How to Increase Online Sales: 3 Effective Ways

The question of how to increase sales is relevant for many companies from different fields. Of course, there is no way that is guaranteed to help everyone. In this post, we’ll cover 3 ways how an SEO company can increase your sales. And you can decide which one is worth trying.

Table of Contents

Use Upsell and Cross-Sell

Upsell is a set of marketing techniques that allow you to increase your purchase amount. Upselling is based on the principle: to show that for a small additional payment the client will receive an obvious benefit.

There are several ways to upsell:

Sell several units of goods in one check: for this they use promotions from the series “1 + 1 = 3” or offer discounts for the second unit.
Offer the same product, but with better characteristics: a person looks at an iPhone with 64 GB memory, and on the same page of the site he sees a similar model, but with 128 GB.
Motivate the buyer to immediately take a large version of the product: for example, not 300 ml of shampoo, but immediately a liter package.
Usually, upsell offers are placed in the product card in a separate block with the heading “Similar products”. In this case, it is important that the goods are really from the same category and approximately in the same price segment (the difference in cost is not more than 5-15%).

A separate block with products is not the only way to upsell in the product card. We find a good confirmation of this in the Pampik children’s goods store. They use upselling methods right in the block of the main characteristics of the product, in our example, Pampers diapers. The user is shown the price for one diaper in a large and a small pack and is thus motivated to buy a larger pack at once.

The Cross-Sell Method is the sale of additional or related products. It is offered in the product card or in the basket. The block with companion products can be recognized by the headings “Together cheaper”, “Buy with this product”.

Upsell and Cross-Sell are often used interchangeably because they have the same goal – to get the buyer to spend as much as possible on a single order.

Implement content marketing

It is a tool that helps you build long-term customer relationships and generate sales through quality content. In short: it’s important to show the right information to the user at the right time.

It sounds simple, but in reality there is a lot of complex work behind it:

Understand your product well. Understand what is unique about your offer, why you are better than your competitors. What audience needs do you cover and how exactly do you do it.
Study potential buyers. It is important to understand what your typical client looks like, how he lives, and what problems you will solve. You can have several types of customers – target audience segments – and for each of the segments you need to separately articulate the value and benefits of the product.
Select dissemination channels and formats. At this stage, you need to decide on the sites for promotion – the company’s social networks, corporate website or blog, specialized media, email newsletters or guest posting. The choice of the site, in turn, will determine the formats – short post, instruction, infographics, informational SEO-text, expert interview or 15-second entertainment video.

Overlay content on your sales funnel . A funnel is a customer journey from “knows nothing about the brand” to “makes a purchase”. Traditionally, on this path, the following stages are distinguished: awareness:

the brand first comes into the field of view of a person;
interest: a potential client is not ready to buy here and now, but he is looking at different options;
solution: the person is interested in you, he tries to find as much information as possible about your product or service;
action: a potential client becomes real, that is, makes an order.

Content Marketing Benefits:

Attracting new customers, both interested in buying and completely “cold”.
Reducing the cost of attracting new customers, increasing their loyalty to the brand and the company, increasing sales.
Formation of the company’s reputation as a strong expert in its field, who can and should be trusted.
Content marketing is very beneficial in the long term, however, it is not suitable for a sharp and rapid increase in turnover and sales. If you want to know more about this method of promotion, we have a detailed tutorial on content marketing in our blog .

Update client portrait

Usually companies that have been in the market for some time understand who they are selling to. A portrait of an ideal client is formed even before the launch of sales, and then it is corrected and finalized by studying real buyers. But it happens that the second stage – updating the portrait of the target audience – is omitted. And in vain, because a hypothetical client and a real one can be very different.

The Old Spice case illustrates this perfectly . The company sells cosmetics and hygiene products for men, so it’s obvious that their potential client is male. But, in the course of research, it turned out that about 70% of buyers of men’s products are just women. This discovery determined the strategy of rebranding and product promotion with an emphasis on the female audience.

By hen need to review and examine in more detail the CA

Online promotion brings traffic, but website visitors are not converting into buyers.
A rebranding or large-scale update is planned in the product itself.
The business wants to increase its presence in the market.

Knowing your target audience helps a business to solve various problems, including:

Develop an advertisement, content, commercial proposal or global advertising campaign strategy that fully meets the needs, interests, “pains” of the target audience. When there are multiple categories in the target audience, separate tactics are required for each market segment.
Offer clients an effective offer, promising a solution to their problem.
Use triggers in promotional materials that influence the customer’s motivation and persuade him to buy.
Purposefully work with a narrow group of people without wasting time and money on those who are not interested in your products.

How to update a client’s portrait

To compose a portrait of a consumer using this method, you need to answer the following questions:

What? (What?): What specific properties of a product or service exist, this list should be as complete as possible, because different characteristics of a product may be important for different buyers.
Who? (Who?): What are the characteristics of your customers.
Why? (Why?): Why is it important for the consumer to focus on this particular product / service?
When? (When?): When to buy the product.
Where? (Where?): Where to buy the product.

After answering the above questions, you are likely to look at your customers from a different angle. If you see that the portrait is not complete enough, you can conduct, for example, a focus group with those who seem to you to be representatives of the target audience. And thus, to make a more accurate understanding of who you are selling to.

Another way is to study a community or group of your competitors on a social network. In addition to getting demographic information, there is a chance to find real customer pains, for example, by reading questions to official representatives.