In this fast-paced world, no one is ready to wait; we want instant results and quick success.

As an entrepreneur, I am sure even you would be looking for ways to quickly increase your online sales to boost your business revenue. But the question is, how? You have a good product, a great clan of professionals, and maximum amount of people are even landing on your website.

Wondering even after all the hard work and good traffic why are you still experience a low conversion rate?

This can happen due to two possible reasons:

• You are not targeting right audience (your website visitors are not interested to make a purchase)
• The user experience on your website is not able to convert potential customers into buyers.

In a research conducted by Monetate, it was revealed that your returning customers hold 5x more worth than the first-timers.

In this article, we will solve your lower sales challenges and guide you in increasing your sales, because it:

• holds the key to success for any business,
• is more important than the rapid spike in revenue, and
• holds an exponential value to your business.

The Key Statistics for Increasing Your Sales Online

Before proceeding with this article, we would suggest that you review the various metrics that will help in measuring your conversion success.

Having a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics with eCommerce Tracking helps you understand your current metrics.

Some essential metrics you must familiarize yourself with:

1. Leads

The people who express some active interest in your products or services. They are one step ahead of your typical website visitors and have interacted with the call to action (CTA) on your page by providing their name and other contact information. Your leads are the first major step towards an uncluttered online sales funnel.

Ways you can track your leads:

Email subscribers

The number of subscribers is the list of leads you collected via newsletters.

Registered users

Websites invite users to register themselves on the website well before making any successful purchase.

They are not the ones who do window-shopping on your online store but actually register themselves may be because of the offers you float or the various signup schemes that you announce.

For example, you float invitation for registration to your website in order to have a predefined set of users who will become your future customers.

Contact form submissions

You can have a contact form where visitors fill out their queries related to your business or for initiating a bulk purchase.

Quote requests

If you are providing online services such as garden maintenance or home spa, visitors get in touch with you for the estimation of the projected cost for your said services. These are potential customers who are right now counted as your leads.

The combined effort

You can strategically mix-up all the above discussed points for gathering leads. Make sure that while using so many channels, you are able to easily keep track on the number of deals you create per channel.

For an online business, manual management of deals and contacts is easy at the initial stage, but as the customer base grows, the need of specific tools increases. You can easily do the same using an email marketing software or a CRM.

2. The Conversion Rate

Conversion rate for an online business largely depends on how they want their visitors to interact with various pages. So, your conversion rate is the final outcome of the division between visitors who perform certain actions on your page against those who don’t.

For example,

• You want to improve the conversions on a specific product page.
• Find out the number of unique visitors who clicked on the “Buy Now” call-to-action button on that particular page throughout a single month.
• Now, divide it by the total number of unique visitors on that page for the same month.
• So, if your product page witnesses 200 unique visitors, and 10 visitors clicked on the “Buy Now” button, your conversion rate comes to 5%.
• To find out the overall conversion rate, compare the number of subscribers you get from a particular page with total number of visitors.
• Every online business has a different goal set for different pages on their site. This makes it easier to measure the individual conversions.

Today, 50% of customer interactions are multi-event, multi-channel journeys. That means people will most likely visit your website multiple times, from many different marketing channels, prior to a purchase being made or signing up to become a lead.

-McKinsey on Marketing & Sales

3. Bounce and Exit Rate

Bounce and exit rates provide the basic idea of the number of people who leave the website or a specific page without taking any action or without purchasing any product.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who just view one page on your website before leaving is the site bounce rate.

For example:

• Your squeeze page has a high bounce and conversion rate; this is a good thing.
• It means once a user lands on your page, they actually do the action you intended, be it making their purchase or signing up for your newsletter and promotional emails. But, what if you want your visitors to browse through the line-up of products that you have.
• A high bounce rate in such case will indicate that your visitors didn’t look at your products completely.

Exit Rate

Exit rate of a page is the percentage of users who left the website without making any purchase.

With “Users Flow” report in Google Analytics, small business owners can understand their users and visitors behavior throughout the website. This helps in creating strategies for curbing the exit rate.

So, let’s get started with the tips that will help you capture the market and at the same time will make sure that you carry out the process of increasing your online sales in lieu with customer retention.

1) Point out your most popular plan

Using the bandwagon effect, you can be assured that when you display your most popular plans on your website, most of your visitors will go for that plan.

Therefore, online marketers lay weightage on words and sentences like “XYZ’s #1 brand” or “highly recommended by most doctors.” These statements come in really handy in the process of increasing your online sales.

What do such statements do? Well, they add social proof to your product. This influences the decision-makers in a positive manner. Such statements also make an impact on the decision maker that they are not the only ones who are making this purchase.

You can make effective use of this method on your pricing page and do not hesitate to use this heavily.

2) Display prominent guarantees

Want to increase the conversion rate? Why not provide the visitors with guarantees that your products or services are of the highest quality. You can do the above in numerous ways:

Flaunt security badges onsite

You might have seen those badges while making online transactions that says all the transactions on the said website are private and secure.

After digital marketing firm Blue Fountain Media decided to get a security badge from VeriSign, they reported 42-percent increase in their online conversions.

As per the reports published by a study from Conversion XL, consumers tend to trust badges that are created by familiar brands like Google, PayPal, and Norton.

