Everyone wants to grow their eCommerce store.
The good news is that there are four ways you can grow sales faster, i.e. four specific levers you can pull.
These also happen to be the levers we pull to help our clients 2X-10X their sales, and the levers the fastest growing eCommerce stores are pulling to accelerate their growth.
Some are more obvious than others, but if you’re looking to grow your eCommerce store, there’s no better way than to pull the four levers outlined in this post.
Lever #1: Get More Targeted Traffic
Targeted traffic comes first and happens to be the most obvious.
If you can get more of the right visitors to your site, then obviously your sales are going to go up.
You need to see your traffic going up like this if you’re going to quickly grow eCommerce sales.
But even though this lever is the most obvious, you can still get tripped up with this step.
You can get stuck on questions like:
- How do we get the right people to our site and not just more visitors?
- How do we get more people to our site at the right cost so we can grow sales profitably?
It would take another article to list all the ways you can get more targeted traffic to your site, but here are some of the best traffic strategies we’ve seen work well for eCommerce stores.
1) Organic Instagram
A lot of stores have successfully used Instagram to grow traffic and sales, especially when getting their store off the ground.
The best ways to do this are to post great content and to like and follow photos from potential customers.
The downside of depending on organic Instagram traffic is that it’s harder to scale, which is why it’s a great way to get started but not the best way to scale your sales, unless you want to spend all of your time on Instagram…
2) Influencer Marketing
Another channel a lot of stores use to grow their traffic is Instagram influencer marketing. With influencer marketing, you reach out to people with large followings whose followers happen to match your target customers.
Influencer marketing is a great way to grow traffic, but it’s become more and more expensive to do now that Instagammers have become savvy and have learned how much brands are willing to pay to reach their followers.
Facebook, who owns Instagram, also has a history of limiting organic reach more and more, which means you reach fewer people with influencer marketing now than you would have a few years ago.
3) Search Engine Optimisation
Another great way to grow eCommerce store sales is with search engine optimistion (SEO).
With SEO, you optimise your store so that it’s more likely to show up in Google organically, which means people find your site without you needing to pay for a click.
The good news is that SEO is easier than most people think and you can do basic search engine optimisation for your eCommerce store in just a few hours. (Leave a comment if you’re interested in learning how, and we’ll write a new post to explain if enough people are interested.)
4) Google Ads
Google search and shopping ads are a great way to grow your eCommerce store’s sales.
One reason they work so well is that Google ads are a great way to scale your growth and tend to be very effective for eCommerce products. The trick is making sure you’re able to profitably acquire customers, which means you need to know what you’re doing when it comes to Google ads so you don’t spend all your money without generating any revenue.
5) Facebook Ads
The best way for most stores to currently grow their sales is with Facebook ads (which also includes Instagram).
With Facebook ads, you build ads within Facebook and then show them on both Facebook and Instagram.
The great thing about Facebook ads is that Facebook has built their back-end algorithms to help eCommerce stores profitably acquire customers, which is why Facebook ads are the top tactic our clients are using to scale their stores sales.
In fact, there are stores that spend hundreds of thousands and even millions every month to acquire customers, which means Facebook ads can be profitable at scale, as long as you have an eCommerce PPC agency who knows what they’re doing.
With Facebook ads you can 2X your store sales in as little as one month, and the sky’s the limit with how much you can grow.
One thing to keep in mind with all of these channels is that there’s a trade-off between time and money. With a channel like organic Instagram marketing, you invest your time to get more customers, but with Google and Facebook ads, you invest your ad budget to acquire customers at scale without needing to spend more and more of your time to do so.
There are also other channels you can use to increase store traffic (leave a comment if there’s another channel working well for your store that isn’t listed here), but traffic is just the first lever you can pull to increase your eCommerce store sales.
Lever #2: Improve Conversion Rates
The next lever you can pull is conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
With conversion rate optimisation, you find ways to get more people who visit your site to make a purchase.
Let’s say, for example, that 3% of people who visit your site make a purchase.
Conversion rates for most eCommerce stores are usually between 1.5%-3%, which means at 1% you are below average and will probably have trouble profitably growing sales. So instead of paying to drive traffic, you may want to focus on boosting conversion rates first.
So what can you do to improve conversion rates for your eCommerce store?
Here are a few things you can do to start…
1) Write Stronger Copy
One of the first things you can do is write better copy on your site. This includes stronger homepage copy, better product descriptions, etc.
By improving your copy, you can increase the percentage of people who purchase on your site.
