It’d be nice if you could flick your fingers to increase your ecommerce revenue with minimum or zero effort. Sadly, things don’t work that way, and you must do the work to make money. 

But fortunately, the UK’s ecommerce business climate is currently quite favourable. 

The early projections for 2022 by Statista expect ecommerce market revenue to reach over 185 billion GBP. There’s no better time than now to make significant profits selling goods online. 

Now, you’re probably thinking, “But how do I increase my ecommerce revenue to make more profit?” 

Well, that’s the point of this blog, to show you how you can boost your business revenue with minimal effort or investment.  

Off-site Strategies To Increase Ecommerce Business Revenue

Increasing your revenue isn’t rocket science; you only need to implement changes around your set-up. However, it all starts with attracting potential customers to your store. 

It doesn’t matter what you have; you need to get your targets to look your way to make sales. Here’s how you can attract customers to your store and increase your ecommerce revenue as well.

Build Brand Awareness

The brand is the face and personality of a business. Just like people describe you by personal details, people define a company by its brand. So, to market your ecommerce business and increase revenue, you must first get people to recognise it. 

You must make your target buyers aware of your business and what they’ll get from you. That way, they know they can come to you whenever they need something you offer. 

That said, let’s look at some brand awareness-building strategies.

Use Content Strategy

Content is the oldest growth strategy in ecommerce. Business owners have been using content even before digital marketing became mainstream. People used Newspapers and billboards for advertisements in the nineties. They still do now; however, much of the marketing focus nowadays is on the web.

So, the easiest way to build brand awareness is by curating content. However, “content strategy” is becoming an ambiguous term. That’s because there are several avenues to go about it. 

For example, you can use blog posts, guest posts, featured articles, email copies and social media content. 

Blog posts are curated information you design to educate a target audience about something. So, for your ecommerce business, you should put up posts that’ll convey helpful information to the audience while also advertising your brand. 

For example, you could write blogs about sneakers if you own a sneaker retail brand. An excellent article topic example is “How to Identify Authentic Sneakers From Fakes.” 

Then somewhere in the article, you’ll market your brand as selling only authentic sneakers.

Offer Free Stuff

People love free stuff, so an excellent way to get their attention is to give things away. Think about the number of times you’ve clicked on ads that promised a gift if you did something. 

So, by giving out valuable items, you’ll draw attention to your brand, and then you can use the avenue to market it. Of course, you need to be tactful with your giveaways. 

Simply giving out items without a backing strategy may amount to nothing. Only offer freebies as part of a larger marketing strategy.

Integrate With Social Media

There are 56.7 million active social media users in the UK. Imagine you can reach 10% of those people and get half of them to buy from you. That’ll be fantastic, right? 

So, one of the best ways to grow your ecommerce business quickly is to maximise social media platforms. Below are two strategies for that.

Use Social Media Marketing

Almost everybody knows about social media marketing now. It’s as simple as paying social media platform authorities to show your ads to many people. 

However, the trick isn’t in what or who you pay; it’s in the content you offer the audience. You must make your social media marketing count by creating engaging content and strong CTAs to make the audience patronise your business.

Try Social Commerce

Admittedly, most SM users won’t want to interrupt their browsing to check out your website. But fortunately, you also don’t need them to visit your ecommerce store to sell to them. That’s where social commerce comes in. 

Social commerce is the social media version of your ecommerce store; they’re the same thing but on different platforms. So, instead of having your ads direct customers to your ecommerce store, you can make them go to your social commerce store. 

That way, customers can transact with you without crossing platforms.

Do Email Marketing

Your digital marketing strategy is incomplete without an effective email campaign. Customers love receiving promotional offers via email. 

Additionally, it enables you keep your business in the customer’s mind as your emails constantly remind them you have the goods they want. Overall, it’s an excellent way to curate an audience, get new customers and retain old ones. 

Now, let’s break down how you can do that.

Build a Mailing List

This part is the most daunting of all the email marketing processes. However, there’s no way around it, and you need a satisfactory result here to have much to go by in the subsequent stages. 

Here is where you curate the email audience for your ecommerce business. Primarily, your aim here is to get as many people as possible to express interest in knowing more about your business. 

Essentially, you want them to submit their email addresses and consent to you sending them promotional offers.

So, when you build a mailing list, you’re shortlisting people you’ll create a community with. Plus, unlike social media ads, you have complete control of the list and can choose who can see your content.

Use Promotional Campaigns

The primary purpose of creating a mailing list is so you can target the audience with curated content. Here’s where you do that.

You can use different content strategies for your email marketing. For example, you can bombard the audience with promotional offers. 