3) Industry-specific badges

The badges which are specifically provided to your website as per your industry. They can be divided into:

• industry ratings,
• awards,
• accreditations, or
• memberships to organizations.

Crofters Organic displays industry-specific seals in order to target customers who rely on relevant trust-seals while making online purchases.

Trust seals generally involve labeling of the products as gluten-free, organic, and GMO-free etc.

• Online retailer Bag Servant reported a 72 percent increase in conversions after they started displaying an award they had won.
• In another study done by Acquisio 61% of online shoppers decided against making purchase on sites that lacked a trust seal.

Building trust is considered part of the psychological keys that help in increasing your sales.

If you want to install trust and provide security on your checkout page you can do that in numerous ways.

Include a basic trust signifier, something that provides an ephemeral explanation of the security measures you take for safeguarding your website visitors and their bank accounts.

Now, take it one step further by including a certified trust seal from a third-party vendor that verifies your website for displaying their badge.

Note: It can cost money to have a secured site seal, but it surely will boost your sales.

4) Seamless return policies and money-back guarantees

Providing customers with seamless return policies and money-back guarantees helps you in earning the trust of potential customers. Having these two features on your website helps in assuring the customers that they will get a refund in case they are unsatisfied with your product or service.

Visual Website Optimizer case study revealed that a 32-percent increase in conversions is achievable if you add a 30-day money back guarantee badge.

5) Write clearer headlines

Headline text is an essential factor for increasing your online sales. Be it for an article, a product page, or your homepage, a clear and captivating headline attracts your visitors quickly.

• If you are offering something valuable to the audience, make it loud and clear in your headline.
• A study from Conductor reveals that clarity of the message you want the customers to understand resonates with readers if the headline explicitly explains the content.
• In another case study, an investment firm reportedly increased their conversions by 52-percent just with their original headline that read “The Wilson HTM Priority Core Fund”.
• Your headlines must appeal to the masses in this case, your online visitors, for maximum conversion.

6) Declutter your site navigation

Online businesses heavily depend on their calls-to-action. These are focused on most of the pages and that makes it very important to declutter the navigation menus.

• If you minimize the navigation elements in your main landing pages, you will be able to divert the visitors’ attention to the CTA.
• MECLABS conducted one experiment for an online store and observed that after removing the top and sidebar navigations on checkout pages they were able to increase checkout rates by 10%.
• A babysitting website increased their conversion rates by walloping their main navigation.
• Some research from Marketing Sherpa revealed that by removing navigation on key landing pages online businesses can increase conversions around 10-50%.

No, we are not asking you to get rid of navigational elements completely, but they shouldn’t distract visitors from the main purpose of your online businesses page; making a sale.

7) Create a sense of urgency in your visitors

Impulse buying applies to online shopping on the Internet.

It is already becoming a common behavior to consume goods quickly amongst the millennial generation.

You can promote impulse buying, if you:

• Place your product at the correct position
• Have the right promotions
• Trigger purchase at the best timing

Creating a sense of urgency while the visitor is deciding to make a purchase means you show a limited-time offer with the reverse running countdown. It can be coupon, limited time remaining for making purchase in the discounted time etc.

8) Create a sense of scarcity

Adding a sense of scarcity is also a promoter of impulse buying behavior.

Many millennials add product to their cart and then visit other retailers for comparing price.

If you display the scarcity of the product on your website at a much lesser or discounted rate, then the buyer will be eager to make the purchase before the time runs out.

9) Use optimized call-to-action

Call-to-action (CTA) is an element on your page that intrigues visitor into taking specific decision.

You might have seen various product pages where a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button is labelled.

CTAs are also used for other conversions. For example, you can ask the visitors to subscribe to your newsletters, follow your social media page, or share your page, offer on social media channels.

CTA based on the nature of users (visitors, leads, or paying customers) helps in increasing the conversion rates.

For example.

• You are running an email marketing campaign.
• Have a separate campaign that directs paying customers to a specific landing page. Do the same for unconverted leads.
• You must keep the customer journey in mind when designing your CTAs.

10) Prove customer satisfaction

Proving to your visitors that your business has huge base of satisfied customers helps in increasing the sales for your online store.

• This proof comes in the form of various industry awards, a list of former or current satisfied customers, your successful case studies, and testimonials.
• You can gain the trust of the market if you can show the list of your satisfied customer to your website visitors.
• As per the findings of BrightLocal survey, 84-percent of consumers trust online reviews.
• The more reviews your products have online, the better it is for your conversion rates.
• If you have more than fifty product reviews the chances of online conversion rates increase by 4.6%.

So, if you haven’t collected any testimonials or reviews so far or have been giving it a thought don’t waste your precious time.

Conclusion

Number of digital buyers worldwide (in Billions)

The chart here from Statista predicts that the number of online buyers is going to increase to 2.14 billion by the year 2021. Online businesses that are just starting out or have been in the market must know and value the fact that they have a market that is booming. All that is required from them to do is understand the market, the buyers, and the online visitors’ interaction with their website.

Increasing sales and managing your contacts (leads, prospects, customers) is a tough task, especially when you cannot lose your concentration while setting up your business at the initial level. A CRM that is intuitive in handling your sales process and email marketing and can also automate most of your sales related tasks for you comes in handy.