Increasing online sales is the primary goal for most businesses, both large and small scale. Business owners who previously only sold offline are now starting to attract customers in the online world through various means.
The good news is, boosting online sales is not as difficult as you might imagine, and it's not as expensive as you might anticipate. You can enhance online sales even with minimal capital.
Also Read: Cross Selling and Up Selling Strategies to Boost Sales
Quick Ways to Increase Online Sales
The tips below can be applied to all types of businesses, from small-scale enterprises to large corporations. The internet enables all business entities of various scales to have equal opportunities in increasing online sales. Here are 15+ rapid ways to boost your business's online sales:
1. Choose the Right Domain Name
Your online identity is crucial. With the right domain, you can build a trustworthy business identity on the internet. Furthermore, a domain also makes it easier for customers to recognize your business.
Domains don't always have to be .COM. There are many domain extension options that you can use for your business. For example, if you want to build an online store website, you can use the .STORE domain extension.
Apart from .STORE, there are several domain extensions that are of equally good quality as .COM. Some of these include .SPACE, .ONLINE, .SITE, and .WEBSITE.
So, there are plenty of domain extension choices to create the appropriate domain name for your business. If you're still confused, don't worry. We have prepared a guide on determining the best domain for your business in our article titled "Strategies for Choosing the Best Domain Name for Your Business".
2. Choose the Right Platform for Your Website
Creating a website is the fundamental basis for ensuring the success and growth of your online sales. If in the physical world you have a brick-and-mortar store, in the virtual world, a website serves as your store. You cannot haphazardly select a platform for your website. An inappropriate platform will only lead to your detriment and, of course, that of your customers.
Our recommended website creation platform is WordPress. WordPress is the platform behind the creation of 30 percent of websites worldwide, making it the most popular among other website creation platforms.
Furthermore, you also need to select the best 'home' for your website. The website you build using WordPress requires hosting. Hosting is the place to store all files, from images, HTML, to content.
Even though its function is "only" to store files, you must not be careless in choosing a hosting service. A poor hosting service can actually slow down your website's accessibility or even render it completely inaccessible. As a seller, such matters can be highly detrimental.
Therefore, you need to choose the best hosting. Hosting that keeps your business website online 24/7, easily accessible, and secure.
Adjust the Hosting Package to Your Business Needs!
3. Use a Professional Theme
After creating a website using WordPress and subscribing to the best hosting service, what you need to do is choose a professional theme. WordPress offers many professional themes for free. So, you don't have to worry about costs. You can find some WordPress theme inspiration in the article on free WordPress templates.
4. Obtain Customers from Organic Traffic
Google search results are the primary source of traffic for most websites. Your website can be more easily discovered in Google search results by implementing SEO techniques. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a collection of guidelines and techniques to make your website SEO friendly.
We have discussed the steps to optimize your WordPress SEO in the article "SEO for Your WordPress Website in 16 Easy Tips." You can follow the guide and apply it to your website. However, it should also be understood that it takes a considerable amount of time to see results from SEO. So, you need to be patient and diligent in applying SEO techniques.
5. Formulate a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing involves creating useful and relevant content to attract and engage an audience. Implementing content marketing is a tactic that allows you to generate potential consumer traffic.
Moreover, valuable content can help capture consumer attention and even foster loyalty towards your business. This embodies the principles of inbound marketing.
One of the most effective ways to execute a content marketing strategy is by integrating a blog into your website. WordPress offers features to add a separate blog page.
On the blog, you can consistently publish useful and relevant content to drive traffic to your website. You can also provide various attractive offers on the blog to encourage visitors to purchase the products you sell on your website. You can learn more about content marketing strategies in the article "Content Marketing Strategy."
6. Make Decisions Based on Google Analytics
Many novice entrepreneurs rely solely on intuition and estimations when making critical business decisions. Unfortunately, decisions based solely on estimations and intuition can lead to a lack of direction in the business.
When making important business decisions, it's best to use clear and accurate data and facts. Google Analytics can assist you in providing accurate data regarding the developments on your website. This includes metrics such as daily visitors, sales, revenue, top-selling products, well-performing pages, and the number of visitors who leave the website.
You can install Google Analytics on WordPress by following the instructions outlined in the article "Guide to Installing Google Analytics".
7. Utilize Social Media
Social media not only facilitates connections between people but also provides a platform that you can leverage to boost your online sales. Considering that the Indonesian population actively uses popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
To enhance online sales through social media, you need to devise an appropriate social media marketing strategy. It's important to conduct research before launching campaigns on social media.
