13 ways to grow your ecommerce store

So you’ve got your ecommerce store all set up and you’re ready to start seeing some sales? Maybe you’ve put so much work into setting all up you thought it would just take off. If you’ve looked at our website you’ll know our passion for digital marketing. We’ve put together 13 tips to help you grow your business and increase sales!

Getting an ecommerce store up and running is only the first step of launching a successful business online — now you need to establish sustainable strategies to increase ecommerce sales.

Setting up your shop is only the first stage in making your business a success. Great digital marketing requires experienced experts, but there are many things you can do yourself which are not difficult and will make a huge impact.

Here are 13 tips and tactics to boost ecommerce sales without spreading yourself too thin.

1. Build your email database

This is a big one! It may seem like a huge ask, but there are many ways to start building up your email database. There are lots of little things you can do to build this up and start collecting this valuable data.

Create a customer email sign up form. Use a pop up form (strategically so you don’t annoy visitors). Encourage users to sign up for your newsletter where they will receive special offers. You can add an opt-in tick box during the checkout process to capture those customer emails as well.

This list ultimately becomes absolute gold for your business as you begin to grow it. Whether it’s using the list for retargeting campaigns on social media or sending tailored email offers to your VIP customers, this will change the game.

Speak to us about optimising your website to grow your email database.

2. Implement a digital marketing strategy

This one might be obvious but you’d be surprised at the number of businesses that proceed with their digital marketing without a proper strategy in place.

Let’s use emails for example since we just discussed the importance of your email database. You could send the same weekly newsletter to every subscriber, but that won’t be as relevant to your audience. Personalising emails with targeted segments is the best way to market to your audience.

A good digital marketing strategy will also leverage other channels such as SEO, UX, CRO, social media and Google just to name a few. Strategic planning comes in as you need to be able to justify where you spend marketing money and why. You need to think about what long term and short term success looks like. Every business is different, so every strategy needs to be tailored to individual needs and expectations as well as the reality of the market.

Speak to one of our digital marketing strategists to point you in the right direction.

3. Use scarcity tactics

Nothing gets the heart racing more than FOMO.

When there is an appearance of scarcity, e.g. your product is available in limited supply or for a short time, visitors are more likely to buy from you. They know that this is their chance and they better jump now so as not to miss the opportunity.

Here are some ways you can use scarcity to boost sales:

• Flash Sales
• Display ‘only x remaining’ on product pages
• Countdown timer
• Limit specific sizes

Speak to our conversion rate experts about how to boost sales with easy scarcity tricks of the trade.

4. Start upselling your customers

When a customer has added to their cart – they are hotter that hot. Do you stop there or upsell to increase their cart value? The answer should be obvious.

Upselling optimises your existing customers. Online stores that upsell increase revenue by 10-30% on average. On average 70-95% of revenue comes from upsells and renewals (for companies who offer them).

“You may also like” upselling tactic is a common one you will see on many ecommerce sites. Another way you can implement this is by inserting a pop up to offer a better, more expensive item or related item – making adding it to their cart one click away.

5. Optimise your store for mobile users

For a long time trends have been moving mobile. More people than ever before do their shopping and other online tasks via their mobile devices. Furthermore most people access social media on their mobile devices – which is a major brand awareness, customer engagement and marketing platform. This has led to huge numbers of websites and businesses moving to ‘mobile first’ website designs.

Ecommerce store visitors are using their mobile devices to shop, but not enough stores are providing a frictionless mobile experience optimised for mobile conversions. Countless sales opportunities are lost because of this. If a user has a bad web experience they will take their business elsewhere.

If you want to sell more, make your website user-friendly for all platforms. Don’t forget to optimise your pop-ups and forms for mobile, too!

6. Improve your site’s SEO

Optimising your ecommerce store for search engines will absolutely increase your organic traffic, especially if you rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword. This is not easy and takes time and consistency.

And who doesn’t love free traffic? If you are tempted to run away at the mention of SEO – you’re not alone. SEO is a techy beast to tackle on it’s own.

But SEO for ecommerce stores is vital for long term success. Think of it this way — every time someone lands on your website via an organic search, you’re saving on paid promotions. And the sweetener is that SEO growth is compound! Invest in exponential growth.

To read more about why SEO is important check out or blog.

7. Reduce your cart abandonment

Every ecommerce store loves getting that notification that says someone filled their cart with your products. All the excitement of a big sale coming your way – finally things are looking up. Then suddenly your potential customer abandons the cart without completing the transaction. Damn it.

Likely, this happens much more frequently then you’d like and may leave you feeling helpless. But there are simple ways to minimise cart abandonment.

Exit intent pop-ups can make someone think twice before exiting. One of the most common and effective ways to reduce cart abandonment is abandoned cart email series. This drips reminders via email to your lost customer. A great way to get them back is to offer a special discount. This should be standard for ecommerce stores.

