15 ways to increase online sales for retailers in 2022

Online retail businesses have a capital cost advantage and avoid large inventory to generate more profit. Looking at the overall market, the traditional local retailers only competed with each other in the past. But when it comes to eCommerce, you’ll need to compete with other international retailers. Customers can read reviews to compare brand options, qualities, and prices.

Customer psychology before buying focuses on the desire to know if the features and quality of the product meet the advertising and promises on the website. Bright Local’s research indicates that 88% of customers trust personal recommendations and online reviews from previous buyers, which improves online sales.

Although eCommerce stores can write extremely detailed descriptions of product features, reviews from previous customers are the true measure of the quality and usefulness of your product.

Our recommendations

• If you’re just adding review features to your eCommerce site, you can offer some incentives like bonus points or discounts to motivate customers to start sharing their reviews.
• You should encourage customers to leave their real opinions, even if they don’t feel so good. Allow them to describe their experiences as real and as detailed as possible. Don’t delete the negative comments and leave only the good ones.

Another common online shopping psychology is that customers often shop on impulse. Fast consumption culture and FOMO are the main reasons for impulsive purchases. Therefore, urgency is the key factor, and activating the right promotion at the golden time has the best effects.

Our recommendations

• You can offer bundled incentives like free gifts, free shipping, or coupons within a limited time.
• You can even put a countdown clock beside the products and discounts to motivate considering customers to take actions.

Most customers just compare items around and add them to cart to buy later. But if they know the item is running low, they’ll probably act right away. Thus, you can increase the sense of scarcity to elevate impulsive buying behavior.

Our recommendations

• You can set the product’s inventory quantity lower than the actual quantity to create the feeling that items are selling so well they will be out of stock soon.

Acquiring new customers costs more than nurturing and developing the purchasing power of existing customers. It’s important to retain your existing customers to promote online sales.

Our recommendations

• You can create a Magento loyalty program to give reward points for each purchase or higher discount for higher purchase.
• Customers can redeem the earned points later, which motivates them to shop again instead of wasting time searching for another retail brand. In the long run, they will gradually become loyal customers because shopping at your website is familiar, convenient, and offers regular incentives.

You should create website content that attracts users to help promote your online businesses without spending too much money. Creativity is a general rule for content creation and is also the secret to increasing online sales for your eCommerce store.

To humanize your brand image and attract more audience to your store, you should produce various types of content in both form and material.

Our recommendations

Blogs

Most online customers still prefer to do their own product research instead of visiting specific websites. For SEO, the higher ranks of your website in search results, the more visitors will get to you. Search engines like unique and keyword-rich content. Therefore, you should research and identify potential keywords that customers look for in your products and services.

• You should spread the keyword evenly in the blog articles, including title, headers, image alt texts, and URLs.
• You should fully cite sources of statistics in your blog articles.

This is to help improve the SEO and ranking of your website when customers search results on search engines without paying money for ads.

Videos

A HubSpot research in 2021 found that

• 84% of customers bought a product or service from a brand after watching that store’s video.
• 80% of marketers say that their video marketing efforts help increase online sales.

Videos are easier to consume faster and more intuitively, thus attracting more customers.

• You should create product review videos or in-depth product features and tips.
• You can add to the description of the video the list of products sold on your website and information about super sales promotions.

Podcasts

This format produces longer pieces of content in a conversational format and is more quality-focused on hot topics.

• Podcasts will be suitable for working customers or those who want to seek opposing opinions instead of reading tedious statistics.
• You can buy ad placements on existing podcasts if you don’t have time to create your own podcasts.

Most customers will leave or never return if your website loads slowly. A fast website can make a good impression on first-time visitors.

High website speed makes it easier for your customers to discover your pages and products, keeping them on your website for longer and increasing conversion rates. In addition, website speed also affects the ranking of your website on search engines, influencing how strangers can discover your brand.

Our recommendations

• You should regularly monitor and test your site’s loading speed. Maintain and apply the important updates of your eCommerce platform to increase the website performance.
• You can try our best 10 practices to speed up Magento websites and boost your online sales.

Today’s consumers rely on mobile phones to handle many daily purposes with higher frequency than ever, including online shopping. Internet Retailing’s report indicates that mobile sales now account for 40% of total eCommerce sales. Mobile commerce or m-commerce will dominate online retails by 2025.

So you should start optimizing your Magento eCommerce website for mobile devices as soon as possible to grow online sales. Otherwise, you’ll gradually lose a significant number of customers and revenue.

Our recommendations

• Make sure your website performs well and has a responsive design on all screen sizes and types of browsers. This includes optimizing your checkout process, landing pages, product lists to be more mobile-friendly.
• You might consider paying ads for certain mobile-specific platforms like Facebook. It’s quite useful to direct customers to your website landing pages and posts.

Usually, customers make a purchase on your website at a given time for 2 reasons: they are trying to take advantage of a special offer or they come back to buy a particular product they’ve already researched before. This means no customer will see all the pages and products of your site, so they may miss other products.

