Ecommerce business owners are always looking for ways to increase sales, and in reality, testing different strategies can often feel like a game of trial and error.
You might spend weeks optimizing your website for conversions, only to see minimal impact. Or you may invest heavily in a social media campaign that generates traffic—but no sales.
When every tactic has been tried by countless competitors, finding what works can be frustrating and exhausting.
In this article, we’ll cover some actionable, strategic tips that you can use to boost your ecommerce store’s sales. From optimizing your website for conversions to offering exciting incentives and promotions, here are 15 proven ways to drive traffic to your website and increase ecommerce sales.
What factors influence ecommerce sales rates?
Key factors that will impact how well an ecommerce website performs include:
- Website design
- User experience
- Product quality
- Pricing
- Customer service
These are all things that business owners can largely control, but there are external factors that can impact an online business’s sales as well: seasonality, market trends, economic conditions, and competitor actions.
Consider taking advantage of digital marketing to drive sales. Ecommerce marketing strategies like SEO, email campaigns, social media marketing, and paid advertising can help you attract more website visitors and turn them into paying customers.
Let’s look at some key areas of opportunity in ecommerce sales, along with 15 strategies for increasing sales that you can implement starting today.
Optimize your website for conversions
According to industry leaders, the average conversion rate of ecommerce stores is 2.5%–3%. This number might seem a little discouraging, but it also means that improving your store’s conversion rate by even a small amount can lead to a major boost in sales. Here’s how to do it:
1. Simplify the checkout process
Around 70% of customers abandon their shopping cart before completing the checkout process. If you want customers to finish this final, all-important step, making your checkout process as simple as possible is essential.
Strategies like minimizing the number of required steps, offering guest checkout, and leveraging clear calls to action (CTAs) will all help you reduce your cart abandonment rate. These tactics all make the checkout process less of a hassle for customers to complete.
As with increasing your conversion rate, reducing your cart abandonment rate by even a little can yield significant results.
2. Work on your product pages
Product pages are one of the biggest sales tools an ecommerce business has, so it’s important to ensure they’re optimized. If you craft product pages that excite and intrigue potential customers, you could generate more sales.
High-quality product images, detailed product descriptions, and customer reviews to build trust are all key elements of a great product page. You’ll also want to include clear pricing information, easy-to-understand shipping and return policies, and a strong CTA to encourage conversions.
3. Implement live chat for customer support
Live chat offers several advantages over other customer support channels, such as phone calls and email. It allows for real-time conversations with customers in a largely non-intrusive way, and it allows support agents to work with multiple customers at a time.
But did you know live chat could be a powerful tool for increasing conversions? By being readily available to answer customer questions in real-time as they browse, or proactively offering product recommendations, you can create a more personalized experience. This immediate support helps build trust and might encourage more sales by guiding shoppers toward faster, more confident purchasing decisions.
To streamline this process further, consider chatbots and automated workflows, either in combination with live agents or as a standalone option.
Use data more effectively
High-quality data is essential for ecommerce store owners looking to fine-tune their marketing strategies. By understanding customer behavior and preferences, you can identify key insights that help drive more personalized, effective campaigns.
From improving targeting to refining messaging, the following strategies allow you to make data-driven adjustments that directly impact sales and customer satisfaction.
4. Personalize your marketing messages
Marketing messages and promotional emails are a lot more effective when they’re targeted and personalized instead of widespread and generic. Personalized messages allow you to address what your customers care about and make them feel like a valued individual.
By using customer data to segment your email list, you can send personalized messages and tailored product recommendations to each segment. This helps you communicate with new and existing customers in a way they’re more likely to respond to positively.
5. Use A/B testing to create stronger campaigns
A/B testing is a process most digital marketers know well, and it’s useful for optimizing different elements of your marketing strategy. From email subject lines to ad copy, you can use A/B testing on nearly every aspect of your sales funnel to see what performs the best.
For example, you have two email subject lines you want to try. To test which performs the best, you can send two emails to two comparable segments using different subject lines but keep the emails otherwise the same.
Then, you can compare the performance of both campaigns by evaluating metrics like open rate and click-through rate with a tool like Google Analytics to see which subject line generates the best results.
6. Track and analyze customer behavior
Understanding consumer behavior is crucial for refining your marketing strategy and delivering better customer experiences. Thankfully, tools like Bitly make tracking and analyzing customer behavior easier than ever. You can create branded, trackable Bitly Short Links to include in your marketing campaigns.
These trimmed links allow you to track metrics like engagement totals over time, geographic data, referring channels, device types, the time of access, and more. This provides valuable insights into your target audience and what drives conversions.
Improve your social media presence
Social media presents an opportunity for businesses to interact with customers in the spaces where they spend the majority of their time online.
With the following strategies, ecommerce stores can transform these interactions into meaningful engagement and, ultimately, increased sales.
7. Run targeted social media ads
Posting on social media can feel like shouting into the void when you’re just getting started. Consider utilizing paid social media ads to gain initial traction.
One key advantage of social media ads is their ability to target specific demographics and audiences based on user insights gathered by the platforms. For example, you could target an ad to users who have shown interest in similar products or services, or focus on a specific age group, location, or even purchasing behavior.
