Selling goods online isn’t easy. Here are ten tips to get you started.
If you decide to start selling online, how can you ensure you hit the ground running?
You can set yourself apart from the rest by following these tips:
- Develop an attractive, user-friendly website: Your text and design must be consistent, and it must be simple for customers to navigate your site for products. Loading times must be quick, and all information must be readily visible. A good website hosting service is essential, and you should optimise the site for mobile.
- Use dedicated landing pages: A landing page is a single webpage that is accessed when users click on a search engine result or advertisement. A landing page should have a clear call to action for the customer, and will help to generate sales.
- Use incentives: Customers appreciate their loyalty being rewarded, and will respond to time-specific promotions. The sky’s the limit: you can offer seasonal or anniversary deals, or even randomly reward customers.
- Use social media: Promotions on sites like Facebook and Instagram will generate a good response, as well as new followers. Use incentives here to get people involved. Think of new and exciting ways to market your products.
- Consider a blog: Blogs are a fantastic, organic way to generate interest in your business. You can write about a wide variety of topics, such as sector news, product information and even current events, where applicable. But be sure only to take on a blog if you have the ability to keep it up to date. Ensure you share your blog posts on social media.
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Make customers feel safe: Emphasise your trustworthiness by offering free return policies and warranties. Offer shipping deals. Customers will be far more likely to buy online if they feel safe doing so.
- Share good reviews: Credibility is crucial in the online world. Share your positive reviews, as well as any awards or accreditations you have won. There is no room for modesty in the competitive world of online sales.
- Use the right keywords: Using keywords will improve your business’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and, as a result, give it a higher search engine result. Services like Google’s Keyword Planner can offer you a good indication of what your customers are searching for, and what your competitors are doing.
- Develop a solid email marketing strategy: Use email to communicate with your clients, and reward them for signing up to your database with email-specific deals. Test what emails are opened by the most people, and offer time-specific promotions. Remember, don’t spam customers. This will lose you business quickly.
- Experiment with A/B testing: This is a randomised experiment with two variants, A and B. For example, your company could offer a promotion to half the people who visit your website, and offer nothing to the other half. Similarly, half of a particular piece of promotional material could provide a deal while the other half wouldn’t. This is a good way to test the effectiveness of different campaigns, displays, styles, pricings, etc.
