How to Create a Surge in Your eCommerce Sales

It’s one thing to launch an eCommerce business; it’s another thing to make first sales and get more purchases. Even when you find a winning product and build a well-designed online store, you still have difficulty finding customers. 

Why? Because a lot of work goes into marketing, fulfilment, delivery, and customer service to build trust with customers and convince them to purchase. The eCommerce industry has become more competitive than ever — so you need to stand out from the crowd to turn visitors into people who actually pay you.

In this post, we’ll walk you through five effective ways to create a surge in your eCommerce business. Once you learn these tactics, you’ll know what to do to improve your online store for better conversions. 

Let’s dive in.    

1. Run Holiday Marketing Campaigns

Despite the pandemic, Christmas 2020 was the biggest on record. Australians across the country splurged over $55 billion throughout the Christmas trade period. 

Australian Post even emphasised that “[…] in November the combination of the Cyber Sales and people shopping early for Christmas saw the month become the biggest in Australian online shopping history.”

That means one thing: as the 2021 holiday season kick-off is coming, it’s in your best interest to have holiday marketing campaigns in place as soon as possible. Do that, and you have a higher chance to achieve record-breaking growth this year. 

Here are some tips to help you drive more sales in the 2021 holiday season: 

• Understand key holiday season dates in Australia, including Father’s Day (Sep 05), Halloween (Oct 30), Black Friday (Nov 26), Cyber Monday (Nov 29), Christmas Eve (Dec 24-26), and Boxing Day (Dec 26-28).
• Optimise your website to ensure the best shopping experience for customers. Think about product detail pages, checkout process, payment methods, abandoned cart notifications, website analytics, etc. 
• Consider adding one or more “buy now, pay later” options like Afterpay into your checkout process as more Australians, especially millennials, prefer using this method while shopping. Also, PayPal, Afterpay, and bank transfer are the most popular payment methods in the country, according to FIS Global’s 2021 Global Payments report.
• Implement a product information management (PIM) system like Salsify and Akeneo if you have many SKUs or plan to offer more products in your store in the 2021 holiday sales. This way, you can update, manage, and enrich product data efficiently, instead of doing everything manually using spreadsheets. 
• Group your customers into different segments to increase retargeting campaigns’ performance. 

2. Apply Marketing Psychology Principles

Marketing psychology principles like social proof, urgency, and scarcity can help increase eCommerce sales. If you don’t know about these tactics, take a look at the following data:  

• Customers often rely on social proof like reviews and ratings to inform their purchase decision. According to PowerReviews, 95% of shoppers read reviews while shopping.
• Urgency makes people feel as if they’re about to miss out or lose a great deal. It triggers fear of missing out, which is powerful to drive sales and conversions. For example, an entrepreneur shared that after showing the time left to download his bundle, his sales increased by 332%.
• Scarcity marketing makes customers experience fear of losing their freedom of choice. Simply put, if a product isn’t available, it suddenly becomes more attractive. This tactic is widely used among retailers and eCommerce brands, for example, “only 2 left in stock,” or “limited edition,” or “two items left at this price.”

Here are some tips for applying marketing psychology principles to increase commerce sales:

• Show reviews, ratings, testimonials, trust badges, and other types of social proof on product detail pages, shopping carts, product quickview, checkout pages, etc. 
• Offer exclusive discount codes for new subscribers or loyal customers.
• Include urgency-triggered words like “last chance,” “deal ends soon,” “hurry” to create a sense of urgency and engage shoppers to order before it’s too late. 
• Display a countdown timer and a countdown stock on the product detail pages to give shoppers a little push to add an item to their cart. 
• Display sales notifications like how many people have purchased this item in the last X hours to create demand for a specific product. 

3. Implement Social Shopping

Social shopping refers to buying and selling via social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. According to Chloe Schneider, Head of Content at Bohemia Group, part of the M&C Saatchi Group, “brands like Country Road, Big W, and David Jones have cleverly embraced the features we do have — namely shop pages, collections, and shoppable tags.” She even encouraged that “the better prepared brands are for that day, the more money they’ll make when it hits.”

