How to Increase Your Website Sales

By Simon  |  13 Mar 2017 16:00:00

"To increase sales you need to sell to more people, more items, more often"

Selling to More People

To sell to more people, you need to get more people to hear about the items and services which you are selling. This is the most difficult and most expensive part of any marketing process. However there are many different ways in which you can achieve this.

Usually there is not one single way in which you will be able to get more customers, it will be a combination of ways each one bringing a proportion of your new customers to you. Each of these methods need to be constantly refined and experimented with to maximise the number of purchasing customers you achieve.

To be successful, you should consider doing everything in the following list, some of which will be expensive and some of which is costs nothing. You won't be able to do it all at once, but you should make a plan to perhaps add one of these every month until after a while you are marketing in lots of different ways.

Each marketing method needs to be tested and measured to find out how to get the best return on investment whether the investment is time effort or money.

Here is a list to get you started...

PPC - Pay Per Click Internet Adverts e.g. Google Adwords

SEO - Organic Search Engine Optimisation

Marketplaces

Social Media

Content and Article Marketing

Email Marketing

Internet Banner Ads

Affiliate Campaigns

Referral Campaigns

Joint Ventures

Traditional Magazine and Publication Advertising

Television Ads

Radio Ads

Poster Campaigns

Exhibitions

Telesales

Direct Mail

Public Transport Adverts

Selling More Items

The most difficult part of any business is getting someone to buy something from you. It's about creating a trust relationship with the prospective purchaser. Once someone has decided to buy from you then it's relatively easy to increase the amount of items which they purchase from you, or alternatively to increase the value of the items which they are purchasing.

There are a number of things you need to do regarding this.

Firstly, make sure you have lots of items for sale. If you only have 10,20 or 30 items for sale then you are most likely leaving a lot of money on the table. Ideally you should have at least 100 items.

For example if you are selling lampshades, then you would sell a whole range of lampshades, but in addition you might sell lampshade cleaning items, bulbs, and perhaps a selection of lamps themselves. In doing so you are making life easier for your customers and in turn making more money for youselves, so everyone wins.

You can also use the up-sell and cross-sell features built into Sellr to facilitate this.

Cross-sell is seeing if the customer wants to buy an additional item or items. For example if they were purchasing a pocket radio, you might ask them if they also wanted batteries or a faster charger.

Up-sell is trying to get the customer to replace the item they are purchasing with an item of higher value. For example, if they were buying a box of chocolates you might ask if they wanted your super box bundle instead which has 3 boxes of chocolates in it with a considerable bulk saving.

Selling More Often

You need to get your customers to return to your store and buy from you more often. A key way to do this is to make sure that you maximise communication with them. If you are not emailing your customers and prospects at least once a month then you'll be leaving money on the table. These won't neccessarily be sales emails, but friendly information and advice to remind the customer that you're still there, but also adding details of any particular items which they should be aware of.

If you sell consumables, then this gets easier but more important. For example, if you were selling ink cartridges, then using Sellr you should send a follow up email to the customer automatically after a set period of time (usually a bit less time that what their ink cartridge would last for) reminding them that you are still there and asking if they would like to re-order.

Email marketing has some very important rules.

1. Don't assume that others don't want to receive emails from you just because you don't like receiving emails yourselves (if that is the case).

2. Keep sending emails until the contact asks you to stop. You can never send too many emails if the person is happy to receive them.

3. Most people enjoy reading information on items and activities they are interested in.

What this all Means

If you increase the number of people you sell to by 10% and the average amount of each sale by 10% and increase the frequency of sale by 10% you will increase your tuenover by 133%. An amazing statistic!

Where to Start

If you are not doing this already, or if the information above is new to you, then come and join us at https://www.sellr.com where we are constantly working on providing features and information to help you make more money from your business, whatever you are selling.