Simple Ideas you can start increasing your e-commerce store revenue today. These best top 100+ tips are so simple, you will have no excuse to not put them into action to improve your store.
But, increasing revenue also can be the result of changes a company makes to its website. And, lucky for us, some of the businesses that have done this have shared the changes they made and the resulting revenue increase. So, in this blog post, you’ll learn how to Increase Online Sales Revenue…
Let’s get into it…
Table of Contents
Checkout Shopping Funnel Ideas
96% of online shoppers expect an online transaction to be completed in less than 3 minutes. Do you know how long it takes your average customers to check out successfully?
The checkout funnel is ideal place to start testing, because funnel tests are closest to your primary conversion (a purchase) and are more likely to have a direct impact on your key success metrics (revenue). Plus, in testing the funnel, you’re serving experiments to a more qualified audience: shoppers who have already signaled a high level of interest in your offering.
Goal: Move shoppers through the checkout funnel to increase purchases and revenue.
High impact test ideas:
- Offer just one product or service on your home page
- Reposition your opt-in offer to boost your opt-ins and build a bigger list of loyal subscribers.
- Add impact to your promotions with hover ads.
- Feature different benefits in your headline.
- Add credibility to your copy–and enhance your visitors’ trust in you.
- Focus on your site visitors–not yourself
- Instill urgency in your copy–and convince readers they need to buy now!
- Offer a limited-time price discount where visitors must buy before a certain date in order to qualify for the discount.
- Offer additional bonuses for free if visitors buy within a certain time frame.
- Offer only a limited quantity of your products or services.
- Offer a limited quantity bonus.
- Remove any references to “buying” from the top fold.
- Boost your product’s desirability by adding images.
- Grab the attention of “scanners” by changing the formatting and appearance of your copy.
The $300,000,000 Button
A popular anonymous e-commerce company increased revenues by $300 million just by changing a button.
After customers put products in their shopping carts and hit checkout, they’d run into a simple form.
It had two fields (email address and password), two buttons (login and register), and one link (forgot password), so lack of simplicity wasn’t the issue here.
The issue was that people did not want to register. One person shopping the e-commerce store said, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” For consumers, registering means entering into a relationship that’s difficult to get out of.
Even return customers didn’t care for the form. Many couldn’t remember their email address and password combination. The form had good intentions, but it was blocking a lot of sales.
So what was the fix?
Removing the Register button and replacing it with a Continue button. The Continue button had this accompanying message:
“You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
Results from this simple change?
A 45% increase in customer purchases that equaled a $300 million increase in revenue in the first year.
The Big Takeaway:
Not every consumer wants to be in a relationship with every e-commerce store where they shop.
People are rightfully skeptical of registering or giving email addresses out to businesses. Many consumers work around this by having a second “just for spam and newsletters” email address. They register for sites using this second email address so all contact goes through that email and doesn’t go into their personal email.
Many consumers resentfully sign up and hate receiving newsletters. I myself have had people say to me “I get all these newsletters that I just don’t care about. When I try to delete my name from their list (unsubscribe), it never works or it’s too confusing.”
It’s these low quality newsletters that send people away and drive the resistance to registering. Many companies now let users proceed with a purchase without having to register.
This is a step in the right direction and one that more companies should adopt. Knowing customers’ fears and pain points is a positive.
- Test the placement and prominence of your primary CTAs. For an e-commerce site, these are likely the the “Add to Cart” button on your product pages and the “Continue to Checkout” CTAs from there. Try adding duplicate CTAs above and below the fold to give shoppers more opportunities to click through.
- Test out different CTA messaging and text. “Buy Now” vs. “Purchase” vs. “Add to Cart” vs. “Checkout”. Oftentimes, more descriptive text results in more clicks.
- Try increasing your CTA button sizes. Larger buttons tend to make it easier for shoppers to travel through your funnel, particularly on mobile.
- Question the assumption that e-commerce security badges increase trust.
