Increase ecommerce sales

image

To build a successful ecommerce business, you need to sell products. However, once you’ve reached the stage of selling enough products, it’s easy to plateau.

Why does sales revenue plateau?

This can be due many factors, like:

  • You’ve saturated your existing target market.
  • Your current target market isn’t very engaged.
  • Most of your products aren’t quite what your audience is looking for.
  • Customers tend to buy only one or two products at a time.
  • People forget that you exist as a solution to their problems.
  • A competitor offers a better price or buying experience.

Go macro, not micro

When you hit a plateau point, the key is to look at the whole picture, rather than picking one or two popular strategies and hoping that they’ll fix everything. Analyze your best customers, and make sure that your messaging is on point to attract and sell to them. Boost your profile with your existing customer base. Look at the products you offer, and whether you need to remove or optimize the messaging for some of them. Try to increase your average revenue per sale. And reach out to new audiences who need or want the products that you’re selling.

Steps

Use RFM segmentation to identify groups of customers who provide you with high value or have potential for you to nurture them into becoming high-value.

Analyze and rank your customers for recency, frequency, and monetary value. Create segments for high-value customers, potential loyal shoppers, and new users.

Put together messaging for segments that you identified in your RFM segmentation, focusing primarily on frequent high spenders, but also considering how to move other groups into that segment.

Customize your website for specific segments. Show customers products that are more likely to be relevant to them, and ensure that all of your email marketing and notifications are personalized.

Use the messaging that you developed to write promotional emails tailored to each of the segments you created.

Analyze past promotional emails to identify popular themes and tactics, and talk to people in your audience to find out which offers most appeal to them. Include UTM links in your emails so that you can track the performance of each one.

Consider dropping less-popular products to limit analysis paralysis in customer. This can work well when new products or existing bestsellers can replace the revenue gap generated by the ones removed.

For example, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he famously cut their product line up down to four products: a desktop for pros, a desktop for consumers, a laptop for pros, and a laptop for consumers. By simplifying the lineup, he made it very easy for people to quickly identify the right solution, improving sales and reducing buyer remorse. Apple stays at a profitable margin because of its pricing strategy and branding as well as the limited catalogue. It proved to be a winning strategy not many can implement.

Identify popular products that don’t sell as much as they should, and work to optimize the messaging around them.

Open your website analytics and look for products that are often searched for or viewed, but in comparison infrequently added to shopping carts. Figure out the issues that are causing the disconnection and fix them to improve sales of those products.

Many products that have been created for a specific audience could easily be adapted to target another niche with a bit of lateral thinking.

You may need to make some changes to the product for a different audience, but in many cases even that might not be required. Probably the most famous example of this is Listerine, which started as a surgical antiseptic before being marketed as a floor cleaner. It was years until it was marketed as a solution to halitosis.

Show customers other products that they might be interested in. Offer upgrades to superior products with substantial benefits.

Include bestsellers and products that other customers bought with products in the cart. Offer free shipping with a minimum order that encourages customers to add more items to their cart.

Ensure that you explain the advantages of upgrades. For example, a faster CPU or larger screen size.

Improve the UX of the purchase process on your website. Make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your products.

People will pay a premium for a simple life.

Build relationships with influencers to market your products or increase your reach.

Develop goals for your influencer marketing, pick influencer traits that will help you to reach your goals, and pick people who best match your list of traits. Develop a plan of action for your campaign and outline how the influencer will be involved.

Use paid advertising on Instagram to boost your profile and increase your followers.

Use Shopping ads to link your target audience directly to specific products in your store. Use your segmentation data to reach people similar to your high-value customers.

Use customer research to collect information on your target market and better reach out to them.

Use interviews and analytics to gather data about your customers and use market research to build on this to create new target audiences. Using the social media platforms your target audiences use, upload CRM data to create lookalike audiences and increase your reach.

Enable retargeting on your website to remind previous visitors about products they looked at or bought previously.

Provide personalized reminders about products that people have already shown an interest in. Use dynamic advertising to display tempting photos of specific items.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-01-15T22:45:21Z

5 Likes

This is a really good strategy that isn’t explored very much in the steps suggested. Many products that have been created for a specific audience could easily be adapted to target another niche with a bit of lateral thinking.

You may need to make some changes to the product for a different audience, but in many cases even that might not be required. Probably the most famous example of this is Listerine, which started as a surgical antiseptic before being marketed as a floor cleaner. It was years until it was marketed as a solution to Halitosis.

2 Likes

Another common reason is that a competitor is either cheaper or makes buying simpler somehow. This is where making improvements to the user experience of the purchasing process is important. People will pay a premium for a simple life. Take a look at the playbooks on usability for advice on how to achieve this.

4 Likes

Sometimes it is necessary to drop products to avoid analysis paralysis. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he famously cut their product line up down to four products a desktop for pros, a desktop for consumers, a laptop for pros, and a laptop for consumers. By simplifying the lineup, he made it very easy for people to quickly identify the right solution, improving sales and reducing buyer remorse.

3 Likes

I agree to cutting on portfolio if parts of it are clearly not profitable and raising prices as a first strategy would not solve the issue. Killing sku’s is recommended when new products or other existing bestsellers can replace the revenue gap generated by the old skus. New products may be same brand but new skus or private label with higher profit margin. Apple manages to stay at a profitable margin but it’s because of pricing strategy, branding and they keep the portfolio focused as you said. It proved to be a winning strategy not many can implement.

2 Likes

This is a very good example. Great feedback all-round.

1 Like

Thanks for your input on this playbook, @boagworld and @Irina_Tudorache – I’ve incorporated your comments into the steps.

1 Like