The Only 3 Best Tips I’ve Learned to Boost Sales in My E-Commerce Business

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There are tons of articles about boosting sales. You might have read and tried them, but why won’t they make a big difference in your sales?

My experience with e-commerces during the past 5 years has proved that not all those tips apply to e-commerces. Each business is unique, and its sales -too- must be treated uniquely.

Tips like “Offer short-term discounts”, “Reduce shopping cart abandonment”, or “Increase ad spending budget” seem fair, but they are too general and don’t guarantee a boost in sales.

How will you know which customer needs a discount? Or how many percentages will bring you more profit from a specific segment of your customers?

Here I’ll give you 3 real tips that you can easily use for your online shop. These tips are very connected and will form a unified and simple roadmap for your business. I will also share some useful tools to max the benefit from each point.

#1 Make SMART Business Decisions

We’ve always heard that time is money. The first tip I want to give you is to make your decisions in a smart way.

What Should Be Smart in Online Businesses and Why?

Here is a list of what you need to make smart in your business:

1. Customer Targeting
2. Showcasing Products
3. Offering Discounts
4. Payment and Shipping

When businesses have trouble growing, their minds immediately tricks them to imagine it’s because they don’t have enough customers.

Smart customer targeting means focusing on the right customers who bring more profit. But how should you know them? Through the data of your customers. This is where we get to the next tip.

#2 Collect and Analyze as Much Customer Data as Possible

A smart business makes decisions based on real data. Following the SMART model, business decisions must be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-based. All these elements are in fact driven from real data. And the most important data in any business is customers’ data.

Customer data is divided into 3 main categories:

1. Customers’ Basic Data: Basic info of customers like name, email address, phone number, etc.
2. Customers’ Interaction Data: Touchpoints that customers have with your brand like product views, free trial sign-ups, user account logins, etc.
3. Customers’ Attitudinal Data: Offers insights into the customer’s experience with your brand. I’ll explain this data further.

Tracking your customer’s basic data is simple. You can gather this data via various forms on your website. Several form builders will help you in this stage, like Google Forms, Typeform, Formaloo. They also provide charts and visuals to help you analyze this type of data.

To track and understand the interaction data of your customers, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Formaloo, Hotjar, Segment, etc. These tools will tell you how your customers are using your website and how they interact with your products. By analyzing this data, you can make decisions that will revolutionize your services.

Customers’ Attitudinal Data help you understand what customers think about your company and the solutions. This data is beyond the experience of customers (as we see in the interaction data). You can collect customers’ attitudinal data by analyzing your customers’ basic data and interaction data and converting them into actions that will upgrade your customers’ experience.

The single tool I know about that will help you understand your customers’ attitudinal data is Formaloo. Comment below if you know of any other software that provides services in this regard.

#3 Learn to Build Customer Loyalty

Data shows the best sales prospects are those who have already purchased at least once from you. This means instead of focusing all your effort on acquiring new customers, you must improve your customer loyalty which is designed in a retention strategy.

To improve your customer loyalty, you need to design activities and processes that:

1. Engage your existing customers with your products
2. Reward them
3. Motivate them
4. Challenge them
5. Give them a feeling of achievement
6. Help them learn and grow

This is achieved by suggesting what each customer exactly needs. I know it’s impossible to track each customer one by one and provide them customized suggestions. But don’t worry! You can use the tools I mentioned in step #2 of this article to automate this.

I brought to you the most important steps you must do to upgrade your e-commerce sales. If you have any questions or personal experiences, just comment below.

PS: if you have some suggestions or ideas you can hit me on Twitter.