Our recommendations

You should highlight some items on purchase and product pages, enticing customers to see and add more items to their cart during their browsing time, thereby increasing your online sales. Suggested items can be accessories for the cart items, their warranties, and related services.

• For first-time customers, you should suggest products that are related to products they’ve previously viewed or added to their cart.
• For returning customers, you should promote products that are relevant to their past product views and transactions, as well as current purchases.

Nowadays, it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t participate in any social media. This makes social media become a great and effective channel to:

• Strengthen relationships with existing customers through regular interactions
• Reach out to potential customers by placing ads that reach hundreds of millions of social media users

Both actions can increase online sales for retailers.

Our recommendations

When you advertise on social media:

• For target customers, you can filter by interests, genders, ages, and job titles.
• For each social marketing campaign, you can use different ads when targeting different audiences.

Email marketing gives customers the opportunity to remember your business and take advantage of your offers. You’ll see your online sales grow rapidly by getting customers to sign up for email newsletters.

Our recommendations

You can suggest customers sign up for email marketing when they create an account on your website or download freebies. Let customers know clearly that they’ll receive the following benefits:

• Introduction of the loyalty program
• The latest and timely offers
• Exclusive deals and discounts
• New blog posts
• Authority content and interesting topics related to your product and industry

You can’t close online sales mainly because your customers abandon their shopping cart. And most of those customers will never come back to complete the orders.

Our recommendations

To remind and bring visitors back to order, you can use a friendly abandoned cart email reminder:

• You should write a clear and compelling headline like “Forgetting something?”
• Then simply suggest customers delete the cart or complete the order.

Sometimes all a customer needs is a reminder of the items they have considered buying and their purchase intent.

As mentioned before, loyal customers of online retail stores can receive many benefits such as special discounts and exclusive offers. However, you can use these types of incentives to encourage first-time buyers or regular customers. This helps customers remember your website after making any purchase and increases the chances of future repurchases to drive more online sales.

Our recommendations

• You can reward your customers with discount codes and coupons for their next purchases.
• You should offer coupons within 1–2 days after their account creation or first order and limit the time customers can redeem the discounts.

You can offer your customers multiple ways to pay for orders on your website to increase your online sales. This is an effective way to streamline the checkout process and increase conversion rates.

In addition, by providing a variety of payment options, you may cover the expectation of your customers. As a result, they are less likely to skip the payment and thereby purchase more from your business.

Our recommendations

You can offer customers the most popular payment options, including:

• Bank transfers
• Electronic checks
• Credit or debit card
• Amazon Pay
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• PayPal
• Bitcoin and virtual currencies

Also, you should research on how to provide payment options that suit your target customers.

• Although Visa is the most common credit card, your customers may still prefer to use American Express if they have a high income or are older.
• If your online store sells internationally, you should implement a popular payment option available in the countries of your target customers. For example, American Express is no longer a suitable payment option if you mainly sell to European customers.

When choosing a favorite brand, customers not only consider the type and quality of goods but also evaluate the service attitude of your business. A brand that offers a superior customer service experience is more likely to win the hearts of consumers to grow more eCommerce sales than a neutral or heartless business.

After a customer has purchased from you is the best time to send a thank you email. Thanking customers for ordering from your eCommerce store can effectively show your care for customers.

Our recommendations

You can send an email that briefly outlines the following:

• Thank you note
• Order summary (products purchased and total order value)
• Billing and shipping address
• Delivery tracking (if any)
• Contact information of your customer care team

Based on the game theory, customers will unlock achievements and level up as they have more interactions and complete more quests. Gamification is changing the game of eCommerce by:

• Making the online shopping process interactive and fun
• Creating a potential incentive for customers to spend more on a single purchase and repeat purchases in the future

Our recommendations

An idea to increase sales and also increase average order value is that you can offer a 15% discount code with the following conditions:

• If a customer adds more items to the cart
• Or if the customer reaches a minimum order value of $99

This can increase the likelihood of your customers increasing their average order values (AOV). If you have the time and resources for ideas and designs, you can think about more advanced applications of gamification like

• Spinning wheel (Spin-to-Win)
• Accumulating points to level up
• Completing a set of actions to receive gifts

In that way, you not only increase AOV but also increase repeat purchases and lifetime value (LTV).

All of the efforts to drive more online sales mentioned above will be meaningless if you don’t take the time to monitor your store’s results and performance. You need to regularly measure online sales to evaluate and make appropriate adjustments.

Our recommendations

You should track based on your KPIs or the following key performance indicators tied to your online sales:

• Your website visits
• The points with the highest bounce rates
• The pages with the highest clicks
• Your store’s online sales volume to see if sales are up or down
• You can refer to our article – Website benchmarks for eCommerce 2022 – to understand the metrics and implementations to measure them.

The 15 best practices in this article are sure to help you generate higher online sales in many cases. However, it depends on your knowledge of customer insights to deploy the most optimal options. It’s important to constantly listen to your customers to meet their changing expectations, thereby creating new online business strategies for sales growth.

During COVID-19 situation, you can implement our recommended digital marketing strategy to drive more online sales and grow your overall business.