- Try using CTAs as a progress meter, telling customers how many steps are remaining in the process. For instance, if there is one page remaining the in the checkout funnel, the your CTA could read “You’re almost there! Just one step to go.”
- If you have an important value proposition, such as “Free Shipping” or “Easy Returns”, try featuring it as close to the primary CTA as possible. Read more on this test idea.
- Remove things like product offers, badges, promotions, or shipping information from each page of the checkout flow. Oftentimes, shoppers prefer a simplified experience.
- Make coupon code fields less prominent. When shoppers see a coupon field they tend to feel less special. They may open a new tab to search for a discount code. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re even more likely to abandon the purchase.
- Try removing navigation to any page outside the checkout funnel. This will help shoppers keep their eyes on the “checkout prize” and eliminate the risk of distraction.
- When a shopper clicks an item to add it to their cart they are no longer browsing, they’re purchasing. Make it as obvious as possible that the item ended up in their cart and make it easy for them to continue down the purchase funnel from there. Many e-commerce sites do this with a subtle animation, revealing a window that shows the product in the cart with a dedicated CTA to nudge them along through checkout.
Call-To-Actions ideas to Increase Online Sales Revenue
1. First and foremost, develop a hypothesis that you want to test, like “I think changing the CTA’s color to blue will increase its contrast, which will increase the CTR (click-through rate).”
2. Construct a plan of action to test those hypotheses, in which you define what tasks need to be done for your tests to take effect. For example:
- Step 1: Sign up for Optimizely.
- Step 2: Develop the A/B test in Optimizely.
- Step 3: Run the test for 2 weeks, or until statistical significance is reached.
- Step 4: Analyze results.
3. Run the test.
4. Finally, analyze the results. If the newer version (the B version) increased your conversion rates, then keep it. If not, reject it.
(Even though testing is a complex topic, I don’t want to make things more complicated than they are. For your needs, this is pretty much you need to know.)
There are three things you should test in your CTA’s:
- Your CTA’s copy (e.g. ìBuy Nowî versus ìAdd to Cartî)
- Your CTA’s size
- Your CTA’s positioning (at the right of the image, below the description, etc.)
Homepage Design Ideas to Increase Online Sales Revenue
The homepage is often a shopper’s first impression of your retail site, so it’s important to get it right. Testing and optimization can help you determine how to make the best use of this precious real estate.
Goal: Drive more visitors to product and category pages
High impact test ideas:
- Test different messaging, tone, and voice to see which resonates best with shoppers. One example is to experiment with is benefits- versus loss-driven messaging. Benefits-driven messaging focuses on what the shopper will gain, such as a huge discount or sale: “Buy now and save 40% on our new spring collection!” Loss-driven messaging plays into a buyer’s FOMO (fear of missing out): “Don’t miss out! Only 1 day left of our biggest spring sale yet!”
- Experiment with different homepage layouts and designs. Start with major changes and then hone in on smaller tweaks from there.
- Your homepage is your front page. Just like a newspaper, experiment with using the homepage to announce new products, offers, or sales.
- While you might find them pleasing to the eye, rotating carousels and large homepage hero images have been found to decrease conversions on most e-commerce homepages. Test it out on your own site.
- Experiment with different types of product imagery.
Social Share Ideas
Recommendations are extremely influential on a person’s buying decision. In fact, 81% of shoppers say posts from their friends have directly influenced their purchasing decision. You can encourage more shoppers to share on your site by optimizing the sharing process.
Goal: Increase positive social shares, which correlate to more purchases and revenue from your site
High impact test ideas:
- Test various designs for your social share buttons. Do shoppers interact with social share buttons that are above or below the fold? How about a scrolling social share widget? Test it out to see what works best on your site.
- Try different incentives and offers to see what compels more people to share widely. You can offer different referral codes for incentives and measure which codes are used most
- Experiment with timing. When is the best moment to ask for the review or social share? Is it during the shopping process? Immediately after the purchase? Or further down the line?
Pricing, Shipping, & Offer Ideas
Finding the right price point or shipping option can drive more visitors to make a purchase.
