The e-commerce industry is growing rapidly, and with sales expected to reach $5.4 trillion by 2026, it’s no surprise that many entrepreneurs are getting into the game. But you can’t simply launch an online store and wait for customers to find you. Nor can you be satisfied with a static customer base if you want to survive and thrive in the future.
The most successful business owners execute proactive marketing strategies designed to grow their online stores. Below are 13 proven tactics you can use to grow your e-commerce sales.
1. Offer promotions
Promotions are among the biggest drivers of impulse purchases. Nothing gets people clicking like the sense of urgency created by a fleeting opportunity to save money or get something for nothing. Promotions come in a variety of flavors. Depending on your circumstances, you might offer:
Buy one, get one free (also known as BOGO)
The effectiveness of BOGO is well established. It’s a good approach for selling overstocked items.
Flash sales
Offering a discount or other promotion for a limited time creates brand awareness and FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s helpful for clearing out excess or obsolete inventory and driving traffic to your online store.
Free shipping
If you usually charge for shipping, you can cover shipping on every order for a limited period or for purchases above a specified threshold (for example, $25).
Free gift with a purchase
It doesn’t matter whether the economy is strong or struggling—people love getting things for free, even simply branded trinkets.
Discounts
Discounts make customers feel like savvy shoppers. You can announce that items are available for a certain percentage off the original price or show both the original and sale price on your product descriptions—or both.
2. Conduct A/B testing
Research plays a significant ongoing role in successful e-commerce businesses. A/B testing is a powerful type of research for improving your marketing and customers’ experience at your online store.
In a nutshell, A/B testing involves testing two variations with your target audience to see which of the two generates more of the desired metric, such as website traffic or conversions. It’s a cost-effective method you can use to maximize the impact of your product photos or descriptions, messaging, designs, layouts, and promotions.
For example, you could test to see whether a message about a flash sale generates greater sales if posted on your social media accounts or sent in an email. (Be sure to use different promo codes to track sales back to their source.) Or you could test various versions of the language in the message. You might be surprised at the difference small tweaks to wording or other elements can make.
3. Market at all stages of the interaction
Purchasing items online is a multi-stage process for most buyers. It generally includes:
Recognizing a need
Researching for products to fill the need (aka shopping around)
Comparing product features and pricing
Making a purchase
Evaluating the purchase
Successful e-commerce business leaders know that they need to market to customers throughout all of these stages, rather than focusing only on the purchase step. How? By providing things like buying guides, product feature comparisons, and how-to videos.
4. Upsell and cross-sell to your customers
Upselling and cross-selling are timeless sales tactics. Upselling occurs when you encourage your customers to purchase a “better” (typically more expensive) version of the item they’re looking at or have already put in their carts. You can do this by playing up the features that make the suggested item more desirable and valuable.
To cross-sell, you display related or complementary items on product pages. Think of the “frequently bought together” feature on Amazon, or clothing retailers that show photos of entire outfits alongside the featured item of interest. If shoppers don’t take the bait on the additional items at the moment, you can send them a post-purchase email again promoting those items.
When done well, upselling and cross-selling can build trust with your customers by anticipating their needs and wants. For example, if they buy an item that requires batteries, but the batteries are not included, then suggesting batteries as an add-on is likely helpful. Upselling and cross-selling techniques also demonstrate how many of their needs you can meet and lead to repeat business.
5. Retarget your lost sales
It’s estimated that as much as 67 percent of items placed in online shopping carts on e-commerce stores are abandoned. The reasons range from trouble navigating the store’s checkout process and the lack of a “guest checkout” option (meaning would-be customers are forced to sign up for an account) to shipping charges, insufficient payment options, and unclear or unsatisfactory return policies.
Regardless of the reason that leads to abandonment, these customers aren’t necessarily out of reach—after all, they likely still have the same need they were looking to satisfy with your product(s). According to the e-commerce platform Shopify, retargeting can reduce cart abandonment by 6.5 percent and increase online sales by almost 20 percent.
An example of retargeting is sending follow-up “abandoned cart” emails, possibly with discounts. This can nudge a person to finish the transaction. You could send a series of emails, starting with a reminder, then setting a deadline for cart expiration, and then extending a discount.
6. Pursue repeat customers
While it’s important to pull in new customers, you shouldn’t neglect your existing customers. It’s a marketing maxim that it’s generally easier and more cost-effective to generate repeat sales from existing customers than to generate new sales from consumers who have no experience with your e-commerce business. So it follows that you shouldn’t restrict your best promotions and discounts to new customers. In fact, this can result in churn, as shoppers chase the best prices from online store to online store.
You have numerous options for keeping your customers in the fold. Consider offering a discount after a customer’s first purchase or when a customer’s total purchases hit a threshold. Establish a loyalty program where customers receive exclusive offers and earlier access to sale items. Send coupons to customers on their birthdays.
7. Try new markets
Exploring new markets doesn’t mean you have to pivot away from your current markets. It’s just wise to diversify so you’re not overly reliant on a single product or segment of customers. Overreliance leaves you vulnerable to evolving tastes and other forces you can’t control, such as natural disasters, economic swings, and supply chain disruptions.
Diversification can refer to different demographics or geographic locations. For example, you could begin to sell your current items internationally. One of the major advantages of e-commerce businesses is the ability to reach potential customers around the world, rather than being limited to those in driving distance of a brick-and-mortar location.
You can tap this market by offering international shipping, especially if you know your items are popular in certain other countries—but do make it clear if international shipping costs extra. There’s no need to go global immediately; you can test with one or two countries to determine if foreign customers are interested. You might try A/B testing to see which countries will be most lucrative.
You also can reach new markets by using sales channels beyond your own e-commerce website. You need to be where your potential customers are, whether it’s platforms like eBay and Amazon—where you can conduct direct sales transactions—or social media, where you can direct customers to your e-commerce website.
