Are your sales at the level where you want them to be?
If you want your e-commerce startup to grow, you might already have tried a bunch of things, like paying for traffic or carefully tweaking the colour of the buttons on your landing page. It’s time to get a bit creative.
#1: Create a video demo
Even if your sales copy clearly explains what your product does and the benefits of using it, do you have a way for potential customers to see it in action?
If not, then creating a video demo could really boost your conversion rate. This doesn’t just apply to products that have a function that’s easy to show off on video: even showing the process of unboxing your product could help prospects to imagine owning it for themselves.
#2: Use https and trust seals
One major reason that prospects don’t buy is that they’re not sure whether your site is trustworthy. To ensure that they feel safe entering their credit card details, you’ll need to use https (which is increasingly being pushed for by Google anyway).
You’ll also want to make sure customers know how secure your checkout process is by using a trust seal or security badge. If you’re not sure what that is, go and find out about trust seals for e-commerce and you can see which ones work the best.
#3: Don’t give up if things aren’t working
Maybe you’re in that position dreaded by any e-commerce startup: rather than celebrating your first few sales, you’ve made no first sales at all. That could be due to a number of reasons: maybe your product images are poor quality, or you haven’t included a single testimonial (see #4).
Whatever the underlying problem is, it’ll normally be something you can fix … so don’t give up. Take a good hard look at all the elements of your sales page, and see what you could tweak to get those sales coming in.
#4: Add testimonials – with customer photos
Hopefully, you’re already using testimonials or positive reviews on your sales pages. If those testimonials are just text, though, you’re missing a huge trick.
By adding a headshot of the customer in question, or (if appropriate) a photo of them with the product they purchased, you can hugely boost new potential customers’ trust in the testimonial: they’re much less likely to think it’s potentially fake.
#5: Don’t force Customers to create an account
To you, it probably makes a lot of sense to have customers create an account: that way, they can easily buy from you again … and you’ll have their email address and other details for marketing purposes.
But some customers hate creating accounts, especially if they’re making a one-off or infrequent purchase. Offer a guest check-out option so that they can purchase with a minimum of fuss. This should seriously reduce your cart abandonment rate.
#6: Offer upsells and loyalty rewards
One very simple way to make more money per customer is to offer them a great deal. When someone’s purchasing a product or service from you, it might make sense to offer them an upsell on the spot – that could be a premium version or something that would complement their purchase.
After someone’s become a customer, they’re likely to buy again. You might want to create a loyalty program to reward regular customers or, alternatively, you could to contact customers occasionally with time-limited special offers.
Whether your startup is just getting off the ground or whether you’ve been running it for months, but without the success you hoped for, these tips should skyrocket your sales. Pick one to put into practice this week.