These 7 top ideas for boosting online sales are just as useful if you’ve already been in business for years or if you’re just starting out with your eCommerce website.

1. Free Gifts

Let’s face it everyone loves freebies! How irresistible is it when you are shopping online and you’re faced with the temptation of receiving a free gift if you place an order? If you’re think you don’t normally get tempted then you’re in the minority. Offering free gifts is a sure way of boosting online sales and here are some ideas:

• Buy 3 items and receive the cheapest product absolutely free
• Spend over £50 on lingerie and receive a useful lingerie bag for storing delicate items
• Arrive in Style: Free broomstick with every witches costume for Halloween

2. Promotion Banners

Special offers for specific periods of time are powerful sales incentives and running regular special offers will bring existing customers back to your website again and again. However what’s the point of a special offer if nobody can see it? Make sure you create banners on your site informing your visitors of special offers. Promotion banners can go on the homepage, along the top or bottom of all pages or in the sidebars of your website. Don’t forget to add an ‘offer ends on date’ to give that extra incentive to buy now.

3. Get Others to Sell Your Stuff

Affiliate programs can be a great way for you to boost your sales without much initial investment. You’ll need to join an affiliate network like Affiliate Window or LinkShare and offer a commission for anyone driving sales to your website. In a nutshell here’s how it works:

1. You sign up to an affiliate network and list your products and provide some advertising banners
2. Affiliate marketers will promote your products using those product links and advertising banners
3. Any sales generated by the affiliate will earn them a percentage of the sale e.g. 5%

Some networks require payment of a setup fee and most networks will charge a monthly fee for using their service. In addition to the fixed costs you’ll also pay a small percentage of each sale as a commission to the network.

4. Newsletters

Sending regular newsletters to your subscribers and existing customers will help keep your business in mind. If you sell products then  you could send a monthly newsletter with photos and links to new products, special offers and anything new in your blog. If you sell services then these aren’t likely to change very much so it’s vital you have a business blog which gives you something to talk about, and certainly provides content to share in your newsletter. If you’re not already using an email newsletter service we can recommend  MailChimp .

5. Abandoned Cart Recovery

An ‘abandoned cart‘ is when someone puts something in their shopping cart on  your website and then leaves without making a purchase. People have short attention spans when it comes to browsing online and once they’ve left an abandoned cart the chances are they’re not going to come back again. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send them a reminder? Well that’s absolutely possible and you can even offer them an incentive – send them an email telling them what they left in their cart and offer them a discount if they purchase these items within 7 days.

6. Retargeting

Retargeting is a way of getting previous visitors to your website to come back again. Have you ever visited a website and then wondered why you keep seeing adverts for that same website ‘following you’ on other websites? Well that’s retargeting working its magic – and it works to show you an advert for a website it knows you’re interested in. You can actually get quite detailed with this which means the chances of you attracting someone back to your website is quite high e.g. you can set the advert to show the exact product that the visitor was looking at. Showing the exact same product that someone was interested in really increases the chances of them clicking the ad and coming back to your website.

7. Coupons

The good old fashioned coupon is another tried and tested way to increase your sales and doesn’t need further explanation. You can distribute coupons in a variety of ways e.g. newsletter, promotional adverts on other websites, adverts in magazines, shared on coupon sites, Facebook groups, via Twitter etc.

Whichever ideas you pick up here today you might find it useful to set a reminder in your calendar to review this on a 3 monthly basis. Set out a marketing plan each quarter and measure the results. If a particular marketing tactic doesn’t work so well then make detailed notes summarising why you think it didn’t do too well. The next time you review your marketing plans in 3 months you might come up with some alternative ideas for the same marketing method that might work well. Planning, measuring and innovating new marketing ideas will help you continually strive for increases in sales and that’s one of the foundations you’ll need to have for business growth and success.

Do you have questions? Please ask below!