7 Creative Ways to Solve Poor B2C Ecommerce Sales
Whether you are a small or large business, the primary goal of every B2C ecommerce business is to increase sales. But unfortunately, every business has to face low phases and this happens when your previous strategies become stale. With the changing consumer habits in the ecommerce industry, generating more sales looks a lot easier than it actually is.
Constantly keeping up with the ecommerce trends and maintaining customer loyalty are considered to be the most important tricks to solve poor online sales. We will look at 7 actionable strategies that you can use to increase sales performance of your web store.
Ready to drive more sales than ever before on your B2C ecommerce store? Start using these 7 creative ways to win the game.
1. Personalize the buying experience
Most of the customers get annoyed with the content shown to them on websites. It can be offers, advertisement, promotions that are irrelevant to them. The spraying marketing technique does not work anymore, especially in B2C ecommerce. The more relevant or personalized offers you show to the customer, the higher the chances of customer buying from your website. A report by Market Insights indicates that over 73% of customers prefer to visit or do business with the brands that use their personal information to create a better and relevant experience.
Considering the privacy of customers, you can ask for permissions before using their personal data. The ecommerce system can use browsing history, preferences, filters, interests to send personalized messages to customers. Every shopper coming to your website expects a personalized experience across different touchpoints through the customer journey. It is always helpful to integrate different customer interactions with the brand. Because if the customers could not complete their purchase due to any reason, they can be retargeted on different channels like smartphone, social media etc. You can also encourage them to complete the transaction through shopping cart abandonment techniques.
2. Use data to improve your business strategies
Using data is not new in B2C ecommerce but you can make a big difference by developing a system to measure the effectiveness of marketing strategies.
The foremost requirement is to have accurate and updated data of the products sold from your website. It also includes the calculation of overall costs to let you understand your profit or loss levels. Once the negative issues are addressed, you will start reducing your business losses.
It is clear that deep segmentation is required to boost sales in the ecommerce system. With advanced ecommerce platforms, you can do segmentation of customers in real-time too. For example, you can track the products added to cart but not purchases, products clicked and saved by them, automatically shoot emails for personalized offers and promotions, and much more. You can also integrate this platform with multiple channels like social media, Google, push messages etc.
With real-time insights, you can personalize your marketing activities incredibly and drive the sales conversion rates much higher. Some of the other techniques to use data are the conversion of upselling products, developing continuity programs like subscriptions, sending soft selling emails etc.
3. Know your customers better
Creating user personas helps greatly in this competitive B2C ecommerce worldThe first fundamental to increase the sales of your online store is to know your customers. The detailed user personas are very helpful to sell the right product to the right customer. If you have ever looked at the Facebook advertisements, you may have seen the targeting based on the university they have graduated from, the area of their home, and even their vacation plans. The granularity can be noticed easily throughout the ecommerce system.
The better you know your customers; the more chances they will respond properly to the tailored messages. It makes the consumers feel connected with the message only when it is personalized and specific to their lives. So, create more detailed user personas than you have ever made before.
4. Shipping as your competitive advantage
The primary driver of online sales is the price. Most of the sellers have the same list of products on their websites but with different prices. With such stiff competition, it is natural for every B2C ecommerce business owner to think of value-added services to increase their market share in the industry.
Price wars are very common in ecommerce but it primarily affects small to medium scale businesses. The large competitors can offer the products at low prices, provide free shipping but small companies cannot afford to do so. The large online sellers also have plenty of warehouses to ship the product from the closest facility that reduces the distribution and shipping cost.
However, you can still use shipping as your competitive advantage by distributing the inventory at different hubs, it may not be a warehouse but more like a fulfilment centre. It might increase your cost initially but in the long term, you will surely call it a business investment as you will start fulfilling the expectations of your B2C ecommerce consumers for fast and free shipping at low prices.
5. Reduce Checkout frictions & Increase payment options
According to a report by Business Insider, there is more than $4 trillion worth of merchandise that is abandoned in the shopping carts in a year. It is also indicated that over 60% of this amount could be recovered using the right marketing techniques.
Isn’t it a jaw-dropping statistic?
So yes, the checkout process and accessibility of payment options are crucial for customers to make the purchase from your website. But how to reduce shopping cart abandonment?
Reducing checkout process frictions can have a significant impact on your sales conversion rates and overall ecommerce system growth. The customers are more likely to buy if they experience an easy process to complete the buying journey. It can be done by eliminating the unnecessary fields from checkout form, don’t make any rule for time out, and alike.
The payment options are equally important as consumers love to have multiple options to pay for goods and services. By offering more payment options, you can acquire new customers and make it easier for them to pay you. Surely, it will be a hassle to optimize the checkout process but it can dramatically increase your B2C ecommerce sales and help you cater to maximum customers.
6. Use Tiered Pricing
Let’s start by an example here.
If you are choosing a restaurant for dinner, you will choose one of the middle-tier restaurants because the high-tier ones will be hyped and costly, and the low-tier ones will provide cheap product and service. So, making a mid-range choice seems to be a safe choice. This technique is considered as “decoy pricing”, where the third option acts as a decoy in your pricing structure.
The same rule applies to the ecommerce system. It can also leverage online sales with a tiered pricing structure. You can push people towards buying the mid-range option and this is the option you really want them to buy the most. This is a psychology game and most of the online companies are using it to make customers what they want.
7. Mobile and PWA optimization
The badly optimized websites will never be in trend, especially when the mobile searches are eclipsing the desktop search in volumes. If you don’t want to leave the sales, it becomes very important to optimize your site for mobile with a Progressive web application (PWA).
Well, this is not only a technical perspective to have a mobile-friendly and responsive website but it actually increases B2C ecommerce online sales. It is necessary to give a good buying experience to customers even if they are not getting converted in one-time. In fact, you should not expect them to get converted in a single session, they might explore for some time and get converted later, if you make it convenient for them.
Think of your mobile users and do every possible effort to make their buying experience easy and quick so that they can buy from you on the go.
Final Thoughts
Surviving in the fierce competition of the online industry is no less than a real war. It definitely requires intensive strategies and places extra efforts on different business aspects. Also, you should be well-prepared for the challenges and strive for continuous growth. Increasing B2C ecommerce sales is surely the prime objective of any online business and you need to test many creative ways (some of them are listed above).
The industry requires every company to keep up with the dynamicity of consumer expectations as it is the only way to increase sales and boost revenue. If you are also looking for a platform that can solve all your ecommerce problems. Schedule your FREE trial NOW.
