If you are the owner or manager of an online retail store, you are already operating in a niche that is set to grow exponentially in the near future. In 2021, online retail sales are likely to make up 15.3% of the total retail sales worldwide.
With such a large market share that is constantly growing, online retail stores have the opportunity to expand and perform quite well to enjoy higher Magento sales. However, as is the case with every expanding industry, the competition in the eCommerce industry is fierce.
So, online retail stores have to find new ways to stand out from their competitors and perform consistently well. If you are one of those companies that are trying to figure out a way to boost sales in your Magento online store, here are a few potential areas of improvement that you should consider:edi
Table of Contents
#1 Prioritize Content
One of the proven ways to boost your online retail store sales is to put content in the driver’s seat. Well-written content can truly be a guiding force for your website by anchoring necessary information to customers. The quality of your content depends on how conversion-driven your product descriptions are and how effectively they can guide potential customers to take action.
Moreover, integrating great content within email campaigns can also help you retain existing customers and attract new ones.
#2 Personalize Shopping Experiences
Nearly 80% of shoppers say that they are likely to shop from brands that offer them personalized shopping experiences.
Personalization is truly the key to retaining customers and getting new ones. Simple tweaks such as addressing customers with their names in marketing messages and while they shop can go a long way. Moreover, stores are also providing more personalized shopping experiences by suggesting products based on the customers’ past purchases.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can also experiment with tailored loyalty programs that make customers feel valued. As a result, they are more likely to stay loyal to your brand. Another study suggests that brands can increase their profitability by 15% using personalization engines that can identify customer intent.
The bottom line?
Personalized customer experiences create loyal customers. Thus, improving your online retail store sales.
#3 Upselling, Cross-Selling, and Bundling Products
Another proven tactic to boost sales of your online store is to enable product upselling and bundling.
This may sound familiar: you go to McDonald’s and order a burger, and the cashier will be quick to ask you if you want fries and coke to go with it. That, in essence, is bundling. Creating combos of products that compliment each other by introducing a savings element enables you to sell more products.
Upselling is another common selling tactic when you shop from any retailer—be it brick-and-mortar stores or online retail brands. For instance, when you buy a mobile phone from Amazon, it will subtly suggest that customers who bought the phone also showed interest in a phone cover or other accessories. It is an efficient way to prompt the customer to add another item to their cart.
Image source: Amazon
#4 Be Active on Social Media Channels
If you are wondering how to increase sales in your retail store, never take your social media presence for granted.
As of 2021, the number of active social media users reached 3.78 billion globally, only set to skyrocket in the upcoming years. What’s more, people spend an average of 2.5 hours on social media. That is a lot of attention to harness for Magento retail stores.
Brands may perhaps think of limiting their presence on social media, but networks such as Facebook and Instagram are already making it impossible for them to do so. Shoppers who check product reviews on social media show conversion rates greater than 133%, valued billions of dollars.
#5 Encourage User-Generated Content
User-generated content refers to different types of content such as FAQs, product reviews, and testimonials that are created by users who are not affiliated directly with the brand. User-generated content can improve your credibility and reaffirms the quality that you offer as a brand.
According to Spiegel, nearly 95% of customers read reviews before proceeding with a purchase. So highlighting customer reviews can help other customers in making an informed purchasing decision. Featuring reviews and testimonials can encourage other customers to post reviews and improve the overall SEO effort.
You can harness the power of reviews and testimonials by presenting them on your social media channels or website. Many emerging eCommerce brands also post videos portraying the buying experience of their customers to reassure new customers.
#6 Audit and Manage SEO Performance
Another key factor that should be considered while improving your online retail store sales is its SEO performance. Improving the SEO of your eCommerce store will help you feature it higher on the SERPS, thus increasing your visibility and reach.
In fact, 70% of the clicks on the first page of SERPs are through organic pages and the rest to AdWords. This highlights the importance of maintaining steady SEO performance for a long time.
Taking simple steps such as optimizing your meta titles and descriptions often, using analytics to figure out what works well for your brand, can be useful. Conduct frequent audits to ensure that all the elements and features on your website are performing the way they are supposed to.
