Introduction
What makes customers buy from one eCommerce store rather than the other? Why does one eCommerce store get more traffic than another eCommerce store, even though they sell the same product? And how can you, as the eCommerce store owner, get more traffic and more sales?
What Makes Your Store Unique?
If you’re the only store in your industry, then you can get by with having good pricing and good service. However, if you have a large number of competitors, you’re going to need to have something that gives you the leg up.
So what makes your store unique?
Can you offer a set delivery time that nobody else can beat? Perhaps your prices are truly lower than anyone else? (Note: that can’t just be a marketing line; it must be true.) Is there an additional service you could offer that nobody else can?
Your positioning in the market depends on what you can do better than anyone else. If you don’t have a specific angle you’re targeting the market with yet, that’s the first place to start.
Never go into a market with the same offer as everybody else. If you do, there’s no reason for customers to come to your store over anyone else’s.
Adding Personality to Your Store
One powerful free way to get more people to your store or to get people to come back more often is to create a personality for your store.
One of the best examples of this is woot.com. Woot is a techie group buying a website that was acquired by Amazon.com for $110 million. Essentially they purchase huge quantities of cheap products and sell them for a group deal price online. Every day gets a different product.
What makes this website different than other similar websites is their personality. All their product descriptions are written in a witty, sarcastic way that really appeals to the techie audience.
It’s clear that the people writing the copy really understand the market they’re writing for. More importantly, people will often come back to the site just to read the funny copy for the latest product – and often end up buying.
Your personality or voice doesn’t necessarily have to be funny. But having a personality can be a powerful tool for winning over your core audience.
Using Social Media to Increase Sales
If you’re not making regular use of Facebook and Twitter, you’re leaving sales on the table.
Facebook and Twitter are powerful ways for bringing new people to your eCommerce store, as well as of staying in contact with existing customers.
There are a few ways these two sites can bring you, new customers. First of all, if you create something that’s very unique or interesting for a certain community, chances are you’ll get talked about.
These social networking sites make it very likely that anything which gets talked about will be seen by new people. If you own a golf site, chances are people who follow you on Facebook also have friends who golf. If someone suddenly sees three of their friends talking about something on your site, they’re very likely to check it out.
Apart from the social aspect, you’ve also got paid advertising.
On Facebook, you can target people by demographics and keywords. Again, if you own a fishing website and know your target market is men in the 40+ age demographic, you can easily target that. You can even set it so that your ad only shows up for men who’ve shown an interest in fishing.
With paid advertising, you can show your ad to literally millions of highly targeted web visitors.
Finally, Facebook and Twitter can be used to bring people who’ve already been to your store back again.
Once you get someone to follow you on Facebook or Twitter, you can continually send them promotions and information about what’s going on in your business.
Of course, you need to make sure they’re getting something of value by following you. Make sure they’re either getting discounts or valuable content by being part of your fan base.
Building a Community around Your Store
Building a community around your store can create both loyalty and buzz around your brand. A community is a group of people who are interested in talking about a topic, as well as helping one another out.
Etsy is a great example. Etsy is essentially a website like eBay, except it’s only for handcrafted arts.
Traditionally auction sites have had a very hard time competing with the industry giant, eBay. Hundreds of auction sites have tried, but few have been able to get a foothold.
Etsy has succeeded because it has a narrow focus and a strong community. It has garnered the loyalty of both artists and art lovers and connected the two.
If you visit the Etsy community, you’ll find a lot of discussion on both sides. People are talking about their latest buys or their top-selling strategies. Customers are telling sellers what kind of things they want. Discussions on all topics are happening every hour of the day.
As a result, people keep coming back to Etsy. People keep buying and people keep telling their friends about the site.
So how can you build a thriving community around your web store?
The most important thing is that you put a lot of energy into seeding the community in the beginning.
Create an easy and intuitive structure for users to connect with one another. Forums and message boards are great ways to do that.