Read Also: 10 Tips to Increase Your Business's Brand Awareness
8. Engage in Online Communities
Online communities such as Facebook groups, Kaskus, Quora, Reddit, and FemaleDaily can help you understand your potential customers. Find online forums relevant to your industry. For instance, if you're running a travel business, you can participate in forums discussing travel and vacations.
In these forums, you can discover the latest trends among consumers, the challenges they face, and even insights for your industry. This way, you can enhance the quality of your products or services based on the findings from these online forums.
9. Showcase Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials can serve as your weapon to convince potential customers. A collection of customer testimonials can influence hesitant potential customers to try your product with confidence.
You can place customer testimonials on product pages, landing pages, or even your website's main page. For those using WordPress, you can follow our guide on creating a testimonial page in our article titled "How to Create Reviews in WordPress".
10. Provide Various Payment Methods
Your customers don't only use a specific bank. Therefore, offer a variety of payment methods to enhance customer convenience in settling their bills.
Adding payment methods also helps boost online business sales as customers have multiple choices for making payments.
11. Create Honest Advertisements
Honesty in crafting advertising is crucial for your business's reputation. While you should create unique, creative, and captivating ads, it doesn't mean you can include dishonest claims in them. Dishonest ads will only worsen your business's credibility in the eyes of consumers.
12. Mobile Optimization
Optimizing your website for mobile devices is essential for all businesses. This is done to create a mobile-friendly website.
Why should your website be mobile-friendly? Because the majority of Indonesian internet users access the internet through mobile devices.
Most internet users access the web via smartphones because it's easier and faster. As a website owner, you need to address this challenge by optimizing the website loading speed on mobile devices.
Aside from being important for mobile device users' comfort, a mobile-optimized website is also favored by Google. Since 2017, Google officially implemented the Google Mobile First Index algorithm, meaning your website's performance on mobile devices is a crucial factor in Google's assessment. The better the website's performance on mobile devices, the higher the potential ranking in Google search results.
13. Utilize PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, one of the internet marketing models where advertisers only need to pay for each ad clicked by the target audience. Advertising systems like this are suitable for various types of businesses, whether they are small, medium-sized, or even large corporations. This advertising system is widely used by major companies such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
PPC allows you to control how many audiences are targeted for an ad. You are free to set the number of ad audiences, whether it's 10 thousand, 20 thousand, or even 50 thousand audiences. Of course, the more audiences you target, the more money you will need to spend.
Furthermore, you can narrow down the audience specifications you are targeting. For example, if your business is baby clothing, you can target audiences that align with your target market, which is mothers. PPC also enables you to determine the target audience based on location, so you can focus on specific locations that are your business targets.
You can create PPC ads on each platform by following the guidelines in this article: "How to Use Google AdWords," "How to Create Instagram Ads," and "How to Create Facebook Ads."
14. Implement FOMO Strategy
FOMO stands for the fear of missing out, which literally means being afraid of missing out on something. Fear of missing out is a psychological term that describes human behavior of restlessness when missing trends or enjoyable things.
In business, you can leverage this behavior to increase online sales. Essentially, you need to build a sense of urgency in your prospective customers by convincing them that the promotions you offer are rare and infrequent.
Also read: "Marketing FOMO: Psychological Tactics to Boost Sales".
15. Increase Website Speed
To determine rankings in search results, Google employs various factors. One of the primary factors is the loading speed of your website. The faster your website loads, the better your website's score in Google's evaluation. This factor applies to search results on both desktop and mobile.
Additionally, internet users are not patient to acquire what they desire, whether it's obtaining information or purchasing products, according to Google's research.
16. Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending commercial messages such as newsletters and promotions via email. Gary Thuerk was the first person to send an email marketing message in 1978. Since then, email has been recognized as an effective marketing tool. In 2017, out of the 205 billion emails sent daily, 120 billion of them were business emails, including email marketing.
Some individuals might view email marketing as potentially disruptive spam for consumers. However, the facts say otherwise, as the use of email marketing continues to rise every year.
A study conducted by McKinsey and Company revealed that email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers compared to Facebook and Twitter. This high effectiveness may be due to companies being able to reach consumers in their personal space, namely their email inboxes.
Furthermore, 59 percent of consumers are willing to become subscribers to email marketing or newsletters if there are offers provided. These offers could be in the form of coupons or special discounts. According to research, as many as 65 percent of consumers receive discount coupons from email marketing. This demonstrates that email marketing encourages consumers to shop, both online and offline by visiting physical stores.
Conclusion
The methods to enhance online sales can be mastered by anyone. For beginners, implementing all 15 methods above at once might seem challenging. However, you can gradually apply the ways to boost online sales one by one for easier implementation.
With the right steps, it's not impossible for your online sales to reach the desired targets.