Or you can go the steady growth route by providing educational content while using strong CTAs to encourage the readers to buy from you. 

Most people will advise you to use a strategy that best suits your business. But that’s quite ambiguous and only offers a little help. It would be best if you used a combination of direct promotional offers and educational copies. 

To do that, you should alternate your email copies between a newsletter containing helpful tips and ones you purely design for advertising. 

On-site Strategies to Increase Ecommerce Business Revenue

You must invest in the off-site aspect of your marketing to boost your ecommerce business sales. However, the bulk of the work to increase your revenue will be on the ecommerce store. 

That’s because most off-site strategies will only help direct the customers to your store. Their perception of your website will determine if they’ll patronise your business.

So, let’s consider what you should do in your store to encourage buyers to make purchases. 

Cut Down Bounce Rate 

Running an ecommerce business means increasing revenue is not your only concern. Getting more traffic and increasing brand recognition and engagement are also primary goals on your checklist. 

Assuming you’ve achieved all those, the objectives shift to getting the visitors to do something when they check your website. But that also means it’s time to deal with bounce rates. 

Customer bounce is the biggest obstacle to increasing ecommerce sales and revenue. Bounce rate refers to the number of people who visit your website and leave without buying anything. 

A high bounce rate will negatively affect your revenue even if you put all the necessary off-site measures in place. You can reduce the bounce rate by applying the following tips. 

Use Scarcity Tactics 

You can motivate people to do things through several different methods. One effective avenue is to incite FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO primarily involves an individual worrying that if they fail to secure something now, they may never get the opportunity again. 

Sometimes, the fear is justifiable as the item may run out of stock. Other times, it’s a tactic marketers use to boost sales, and you can use it for your ecommerce business too.

The easiest way to incite FOMO is by using scarcity tactics. You just need to give customers an impression that only limited amounts of a product are available, and it’s fast running out. It’ll surprise you how fast they’ll respond.

Usually, when a customer notices an item is running out of stock, the realisation helps them make purchasing decisions faster. They quickly conclude if they want the item. 

Then, If they want it, how soon? If they don’t need it very soon, the next question is, “will it still be available when they need it?” These questions often push them to faster conclusions.

As such, scarcity tactics are often great for reducing bounce rates as they push visitors to make purchase decisions even before visiting your store. Knowing that an item is fast running out of stock will get customers thinking, “Do I buy now or wait and risk missing out?”

Parade Your Top Sellers

Nothing encourages people to buy things (they need) than seeing other people purchasing them. It’s mob mentality reinforced by their actual need for the item. 

So, someone who comes to your website looking for an item and finds that many people have bought it from you will have no reservations about doing the same. 

So, you should structure your landing page so that visitors will see your best sellers. This strategy helps you to make a solid first impression on the visitors. 

Additionally, it gives window shoppers direction on the products they should check out. Plus, even if the bestsellers differ from what the customers came looking for in your store, you can encourage them to consider those goods by portraying them first.

Enable Multiple Payment Options

Not all your customers use the same payment methods. Some will use Apple pay; others may use Samsung Pay; another group may prefer Paypal while the rest roll with their debit/credit cards. 

Hence, you must accommodate all customers and their preferred payment methods in your store.

If someone wants to pay using Paypal, but you only accept debit card payments, the individual will look for another seller who will take their Paypal payment. 

Unfortunately, the ecommerce industry structure is such that it’s easy for customers to hop in-between stores when shopping. 

So a buyer can simultaneously browse yours and a competitor’s store, compare their experiences and actively decide which to patronise. So, you want to avoid giving them any reason to choose the other store over yours.

Use SEO Plugins

The interesting thing about this strategy is that its application is on-site, but its primary effect is noticeable off-site. That’s because you’ll apply SEO plugins on your website, and it’ll then work on your website’s position on SERPs.

Again, growing your organic traffic is fundamental to improving your ecommerce business sales. One of the easiest ways to achieve that is by improving your visibility through SEO. 

And that’s where the SEO plugins come in. SEO plugins help optimise your websites for higher search ranking on specific keywords.

Improve Customer Shopping Experience

Nowadays, buyers are big on customer service more than ever. It’s up to the point that a third of customers are willing to pay more for excellent service. 

So, you must always provide impeccable customer service if you want to increase your ecommerce business revenue significantly. 

Unfortunately, providing below-par service may lead to a higher bounce rate. So it’s crucial to keep the bar high when serving buyers. You can do that by adopting the following ideas.

Adopt a Mobile First Approach

63% of UK buyers shop through their phones. The easiest way to optimise for phones is by creating a mobile app. Mobile apps will make it easy for customers to access your store. 

