There is one sure shot way to expand your business and most of the business owners have been doing this thanks to the benefits that the online platform ushers in…making a foray into the world wide web to sell their products…big or small…regardless of their magnitude. The main intention here for the foray is to enhance the visibility of their business and thereby increase the client base month on month and year on year. This definitely brings about a significant change in the ROI, which of course is the ulterior motive of every business owner. Selling online, there is no need to restrict yourself to the number, but you should ensure that you will have a constant stream of sales and be in the eyes of your existing as well as prospective customers.
To be able to attract more customers to your eCommerce shopping cart and to be able to sustain the interest of existing customers is definitely a tight rope walk. To maintain a consistent volume of this traffic of clients to your website is yet another Herculean task. The main challenge here is to have a good Conversion Ratio Optimization which is an indicator of the performance of your business and the success or failure of the internet marketing strategies that you have adopted. These results will give you an idea as to what are the key areas you should focus more on.
Here are top tips that will help you to sell your products or services on the online platform:
- Give each products its due importance
There may be quite a number of products that you have up for sale. Do not treat any of them to be of less significance than the other. Each one has its own value and place. So, you will have to doubly ensure that all the products get their own web page with adequate description that will focus on its features and details related to the pricing and more. You could perhaps add in your experience too to the unique description you are providing there rather than just copy pasting the copy that is provided by the manufacturer.
- Add user reviews to the product web page
Your efforts to sell or push the product can get even more convincing when you can have the user reviews right on the page where the product is displayed. These direct experiences in the form of reviews will stand out as unique content and will be the main guiding forces for people to buy the product.
Generally it has been found that, even though it is extremely traditional, word of mouth recommendation has proved to bring in significant results. You can leverage the social media platform too to get such recommendations and reviews by the users. Rather than you writing something bombastic about your own products, you can get your patrons write some comments or feedback in the provision that is there on these social media networking sites. You may also have incentives for the best reviews written about your products announced on your website. Such giveaways when genuinely given away, will enthuse your customers to take part more seriously.
- Have a presence on the social networking sites
You can have a fan page wherein you can interact with your customers. You would have by now developed a strong base of brand loyalists whose words and recommendations can really sell for your business. Even for building a fan page you need a strategic approach. If you are unable to go ahead with this, you can very well take professional help to learn to interact with your customers.
Same holds good for the Facebook advertisements too. Who does not have a Facebook page now? Almost everyone has…right from 8years of age to 80 years of age, you see people having a profile page for themselves. Now, Facebook ads placed at strategic points about your products will definitely draw more traffic to your website.
- Google Analytics and AdWords
Such kind of techniques will help you learn more about your consumer’s behavior. You will get to know where each one of them is spending more time on, the kind of products they wish to buy. You could also bring in some modifications based on the consumer behavior on your website.
Talking about Google, you could also make use of Google AdWords to attract customers to your website. And, it is strongly recommended that you have multiple versions of the advertisements to attract them. You can keep an eye on the one that brings in more sales and then you can decide to call of those versions that do not bring in much traffic.
- Clarity and brevity related to the product
Ensure that for every product you are offering relevant details that will convince the prospective customer into buying. Have the product image; if possible have multiple images in different angles. Have the specifications laid out, unique description and an expert store review. If possible have a video too about the product review. When you have the ‘Customers also bought’ indicator or option, you can be definite that the consumers will be further drawn towards buying on your website.
- Build confidence and trust in the minds of the customers
All said and done, whether it is a small business or a huge business, it should be able to build confidence and trust in the minds of the customers. Through your marketing efforts, through your presence on the various social networking platforms ensure that you will be able to build great confidence in their minds.
You may also have a blog for your small business wherein you can just mention about the entire product range you have in store. Discuss about the merits and demerits that each one of those products comes in with. Lead the article towards highlighting on the facts that why should an intelligent customer invest his money in a given product. Through your blog you can also inform about discounts, offers and the latest range that may add up during the fresh season.
To conclude, a few important things:
- You must invest online. Though you have limited resources, you can be assured of getting extremely good results which are easy to optimize too.
- If your budget permits, have an expert tackle your marketing efforts for you. They will at least help in building the client base when you are busy procuring the products on to the online platform.
- Most important of all, invest in the right ecommerce development platform so that your customers feel at home and experience easy navigation when they are shopping at your site. This pleasure is truly incomparable with any of the other marketing strategies.
As small business owners you may have your budget limitations as well as scarcity of resources too like time. But if you invest a bit of money as well as a bit of time in the tools mentioned above, it will deliver an exponential impact on the financial returns for your business. This is just the tip of the iceberg, for, when you invest some more time and money towards your small business and online marketing efforts, the sky is the limit.
And, most importantly, have a reliable payment gateway for your website which will make the entire thing a smooth sailing.