Goal: Maximize revenue by finding a price point that provide the greatest ROI to your business and the greatest value to your customers.
High impact test ideas:
- Experiment with free and discounted shipping offers to see if they result in an increase in purchases that is revenue positive when paired with the discount you are offering.
- Test having checkboxes auto-selected as default. For example, a customer’s billing address could be defaulted to the same as their shipping address.
- Try adding or removing promotional offers. In some cases, a promotional offer may actually distract users from the purchase at hand. Test this hypothesis out on your site to see what your shoppers prefer.
Add Better Product Images
What’s the one big advantage offline shopping has over its online counterpart? The product’s touch and feel .
If I had to choose one serious advantage of offline shopping it is that I can see, feel, touch, smell (yeah, it sounds weird, but hey, I don’t judge) and even try the products on. The closest thing to that experience online are the product’s pictures and things like:
- Different angles
- Zoom in
- Product test, or in action
- A video
- A 360 degree view of the product
The Big Takeaway:
Periodically, give your site a thorough audit and patch any weaknesses. It’s an effective tool for conversion rate optimization.
It’s easy to get too zeroed in on something and lose sight of the big picture. This is why it helps to take a step back and look at your business from a bird’s eye view, surveying the total operation. This case study provides a lesson that “plugging holes” in your business can impact your bottom line.
Find out why customers aren’t buying and cover those holes. Thoroughly examine your marketing programs and see if they’re effective and how they can be improved.
Business owners think that “if I just buy this product, then my revenues will double.” But, often, it’s beneficial to first look at your business and see what needs attention. Answering questions like these can help:
- Why don’t some customers buy?
- Where do people drop off in their visits on my website?
- Do people know how to use my website? How do they feel about it? Do I need to get some insight?
- Are the keywords I’m bidding on consistent with intent to buy? Or are they vague?
- Do visitors feel safe ordering from my business? How can I build trust?
Step 1: Make sure your site will work with hyper retargeting
Retargeting works only with customers who visit a site a number of times in the buying cycle. It’s not for websites where the customer visits once and makes a purchase (i.e., ordering a pizza). Retargeting reminds the customer to come back and visit the site.
Step 2: Map the buying cycle
For each product you want to promote, answer these two questions:
- How long does it take the customer to sign up after their first visit or to make a purchase?
- How many times does the customer visit your site before purchasing?
Then figure out the steps the customer goes through before they make a purchase. For example:
- They visit your homepage without bouncing (staying for 25 seconds)
- They sign up for the trial
- They continue with the purchase
Step 3: Segment your audience
After getting the steps, then you can segment the audience. For example:
Segment 1 – The prospects visited your homepage without bouncing
Segment 2 – The prospects signed up for a trial
Segment 3 – The prospects continued with the purchase
With segments 1 and 2, you can target them and send them messages encouraging them to take the next steps.
You don’t want to flood your audience with ads. You want to find the optimal time that corresponds with how long they’ve been in your buying cycle. For instance, you can segment the prospects by the following time periods:
- 0-7 days – prospects are shown the most ads
- 8-15 days – prospects are shown a modest number of ads
- 15+ days – prospects are shown a few ads
Step 4: Create the ads
Each ad must correspond with where the prospect is in each step. Corel Software recommends that, at any one point, “you should have at least one A/B test going for each one of your audiences.”
These are ads they used to get visitors to sign up for a free trial.
These are ads they used to get visitors to buy a product.
Over 30 days, from a year-over-year perspective, the revenue has increased 106% by implementing hyper retargeting.
Do’s and Dont’s
- Don’t implement all these tips at once.
- Do A/B test these strategies to find out what works the best for you
- Do strike a balance between discounts offered and your profit margin
- Don’t go away without leaving a comment below (nice ones preferably)
more concern you can contact with us at surjeet@ppcchamp.com or skype: ppc.champ
Let me know your feedback on this post by commenting below.
Replicating these tests certainly does not guarantee that you’ll achieve the same revenue improvement, but there’s no harm in trying.
Happy testing!