Not only that, mobile apps make personalisation much easier, and it enables customers to slide around the store on the go. 

Of course, you can also optimise your browser-based website for mobile devices. Not everyone will be willing to download your app on their phones. But they still want to check your store from their phones. So, you should design your website to accommodate them too. 

Optimise Your Platform’s Navigation

One of the biggest user experience influencers on web platforms is navigation. Most times, the ease of navigation is the foundation on which users base the rest of their perception of your website. 

And if you get it wrong, you have a mountain climb to satisfy the customers. Hence, you must strive to get it right.

Essentially, you must make it easy and seamless for customers to get around your store. Moving through the categories should be as easy as walking through a well-lit, spacey corridor. Primarily, customers should be able to find whatever they’re looking for without having to do much. 

All these factors may not directly increase your ecommerce revenue. However, they significantly influence user experience, which impacts bounce rates and customer retention. 

And those are factors that can increase your ecommerce business revenue with minimal efforts or investments.

Personalise User Experience

Customers like to feel that you care enough to treat them as acquaintances, not just random internet people. But it goes beyond simply addressing them by their name whenever they come around. 

Ecommerce personalisation has evolved into a complex and dynamic system of providing unique and individual shopping experiences for each user. 

You can only achieve that by analysing the customers’ personal information, browsing behaviour and shopping history. 

That way, you’ll gain insights which you’ll then use to curate content for each shopper. You can personalise the shopping experience for buyers in many different ways. An excellent example is by making targeted cart recommendations.

Enable LiveChat/ Chatbot

A common metric customers use to rate businesses’ support services is how fast they respond to enquiries. However, unless you have an employee in charge of customer support, you’ll often fall behind in this respect. 

Responding to customer complaints is likely the last thing on your mind as you try to keep up with the demands of running an ecommerce business. 

However, customers don’t care how busy you are, if they have questions, they want answers, and they want them fast! So, you must appoint a stand-in to respond to all correspondence on your behalf. 

For that, you can employ a customer service rep. However, that’ll cost you significant money in wages.

A more affordable alternative is to use AI Chatbots. Chatbots work better than autoresponders because they don’t just guide customers or ask basic questions. 

You can use Chatbots to facilitate two-way communication with customers and develop your relationship with them.

Use Trust Inducing Strategies

You can significantly boost your business revenue with minimal effort by getting customers to trust you. The idea is quite simple; someone who trusts you to deliver what they need will have more inclination to come to you for it. 

You can develop customer trust using the following tactics.

Upload Customer Reviews

Most shoppers, especially first-timers, will be sceptical when purchasing items online. The scepticism is justifiable, as there’s always a chance the product is not as you portray them on your ecommerce store.

So, the best way to address these doubts is to show the customers what other buyers say about your products. Seeing other people vouch for your goods will reinforce the buyer’s interest and clear any residual doubts they may be entertaining.

Create Money-back Guarantee

Giving a money-back guarantee provides a similar effect to putting reviews on your website. It gives the buyer a sense of security regarding the purchase. 

So, customers will be more willing to buy a product when they’re sure they can return it and get their money back if it doesn’t meet their expectations. 

But of course, you should be careful, so customers don’t take advantage of this as a loophole. An excellent way to do that is to put a time constraint on the return policy. 

For example, you can have the guarantee last for a few weeks, after which it’ll no longer be valid. This way, you can dissuade customers from trying to pull a fast one on you.

Go Big on Customer Retention

The best way to consistently increase your ecommerce revenue is to keep your customers coming back. It takes less effort to get a customer to continuously do business with you than to get new ones. 

Additionally, consider this. Would you like to have one customer who’ll come back for more purchases five times or get five different new customers who will make one-time purchases? 

Most people will take an indifferent stance here. But the one customer that purchased five times is more likely to come back again than those five that only made one-time purchases.

Furthermore, returning customers are likelier to refer you to their friends than one-time customers. So, customer retention is an excellent strategy to increase ecommerce business revenue with little to no effort.

Start the Journey to Increased Revenue

There, you have a breakdown of the ways to increase your ecommerce revenue. The ideas are straightforward and require little to no technical knowledge. 

However, you can’t take shortcuts if you want to increase your ecommerce business revenue sustainably. Instead, you should do the work. It’s not quick, but it’s the best way to grow your ecommerce business. Delayed gratification gives the best rewards.

Our investor team at Axis Shift can provide expert recommendations to increase your ecommerce business revenue. We can partner with you to maximise your stalling ecommerce business. 

Contact us today to discuss our investment options!