Google Shopping is worth checking out, too. It provides a no-cost method to reach potential customers who are already researching your product type with images and pricing information.
Finally, you can reach new markets by selling new products. But make sure you conduct the same degree of research and due diligence on any new products that you did with your initial offerings. It’s not enough that there’s a demand—new products also need to be a good fit with your other products, customers, brand, sourcing and fulfillment resources, and long-term goals.
8. Get involved in affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way to outsource some of your marketing burdens and leverage the reach and reputation of others. Affiliates (also known as publishers) could be popular bloggers or TikTok personalities. They post links to your online store, and you pay them a flat fee or a commission for each online store visitor or sale they generate for you.
Depending on the arrangement, you may only have to pay when you make a sale—that way there’s always a return on investment. A bonus return is that the incoming links can boost your search engine optimization results.
You can connect with affiliate marketers through platforms like Amazon Associates, ShareASale, and ClickBank.
9. Leverage social media
Social media marketing is essential for e-commerce businesses—you can’t expect most consumers to trust an online store that doesn’t have a presence on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, or the like. Moreover, social media ranks among the most cost-effective marketing avenues available.
For example, you can use social media platforms to spread the word about your promotions and new items, whether through paid ads or your own posts. Note, though, that different platforms often have unique content styles that cater to the user base. That means you should tailor your message to the specific platform, even for the same promotions.
You also can take advantage of social media for content marketing, where you create value for your followers without making an explicit sales pitch (or making it a relatively small part of the content). This content could take the form of a blog post, podcast, infographic, video, or even a live event where you do demonstrations and answer questions. Just be sure you post regularly and actively engage with your followers.
Better yet, use your followers to create content. This is known as “user-generated content” (UGC). Encourage or incentivize customers to post photos or videos using your products in real life, with a hashtag. UGC generally comes across as authentic, while also providing valuable “social proof” about your e-commerce business. You simultaneously receive free marketing content and build loyalty.
Influencers can be especially powerful for marketing your online store. Similar to affiliate marketing, you pay influencers to spread the word about your e-commerce business and its offerings to their massive audiences. Many influencers you may have never heard of are effective avenues for reaching niche audiences.
Skeptical? The Pew Research Center reports that:
Four in 10 social media users say they follow influencers or content creators, including 72 percent of 18- to 29-year-old social media users and 44 percent of those ages 30 to 49.
Three in 10 adult social media users say they have purchased something after seeing an influencer or content creator post about it on social media. When looking only at users who follow these accounts, the number rises to 53 percent.
54 percent of 18- to 29-year-old social media users say influencers impact their purchasing decisions a lot or a little.
The numbers make clear that influencer marketing is an option that could pay off for e-commerce businesses.
10. Put your email list to work
At this point, email marketing is an oldie but a goodie—because it still has a notably high return on investment compared to other marketing channels. If someone signs up for your email list, you know they have some interest in your e-commerce business, and it would be foolish not to take advantage of it. Automation makes it easy to maintain regular targeted contact to stay top of mind and monitor metrics like open and unsubscribe rates.
Provide shoppers with the opportunity to subscribe to your email list throughout your online store, highlighting the benefits of signing up. You also can use promo offers to entice people to sign up—for example, by giving them 15 percent off their next purchase. As with social media marketing, mix it up when it comes to the content in your emails. Send ads and announcements but also content that isn’t a direct pitch.
11. Optimize your website for mobile
When you target customers through social media or email, the odds are good that the recipients who click through to your online store will do so on their mobile phones.
In a Pew Research Center survey, about three-quarters of U.S. adults (76 percent) said they sometimes buy things online using a smartphone. Ninety-one percent of Americans ages 18 to 49 said they sometimes buy things online using a smartphone, as do 69 percent of adults ages 50 to 64, and 48 percent of those 65 and older. About one-third of U.S. adults (32 percent) said they use a smartphone to buy things online at least on a weekly basis.
In other words, if your online store isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re probably losing customers. Shoppers on a phone want a hassle-free experience (including a strong search function and clear, easy-to-read product descriptions), streamlined with tools such as one-click buying.
12. Provide excellent customer service
Top-notch customer service is important for every kind of business, but especially for those in a sector where so many competitors are easily found with a simple Google search. In addition, some customers, even now, might be hesitant about buying online—at least for special or bigger ticket items. Reliable customer service can help shoppers to overcome that reluctance.
Customer service is a key contributor to product reviews, too. It’s not unusual to see reviews that focus more on the seller’s customer service than the product itself. If the reviews are negative, you’ll likely lose not only that customer but also potential customers who read the reviews.
If there’s any doubt, assume that your prospects do read reviews. According to Statisa, in 2021 nearly 70 percent of online shoppers typically read between one and six customer reviews before making a purchasing decision. Less than one in ten shoppers didn’t have a habit of reading customer reviews before buying.
Research the pain points your customers experience with your business and your competitors (for example, a confusing return process), and tailor your customer service to alleviate those pain points. And don’t put up hurdles between your customers and your customer service representatives. Be reachable via multiple channels, such as email, chat on the website, social media, and an 800 number.
13. Cut your operating costs
Boosting your e-commerce sales is always going to be a priority, but that’s not the only way online businesses can improve their bottom lines. You can also do it by cutting your costs.
Don’t assume that the way you did things a year ago is still the most cost-effective approach. Scrutinize your operating costs regularly, and shop around for your vendors and suppliers. See if they’re open to negotiation (for example, volume discounts). Automation can also help you cut costs for everything from inventory control and payroll to product listings and customer service.
Follow these 13 best practices and you’ll be well-positioned to successfully scale your e-commerce business.
