Sales is the blood in your business’s veins. Without it, your business cannot stand on its own. If your sales have been stagnant, you need to start looking at different marketing avenues that you can tap into to boost your product sales.
Here are eight ways that can get you started to boost product sales:
- Advertising
- Social Media Influence
- Produce Blog Content
- Conduct a Webinar
- Run Discount Promotions
- Bundle and Upsell
- Offer Freebies
- Improve Your Landing Page
By the end of this tutorial, I need you to pick one or two that you can start today—focus on these two approaches and test what works best for your online store.
1. Advertising
One of the easiest, but also the most expensive ways to boost product sales is through ads. You can promote your products on different platforms, but you need to be strategic about it.
Here are some examples:
- Facebook – generally good for all types of products
- Google – works best if you want to target people on YouTube and on search
- Instagram – great for products related to health, beauty, and kitchens
- Pinterest – use this platform for products like jewelry and female-oriented items
Whatever it is that you do, do not advertise one-time big-time. Start small and see if your ad works. If you cannot drive traffic and conversion to your store through your ad, you need to revisit the parameters used in the ad—you may be targeting the wrong people or demographics.
2. Social Media Influence
You can do this in two ways—create your social media pages or hire an influencer to recommend your store.
In the first method, you need to build up your own audience. You need to post regularly, and you need to engage. You should avoid filling your social media pages with sales or product content. Instead, you have to post motivating content and lifestyle images related to your business.
The other method is to hire an influencer. You can do this by going to freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, and pay the influencer to recommend you.
Some influencers will ask for cash, while others will ask for both cash and your product. Consider this a good deal, especially so, since this influencer has access to thousands, if not millions, of people who will buy what he or she recommends.
3. Produce Blog Content
Another good method to boost product sales is to produce content on a regular basis. The content you produce should be helpful and optimized for search engines.
A blog works in marketing because you are establishing yourself as an authority—not only to people but also to search engines. While a blog can cost you a lot of time to grow, it is an asset that will be on the internet forever. If you want, you can hire an affordable freelance writer to do it for you.
Here are some tips to make your blog effective:
- Add value – write content that enriches the lives of your readers
- SEO – make sure that you use keywords and apply SEO principles so search engines can find your blog
- Consistency – post a blog on a regular basis; search engines like websites that offer fresh content all the time
Avoid writing blog posts that are too salesy—focus on posts that answer a customer’s problems, or posts that provide new insights to people. Insert your product links somewhere in the blog, but make it subtle.
4. Conduct a Webinar
A webinar is a live online seminar. You can offer crash courses and invite people to attend for free. This webinar must be focused on helping people learn, or it could be about demonstrating your products.
Here are some examples:
- If you are selling drones, do webinar about how to fly it or how to customize it
- For beauty products, show how to use a lipstick or a make-up
- If you are selling toys, demonstrate how they work (with a child)
Make sure that you capture people’s emails before they can access the webinar. Once they give you their email address, you can use it for your follow-through campaign. You can thank them for attending, and you can send them regular emails about your products later on.
5. Run Discount Promotions
Another effective method to boost sales is to offer discounts. People love to save on the cost of what they buy, especially if they get a really deep discount—say, no less than 30%.
If you choose to go this route, you have to use urgency as your weapon. You cannot run a discount sale for a month—no one will buy.
There is a reason why huge companies run a sale for three days only—sense of urgency and FOMO. If the sale only happens in three days, the person looking at this product will decide now—not tomorrow.
FOMO stands for fear of missing out. If you can position your product as something that is in demand and that the affordable price you set is only available for a limited time, people will make impulse purchases.
6. Bundle and Upsell
Most successful marketers use bundling as a way to get you to buy more products and move inventory. This is the reason why McDonald’s and other food chains have a lot of bundles to offer.
Do the same with your store—put together related items and sell them for a significantly lesser price. People are more likely to spend money this way because they know they are going to save a lot of money.
Upsell is also a great method to increase your average order value or AOV. Use a software that automatically offers a product upon checkout. If possible, offer products that are related to the one that a customer is buying.
7. Offer freebies
Free stuff is one of the most effective ways to boost product sales. Before you do this, you need to do some serious math.
You see, not all free stuff is really free—the business owner has factored in that cost to the buying price of the item sold.
What you give away for free must be of value. It must also be something that it related to what the customer is buying. For example, you can give a free laptop bag if a person buys a laptop, or a free phone case if the customer bought a smart phone.
8. Improve Your Landing Page
The last thing you can do to boost product sales is to change your storefront. The main problem with many online stores is that they are not attractive enough.
Here are some things to think about:
- Use banners that showcase lifestyle photos
- Make sure you line up your product collections below the fold
- Use call to actions on your home page
- Make your landing page easy to navigate
- Remove clutter from your landing page
As a takeaway, always remember that your landing page will make or break your website. Without a good-looking landing page, your customers will think that you are just another run-of-the-mill store.
Summary
There are many tactics to boost product sales, but you only need to choose a few. In each type, you have to run A/B tests to validate if your marketing campaign is working, and which of the two are generating a higher conversion rate.
Once you have determined which version works, you can scale it up. Wash, rinse, and repeat, then start creating campaigns with the other methods.
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