2) Use High-Quality Photos and Videos
Another way to improve conversion rates on your site is to use high-quality photos and videos because the stronger your product photos and videos are, the more likely people are to purchase.
3) Use Live Chat on Your Site
Sometimes people don’t purchase because they have a question they can’t get answered or aren’t 100% sure they’re ready to buy. You can solve this problem by using live chat on your site to answer customer questions and objections.
Some good eCommerce live chat tools include:
- Live Chat
- SnapEngage
- Olark
- Chatra
- Tidio
- Tawk
If you’re not using live chat yet to improve your conversion rates, you should definitely check it out.
4) Improve Your Website Layout
If it’s difficult for visitors to find products or navigate your site, then your conversion rates are going to be low.
In order to improve this, it’s good to make your eCommerce store as easy to navigate as possible by following web design best practices and not getting too crazy or creative when it comes to design.
Hotjar is also a great tool you can use to watch visitor recordings so you have a better idea about where people are getting tripped up on your site.
5) Let Customers Check Out as Guests
There’s nothing more frustrating to customers than going to an eCommerce store and needing to create an account in order to buy something.
When you make a purchase in person, you don’t need to create an account; you just need to hand over your credit card to make the purchase.
The process should be just as easy online, which means customers should always be able to check out as guests on your site so they don’t get frustrated and leave because of the hassle of needing to create an account.
6) Allow Customers to Review Products
Visitors are very interested in knowing what other people have to say about your products, which means adding a review plugin on your site is a good idea.
This is scary for some store owners, but as long as you’re selling good products, the positive reviews from happy customers will overshadow any negative reviews and will help to improve your conversion rates.
7) Use Cart Abandonment Software
Cart abandonment software allows you to send emails to people who enter their email address but don’t complete their purchase. In order to get them to check out, you can send them an email to get them to come back and can even incentivize them to come back by offering free shipping, a 10% off coupon, etc.
The list of ways to improve conversion rates goes on, but one thing is for sure: paying attention to conversion rates AND growing your store traffic makes it easier to grow your store sales faster than if you’re just trying to find ways to get more people to your site.
Lever #3: Increase Average Order Value
Another way to grow your eCommerce store sales faster is to increase average order values.
One thing that’s interesting about this lever is that it often gets overlooked.
Everyone pays attention to traffic, some people work on conversion rate optimization, but not nearly as many people think about ways to increase average order values.
But what’s crazy is that increasing your average order value is one of the easiest ways to grow sales and improve ad profitability.
Think about it this way…
Let’s say it costs you $15 to acquire a new customer with Facebook ads and your average order value is $30. That means for every purchase you get with Facebook ads, you pay $15 and make $30, a 2:1 return on ad spend (ROAS).
That may be profitable, depending on your cost of goods sold, but if you can increase your average order value to $60, then you double your return on ad spend and now make $60 for every $15 spent on Facebook ads instead of only $30.
So how can you pull this lever and increase the average order value on your site in order to make it easier to run profitable ad campaigns? Some of the best ways to do this include:
- Offer free shipping on purchases over $50 or $100.
- Offer a discount when people bundle multiple products together.
- Offer a discount for purchases over $50 or $100.
Use a tool like Candy Rack to offer upsells and cross-sells when customers have added products to their cart.
Once again, the list goes on, but increasing average order value is a great way to grow your store sales from the traffic you already have without needing to pay to get more people to your site.
Lever #4: Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Last but not least, you can grow your eCommerce store sales by increasing your customer lifetime value (LTV)
LTV is calculated by dividing your total revenue by the number of unique customers. Then, depending on how often customers repurchase, you can find out what your average revenue is for each customer over the lifetime of them being a customer.
Most people also know that it costs more to acquire a customer than it does to get a sale from a current customer, so it’s always a good idea to increase your customer lifetime value instead of spending all of your time and money trying to acquire new customers.
So how do you grow customer lifetime value? Two great ways are:
- Email marketing to past customers.
- Facebook ads targeting past customers.
- Google remarketing ads targeting past customers.
Once again, increasing customer lifetime value is an often overlooked way to grow your store sales, especially since it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to get a sale from a current customer for most eCommerce stores, which is why increasing customer lifetime value is one of the best levers you can use to grow overall sales.
Now It’s Time to 2X-10X Your Growth
Now that you’re aware of the four levers you can use to grow your eCommerce store, we hope you’ve got some new ideas you can implement TODAY to help your store grow. All you have to do is figure out which levers to pull first so you can accelerate your growth.
If you have any questions about how to do that, let us know, because we specialize in helping eCommerce stores quickly grow their sales 2X-10X by pulling all four of these levers.