If that doesn’t convince you, think about 20.5m social media users in Australia, equivalent to 79.9% of the total population. Your customers are more likely on social media, and they’re searching for your products and brand there. 

Here are some tips to help you implement social shopping:

• Mix up different content types to create a good social media strategy. Think about regular posts (personal stories, tutorials, fun facts, product photos, blog posts), videos (Instagram Stories, Reels, IGTV, TikTok videos, Facebook Stories), user-generated content, and giveaways/contests.
• On Instagram, take advantage of tools like taggable products, shopping via Stories, Instagram Collections. Also, set your Instagram account as a business account, allowing followers to tap on “Shop” on your profile to see product information.
• On Facebook, focus on Facebook videos, Facebook Shopping, and Facebook page.
• On TikTok, try different TikTok ads formats, including in-feed ads, brand takeover, Topview, branded hashtag challenge, and branded effects.  
• Test channels until you find the one that works best for your eCommerce business. Remember that you don’t need to be on all social media platforms. 
• Consider working with influencers if you’re selling fashion, beauty, and food products. You can offer them free gifts or other incentives in exchange for promoting your products. 

4. Choose a Trusted Delivery Provider to Offer Fast and Affordable Shipping

Australians increasingly expect fast shipping. Data showed that 57% of Australians would abandon an online purchase due to a negative shipping experience. Meanwhile, a new report from Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights found that “68% of consumers said fast shipping would lead them to place an online order.” 

Hence, if you can offer fast and affordable shipping, you can create a strong competitive advantage for your eCommerce business. One way to make that possible is choosing a trusted delivery provider from the get-go like PACK & SEND Live.

PACK & SEND Live is an eCommerce-dedicated fulfilment and shipping platform that helps you provide your customers with a premium checkout experience and save time, trouble, and money on shipping orders. PACK & SEND Live is designed for businesses of all sizes with no monthly subscriptions — you only pay for your deliveries.

Here’s what makes PACK & SEND Live stand out:

• Support domestic and international delivery.
• Offer branded tracking page, performance dashboard, multiple carrier integrations, bulk consigning and dispatch, and more.
• Integrate with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and eBay. 
• A network of over 100 service centres across Australia to help you fulfil and deliver products faster. 
• Simplify your fulfilment and shipping process with one solution, one invoice, and one point of contact.

5. Provide An Exceptional Customer Service

Customer service is a marketing channel that many eCommerce businesses often ignore. They’re focused so much on email marketing, paid ads, and social media marketing that they forget to improve their customer service experience. 

If that sounds familiar to you, you should know the following statistics:

• 95% of customers say that they consider customer service a key factor when determining to buy and be loyal to a brand. 
• 86% of customers are more likely to trust brands if they explain how they provide a better customer service experience. 
• Over 66% of marketers say their companies compete mainly based on customer service. 
• Over 72% of customers say their prior experiences with a brand is the main factor that influences their future expectations.

In short, customer service can make or break your eCommerce business. The better support you give your customers, the higher satisfaction they have with your brand. But suppose you don’t provide them with the level of service they expect. In that case, they’ll turn to your competitors and talk about you negatively across social media, which puts your business at risk. 

To improve your customer service experience, try the following tactics:

• Build a dedicated support team and equip them with excellent customer service skills.
• Make frequently asked questions and common information available on your website. Think about contacts, shipping, return, and refund policies, which most customers always want to know.
• Add a live chat widget to critical pages like homepage, product detail pages, and checkout pages.
• Ask for feedback after delivering orders to customers. Take advantage of email marketing to keep connecting with purchased customers. 

Ready to Increase Your Ecommerce Sales?

That’s it — five tactics to increase your eCommerce sales. Let us know if you try any of these tactics and how they work for you.  

In case you’re looking for an eCommerce-dedicated fulfilment and shipping solution, try PACK & SEND Live. With over 25 years of experience in providing logistics solutions, we can help you save delivery costs, ship products faster, have more satisfied customers, and accelerate your business. Contact us today to find out more and get started with PACK & SEND Live.