For this purpose, use crawlers like Screaming Frog, Serpstat, Ahrefs, or others so that you can monitor and tweak the on-page SEO performance of your online store. Additionally, you can use online guides that can empower you to boost the SEO performance of your Magento store. Plus, you can use many modules and extensions from the Magento Search Engine Optimization Suite to drive your SEO efforts in the right direction.
#7 Embrace Customer Feedback
Customer feedback might sound fairly basic but serve multiple purposes. Not only are they important in maintaining credibility and engagement on your website, but they also perform great on SERPs.
eCommerce brands must embrace positive and negative feedback with equal fervor as they play specific roles in deciding the performance of the online store. Rather than wondering how to increase the convenience store sales that you are running online, rely on your customers to tell you. Negative feedback from customers can indicate the primary areas to improve for the brand, and positive feedback can let them know what they are doing right.
Plus, by asking customers for their feedback, you are letting them know that their opinion is truly valued. This improves customers’ perception of your brand and instills confidence in your customer service.
#8 Optimize the User Experience
If you have already tweaked the other aspects that have been discussed so far, the next thing you need to pay attention to is the user experience. The user experience is defined by how satisfied your customers are in engaging with the website interface.
More than 88% of the shoppers state that they would not return to an online store after a bad user experience.
Taking simple but proactive steps such as improving the interface, providing wishlisting options, and suggesting products based on past purchases can go a long way in creating a stellar user experience. eCommerce stores should also actively try to improve the overall user experience through transparency and social proof.
#9 Track and Improve Buyers’ Journey
A key area of improvement that eCommerce brands often underestimate is the optimization of the buyer’s journey. eCommerce brands have a lot of content and elements on their website, allowing them to guide the buyer’s journey in the direction they want.
One of the ways to do this is by providing customers with enough content to help with their research and create awareness. Additionally, brands should place CTA buttons at appropriate places on product pages and landing pages to prompt purchases.
You can also stay ahead of the rest by targeting keywords based on the users’ intents and their behavior on the website. Online retail brands should also strive to assist the customers throughout their association with the brand—even after the purchase transaction is completed.
Some of the top sales extensions out there can also help you map the buyer journey efficiently.
#10 Consider Hosting Holiday Sales
For eCommerce stores, holiday sales are great opportunities for boosting sales. While every online retail brand is quick to jump on the bandwagon and offer options, some fail by not preparing the website for increased traffic.
Before you even market your holiday discounts or offers, optimize the website navigation and performance. Check how the website performs under peak traffic and eliminate any lags right away. You can boost the sales of your products by running highly effective marketing campaigns on social media and emails. This can also help you in creating a sense of urgency among your customers, which can provide impetus to your sales efforts.
Hosting such holiday sales will also require you to get your shipping and logistic processes up to the task. You can monitor and control the logistic processes through the Magento 2 shipping suite and ensure that your products reach your customers by the estimated delivery date.
#11 Monitor your Core Web Vitals
When Google announced a new set of parameters on which the rankings and performance of web pages will be measured post the release in 2021, very few knew how to go about it. Core Web Vitals were based on customer centricity, encouraging brands to focus more on how the customer perceives their website experience.
Core Web Vitals include parameters such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and FCP (First Input Delay), which indicate the speed at which your webpages load and become responsive. These parameters are not just based on objective limits but also on the customer’s perception of the speed. Hence, they give you a better overview of the customer experience on the website.
These parameters can be improved by increasing the hosting server speed, optimizing the elements on your webpage, and other tweaks that can amplify the overall website performance.
#12 Optimize Hosting Performance
eCommerce stores often suffer the brunt of low speeds delivered by the servers that they are hosted on. While some websites prefer to be hosted on their servers, some seek to host from prominent providers such as DreamHost or BlueHost.
This can be accomplished by minimizing third-party assets and using caching plugins to minimize the website load time. Moreover, using spam filters and managing the user inputs can also be crucial in optimizing the hosting performance.
As a growing eCommerce brand, be flexible about changing the hosting provider in case you are constantly experiencing lags and slow performance.
Wrapping Up
While no set roadmap can lead your Magento retail store to the doors of success, you can implement some of these steps to move in that direction. As the eCommerce industry continues to grow, the onus of boosting sales organically without having to use aggressive sales tactics falls on the new-age online retail brands. Such brands should strive to improve their website performance by optimizing the potential areas of improvement that have been mentioned here.
The author’s bio:
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.