8. Showcase your top selling products

What does your ecommerce landing page look like right now? Is it enticing and informative?

Your website landing page (home page) needs to be home to your best-selling products. These products will give your visitors a first impression and will be the first thing they see when they come to your store.

By displaying the best-selling items on your home page, you’ll make a great first impression and also start giving an entry point into your visitor’s shopping experience. You are showing them what’s already popular instead of overwhelming them with choices that they did not navigate to themselves.

Your top selling products are exactly that. Top selling. They have proven their worth and for good reason. Leverage this to inspire new customers.

9. Integrate Instagram feed

Utlise instagram shoppable posts. Set up your instagram shop. If your business is in an industry that complies with Instagram’s commerce policies – make the most of it! You can use your IG business profile to link directly to your store.

Instagram has a monthly active user base of over 1 billion (500 million daily users). This opens big sales opportunities.

This is definitely true if your store and product range branding is visual and on-point. Leverage your beautiful imagery and catch potential customers’ eye… and guide them back to your store – to a specific product.

Many shops also utilise the instagram feed function. This serves to cross promote your website and instagram. Someone shopping can easily get a preview of your feed and decide to follow you – a great way to promote brand loyalty, awareness and engage the audience.

10. Display social proof

Over 70% of customers use online reviews to inform their purchases. This is basically the digital version of a word of mouth recommendation and it’s vital to successful businesses.

If you’re not gathering business reviews, you’ll definitely be losing out on a chunk of potential income.

A good way to leverage social proof is to add a star rating system to your products. Make sure you are prompting buyers to leave a review for your products. Often people will not think of this on their own.

Another important thing to do is gather testimonials. It’s great to get your most loyal customers to say some nice things – ask them. Testimonials are different from product review as they are more about your business as a whole and should speak to the entire experience of shopping with you. Once you’ve got these, add them to your website. These will build up trust with potential customers. To get the most utility out of your testimonials it’s good to display a name and possibly photo alongside so visitors know it’s a legitimate person.

11. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and A/B split testing

How can you know what’s the best way to optimise your website in terms of your website’s conversion rate?

The short answer is that you can’t without testing. A/B split testing is a great way to figure out how people interact with your store and how this can be improved.

The method of A/B split testing puts into competition two versions of headlines, product descriptions, page layout, or design elements and measures which one performs better. You then make the change permanent and test something else!

A/B testing ultimately assists in increasing customer experience which in turn leads to more sales for you. It also increases the chances of returning customers.

This method is not effortless and requires constantly improving your store. A great place to start is content testing and if you need help with the tech-side just reach out to us!

12. Implement live chat

Live chat is another great ecommerce solution that may sound like it’s difficult to implement. The truth is, it’s very simple to add to your website and manage.

Live chat is basically like having someone standing at the front of your store asking if they can help customers find anything. It adds an extra layer of customer service and increases visitor engagement.

Sometimes visitors want to buy something but they need a question answered before they click buy. Making it easy for customers to speak to someone and get in contact with you improves the customer experience dramatically.

Another benefit to implementing live chat is that visitors can speak directly to someone if they have a question. If you notice that there seems to be a question that gets repeated by a number of customers, you can know that you need to make this more prominent on the website.

Live chat is a very easy way to establish a connection between potential customers and your brand. Live chat boxes It’s an effortless way to establish a connection between potential buyers and your brand.

13. Retarget customers

Very often first time users will browse for a bit and leave without making a purchase.

Even though this is part of the truth in running an ecommerce store – it doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do to leverage these store browsers.

This is where retargeting comes into the marketing strategy. Facebook collectes much data on its users and although it won’t share this data with advertisers Facebook’s algorithm does use it to improve ad performance. This means using the Facebook pixel you can show ads to both visitors who have left your store without making a purchase and those that have bought something.

There are many ways to use retargeting. You can, for example, show an ad to people who left your store but clicked on a specific product. You can then show them ads for this product on social media. Offer a discount for a limited (scarcity).

Another example is if someone filled their cart and left without finishing their purchase, you can show them an ad to entice them to come complete it.

The bottom line is that customers might not buy from you the first time around, or even the second time. But the more they see your brand and get exposure to your products the higher chances they will come back and buy something eventually.

We know from living and breathing data that return visitors have a much higher conversion rate than first time visitors. The first time some buys from you, then the journey then becomes making them a loyal repeat customer.

Final Thoughts

All these e-commerce strategies are tried and tested. Some will provide a quick win, others long-term success. Always remember your audience and understand how they respond to various methods by regularly reviewing customers and your sales data. You will quickly find which tactics are most suitable for your business and what you have to forget. 

Do you want more tips on how to make your ecommerce store successful? Speak to one of our incredible marketing strategists to understand where the holes in your marketing might be.