By leveraging these targeting options, you ensure that your ads are only shown to audiences who fit your ideal customer profile, potentially boosting your conversion rate and making the most of your advertising budget.
8. Engage with customers through social proof
Social proof is a powerful concept in the world of online sales. When customers can’t see your product in person before buying it, they’re even more reliant on the opinions of others to guide their decisions.
Customer testimonials and user-generated content (UGC) are forms of social proof that can grow your brand awareness and build trust with potential customers.
You can start by sharing customer feedback and testimonials on your company’s social media profiles. You can also encourage loyal customers to share their UGC with strategies—such as a loyalty program—that rewards customers for social shares.
9. Use shoppable posts
Shoppable posts allow customers to purchase products directly through social media without needing to leave the platform. For example, on platforms like Instagram, these posts include tags or links embedded in the image or video that lead users straight to a checkout page.
This creates a frictionless buying experience by letting users complete transactions directly from the post where they discovered your product. Once they’ve made a purchase, they can return to browsing without interruption, ultimately encouraging more impulse buys.
Enhance email marketing efforts
Email may not be the newest trend in digital marketing, but it remains one of the most reliable and effective ways to engage customers directly.
Unlike social media or blog posts, which can easily be overlooked, email ensures your message reaches your audience right in their inbox. This direct engagement makes email marketing a powerful tool for staying top-of-mind, nurturing customer relationships, and boosting overall business growth.
The following strategies can help you leverage the power of email marketing to boost your sales.
10. Segment your email list
Segmentation is important because it helps you personalize your marketing emails for different groups. For example, you could send different emails to existing customers, depending on whether they bought Product A or Product B, recommending new products that go well with the one they’ve already purchased.
You could also segment your audience based on demographics like interests, location, and lifestyle, to help ensure your messaging and product recommendations are aligned with their interests.
11. Automate follow-up emails
With the right email marketing platform, you can easily create automated email sequences that trigger based on various customer actions, unlocking a whole new marketing potential.
For example, you could create an abandoned cart email that automatically sends to customers who’ve had a product sitting in their cart for a certain period of time. It could be a simple reminder to complete their purchase or a discount code to incentivize them to buy.
You could also create a follow-up thank you email to collect customer feedback and ensure a positive post-purchase experience. Follow-up emails help keep customers engaged and can be highly effective when you choose the right messaging and timing.
12. Use compelling CTAs in your emails
You often see CTAs because they’re effective. Calls to action encourage people to take the next step, whether that’s visiting your website, purchasing a product, or signing up for your email list.
However, the CTAs you use in your promotional emails should be compelling, clear and concise, and stand out from the rest of your content. You can also create a sense of urgency by using language like “before time runs out” and “while supplies last” to make your CTAs more effective.
Offer exciting incentives or promotions
Searching for discounts and promotions is what many people enjoy about online shopping. If you want to attract more customers and grow your sales, offering these perks is a great way to do it, and there are ways to make these efforts more impactful. You can:
13. Implement limited-time offers
Up to 60% of individuals have made purchases driven by FOMO (fear of missing out), underscoring the power of urgency in marketing. By offering limited-time discounts and promotions, you can tap into this psychological trigger, encouraging shoppers to act immediately rather than risk losing the deal. Creating urgency does more than just promote a discount—it turns hesitation into conversions.
To maximize impact, set a clear time limit on your offers and emphasize it with a compelling CTA, ensuring your message drives immediate action and captures customer attention before the moment passes.
14. Use discount codes strategically
Think of discount codes as free digital marketing tools you can use in numerous ways to engage your customers and drive sales. But, rather than offering them at random, try to use them strategically.
You could offer a discount code to new customers to grow your customer base. Or you can use them as a lead magnet to encourage more email signups. Another great option is creating a loyalty program that rewards customers with discount codes for link referrals and repeat purchases, for example.
You can also track the effectiveness of your discount codes by using Bitly Links. With Bitly’s click tracking, you can track who clicks on the discount codes you send out to determine which offerings are generating the most engagement.
15. Offer free shipping
Imagine you and your competitor sell two nearly identical products right down to the product packaging. Your competitor’s product costs $30 with free shipping, and your product costs $20 with a $10 shipping fee. Which one do you think customers are more likely to purchase?
If you answered the free shipping option, you likely already realize how much online shoppers value this offering. In fact, 62% of customers say they won’t purchase from an online store unless they offer free shipping.
In other words, free shipping is a great way to drive more sales, and you can even combine it with a minimum purchase threshold to increase your average order value. This is an especially effective holiday marketing strategy when most consumers are searching for the best deals to stretch their gift budget further.
Build an effective ecommerce strategy with Bitly
From leveraging data analytics to generating interest on social media, there’s no shortage of strategies online stores can use to increase sales. However, it can be challenging to determine which are the most worthwhile and optimize your approach for each.
Fortunately, Bitly makes both of these elements of successful ecommerce marketing much easier. By using Bitly to create trackable links for all of your marketing efforts, you can measure the results and determine what works best for your brand. Whether you’re A/B testing marketing emails or measuring the effectiveness of social media ads, Bitly’s link shortening and analytics tools can help you take your sales to the next level.
Ready to start building an effective, data-based ecommerce strategy? Get started with Bitly today!