For the first month or two, having a staff member occasionally come on and answer questions can make a big difference. Try to have the company actually involved in the community.
Make the community a prominent part of your business. Don’t just have a forum link buried somewhere in your website. Put it on your home page and reference it in articles. Actively promote the community.
Using How to Content to Build a Reputation
If you’re selling a product in a crowded marketplace, one way you can differentiate yourself is to provide top-notch content.
All other things being equal, people are going to buy from a website that they already trust rather than another store.
StarCityGames is a good niche example of this. StarCityGames sells Magic: The Gathering (MTG) playing cards.
There are at least ten other MTG retailers online, in addition to low-margin competitors on eBay. Customers can have their pick of the litter from low-cost dealers.
But StarCityGames is successful because they regularly have professional MTG players writing content articles for their site.
Because their name is well known in the MTG as a resource, just about every serious player knows the site. As a result, they’re one of the most successful card dealers in the space.
It’s not because they’re cheaper. It’s not because they deliver faster. The product isn’t any better. They get their business because they’ve built trust and credibility by providing how-to content.
This strategy can be applied to just about any market, from golf to supplements to consulting.
Stand for Something and Publicize It
Take a stand for something and publicize it. Your stand can be anything as long as there’s genuine passion behind it.
One eCommerce store that does this superbly is Zappos, an online shoe retailer.
Zappos’ most important value is customer service. Unlike other companies that try to minimize customer call lengths, Zappos encourages their support reps to stay on the phone as long as necessary to help the customer. Reps are even trained to send customers to competitors if a shoe they want isn’t in stock.
Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh has publically admitted that he doesn’t care much for shoes. That’s not where his (or the company’s) passion lies. What they’re really selling are customer service and a positive shopping experience.
They’ve taken that stance and subsequently broadcasted it as loudly as they could. On their website, on their blog, through their personnel and even through a book was written by the CEO.
As a result, Zappos is the leader among hundreds of other online shoe retailers.
Another prominent retail example is Ethos water. Ethos donates 10% of its profits to charity every year. As a result, people are willing to pay for the water, even if it’s often twice the price of other types of water.
Can you make your store stand for something? If so, make sure those values permeate your company’s culture. Make sure everyone who deals with your company knows about it, from suppliers to customers.
Using Scarcity and Sales for Instant Profits
Want to inject your business with a sudden burst of sales? You can do that with one-time limited discounts and sale events.
The secret to sales is two things: first of all that it’s limited time which creates a sense of scarcity, and second that the discount strikes them as an irresistible value.
You can do a sale as often as once every two or three months. Of course, you don’t want to do a sale so often that people start to question your regular pricing.
As long as you don’t overdo the sales, however, you can use this technique repeatedly. A well-orchestrated one-week sale can pull in as much as a whole month or two’s worth of revenue.
One company that does this very well is Audible, an audiobook sales company. They take advantage of just about every possible occasion to have a sale.
The standard price for a book is about $20. For members, it’s usually about $15.
However, every few months they’ll have a sale where you can buy books for as little as $5.
The sales are always limited in time and only apply to specific books. But visitors are offered such a deal that they’ll often snap up multiple books at once.
A customer who might ordinarily only buy one book a month might buy five books in a day just to take advantage of the deal. After all, there are probably many books you’d read at $5 apiece that you wouldn’t at $20.
Anytime you run a sale, make sure you give it as much exposure as possible. Send at least two emails about it, though not too close together. Make sure to also prominently feature the sale on your website.
Using sales can bring an enormous volume if done properly. Make sure the deal seems irresistible and don’t overdo the frequency.
Use Loss Leaders Intelligently
A loss leader is a product that’s being sold for break-even or a loss just to get the customer in the door.
Once you have someone on your customer list, you’ll be able to sell to them repeatedly. Yes, you will lose money on the people who don’t buy again – but the people who do should more than makeup for it.
The big benefit of doing a loss leader is its marketing power. If everyone else is selling something for $10 and you do a marketing promotion for $1.99, that’s going to create both buzz and sales.
One example of this in action is Double Your Dating’s affiliate program. Double Your Dating is a dating guide for men.
Most digital product affiliate programs pay between 50% and 75%. Double Your Dating decided to pay 200%.
At 200%, they were paying $20 for every $10 sale that was made – an instant $10 loss. This outrageous offer attracted many talented affiliates to promote their website.
They were able to profit from this arrangement because ultimately the customers who ended up buying outweighed the customers who didn’t.
This technique can be used to bring in a flood of customers. Just make sure you can handle a high volume of initially high-cost customers before you go all out on such a promotion.
Leverage the Power of Affiliates
No matter how good your marketing team is, there’s no way you can perfectly tackle every possible marketing avenue out there.
Instead, you can “hire” a virtual team of marketers to do all the hard work for you. You can do this through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing means setting up your system so that other people can sell your products for you in exchange for a commission. For physical goods the commission is usually 5% to 10%; for digital goods it’s often 50% or more.
The best way to attract affiliates is to get your eCommerce store on one of the major affiliate networks.
These networks include Commission Junction, LinkShare and ShareASale. Getting onto these networks involves a process of jumping through a few hoops to make sure you’re legitimate. Once you’re in, however, finding affiliates will basically take care of itself.
The real challenge to running an affiliate program is getting your conversion rates as high as possible. The goal is to get your earnings per click (EPC) to the point where it’s higher than any of your competitors’.
In other words, if affiliates could earn $100 for every 1,000 clicks they send your competitors, they should ideally be able to earn even more if they sent that traffic to you.
Top affiliates routinely test traffic to a myriad of different merchants. If you can optimize your website to the point where affiliates will earn more by promoting your site than any other site, you’ll soon be inundated with sales.
Website and Conversion Optimization
Website optimization is the process of testing small or large changes to your website to see whether it increases sales or decreases sales.
For example, what happens if you put the logo on the right side of your header image instead of the left? Or what happens if you use “Add to Cart” instead of “Buy Now” on your purchase buttons?
Each of these changes may only result in a 0.1% increase in conversion. But if you can increase your conversion by “just” 0.1% every week, that’s 0.4% per month. In a year, that’s more than a 4% increase. For many eCommerce stores, a 4% conversion increase means they’ve more than doubled their profits.
Optimizing gives you all kinds of benefits on top of just selling more customers. For one, you’ll be able to attract more affiliates, as detailed above. You’ll also be able to spend more money to attract visitors because each visitor is worth more to you.
Setting up an eCommerce optimization system can be simple at times and extremely complex at other times. Simple things like testing different banner images can be easy enough. On the other hand, testing different upsells can be extremely complex.
Talk to your system administrator about setting up a split testing program. If you don’t have an in-house tech, explore some of the optimization solutions available online that cater to eCommerce websites.
Getting More Sales for Your ECommerce Store
You’ve now learned a myriad of different techniques and tactics for increasing your sales.
Some of these tactics, such as the limited time sale, can be used immediately to bring cash to the bank. Other tactics, such as building a community around your store, take more time to work its magic.
Increasing your sales isn’t just a matter of applying one or two tactics. Often it’s a matter of trying a wide range of different tactics to see what works and what doesn’t.
Above all else, listen to your customers’ feedback. Try things and see what people like and what they don’t. Also, watch your stats like a hawk. See if your conversion rates, return rates and other important stats are going up or down with every change.
Finally, keep in mind that many of these tactics may be outside your sphere of expertise. For example, setting up the technical aspects of a website optimization campaign may be beyond your technical capabilities.
Don’t let that limit you. Look at the tactics discussed here and make a strategic decision about whether or not it’d be good for your business. If you believe it will be, then find the right people to implement the strategy.
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