Having a business in a very competitive market and facing hardships of the increased cost of advertisements could be a trigger for business failure!
But without advertisements, you may also find it hard to expand your customer base and even to reach out to a wider target market.
As a business owner, you might have noticed your online ad costs have been increased and it is somewhat daunting to spend a lot on advertisements and receive less sales in return!
Advertisements costs have affected every business around the world and it is not just your ads costs are expensive.
The cost of advertisements had made many businesses reconsider their strategies on how to increase online sales.
As of July 2021, there was a drastic advertisement cost increment in the top 5 online platforms. Below is a list of how these top 5 online platforms increased their advertisement costs:
- Google and YouTube’s CPM had a rise by 108%
- Facebook ad cost had an 89% increase, while the average CPM was $11
- TikTok’s CPM rose by a 92% increase
- Snapchat had “the lowest” of 64% increase in CPM
Source: Hunchads
So here are some of the easiest but most proven ways how to increase online sales in 2023 without spending more!
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You can adapt the following tips to increase online sales which are easy to use and cost-effective. These also help your business not only increase sales but also to get recognized online and help you to build a much more stable user community!
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is a process that is used to organize and automate marketing tasks to boost sales and manage the marketing processes effectively and efficiently!
It allows your business to manage your email campaigns, social media marketing, personalized advertising and other marketing tools as well as to track your customer behaviors, lead generation, follow-ups and many more!
Marketing Automation tools help you to keep your marketing materials in one place and are highly effective in tracking and boosting your sales.
According to Findstack.com, Marketing Automations are highly effective for online businesses and 63% of companies using Marketing Automation outperformed competitors and 80% of marketers witnessed an increase in the number of leads after using Marketing Automation software!
To find out more about Marketing automation and how to increase online sales, read my article on FREE Marketing Automation Tools for Online Businesses!
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing has become one of the most famous and cost-effective ways to boost your online sales!
Affiliate Marketing is where someone else (an affiliate) promotes your products and generates traffic or leads to the business.
Through Affiliate Marketing your business can reach a wider target market via affiliates’ own marketing efforts, where you do not have to worry about the cost of ads, as they have an already built fan base to support their marketing.
According to mediakix.com, over 80% of brands use Affiliate Marketing programs which clearly shows the importance of trying out Affiliate Marketing to increase your online sales!
The following affiliate networks are helpful to choose from what is best for your business and how their features will help you to increase your sales online!
Here are 5 Affiliate networks you can check out!
This is a popular network for Affiliate marketing that connects online retailers to over 225,000+ affiliate partners around the world by reaching a wider consumer range and providing another source of revenue!
They allow both physical and digital products and are perfect for a wider customer reach as they are in the business for a long time and work with other big brands!
With Click Bank, you can access thousands of Affiliates, sell your product and receive automated Affiliate Payments! They will offer you the best eCommerce tools and support your business to scale online.
Click Bank is a platform of relief from rising advertising costs that has partners in over 190 countries!
Their features are suitable to connect with your consumers much more frequently through their affiliates bringing your business a fast sale process throughout!
CJ Affiliates, formerly known as Commission Junction is an affiliate network that brings thousands of Affiliates under one roof!
They have over 2600 merchants including Lowes, Overstock, Office Depot, Priceline, GoPro, IHG (Hotels) and Grammarly.
With CJ Affiliates, your business will have a chance to grab the opportunity to compete with top brands and receive a wider consumer reach through CJ affiliates.
CJ Affiliates allows the use of both physical and digital products and has a nice back-end dashboard to track all the data and stats. Also has a deep link generator bookmarklet which makes link generation much easier!
JVZoo offers you the quickest ways to get higher paying customers and connects you to the top-performing affiliates with their customized features and affiliate network, allowing your business to rank in a higher position online through affiliate sales.
They have an instant affiliate program with over 800,000+ active affiliates and the best way to boost your sales is through a wider consumer reach with these affiliates!
The best thing about JVZoo is that you can get started for FREE! They offer no setup or maintenance fees – ever and you will only pay when you make a profit while having virtually zero risk of loss as you pay for sales, not for traffic!
Warrior Plus is an affiliate network that consistently updates its features and continuously finds ways to get your sales boosted!
Their program includes unlimited Upsells and Downsells, unlimited products per page, multiple payment providers and many more.
Adding to that they also have a feature for Affiliates to the best browse offers to find the top-performing offer to promote!
To get more details and give it a try, sign-up FREE for your free account with Warrior Plus!
Some of the above Affiliate Networks may not support your country if you want to build your own Affiliate program get in touch with me by filling the below form
Now you know how to increase online sales with Affiliate Networks which will help you to partner up with affiliate/s to promote, advertise or sell your services and products to increase online sales with a minimal cost and in a very efficient way!
Content with a sense of urgency
To boost your sales, advertising materials are just not enough. Without proper content, all your hard work will flop.
Content is a must when understanding how to increase online sales. The content is focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for your target audience online.
Viable and valuable content attracts a high rate of leads, a proper content is a king of bringing increased sales into your business.
Your marketing efforts should have a good sales copy in a different format of visuals that show a sense of urgency and is able to improve the leads.
The following FREE tools give suggestions and help you to create content with a sense of urgency:
- To check Grammar & proof Read – Grammarly
- To create amazing designs for social media – Cava
- To create powerful video ads, promotions & intro – Invideo
With correct content, you’ll be able to reach the targeted market much more easily and effectively to increase your sales.
You can also consider ChatGPT to write content for your website
User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content is content that was created by users. They are contents including texts, posts, reviews, images, videos and other contents that are created and posted by users into online platforms such as social media.
These contents are created by only users and not brands themselves such as customers, brand loyalties and employees.
How to increase online sales through UGC completely depends on its importance to a buyer’s journey.
This customer-centric content is used to boost engagement and increase conversions. This is treated as modern word-of-mouth to increase sales in a business.
User-Generated Content helps to build trust and community, builds brand loyalty, increases conversations and influences purchasing decisions.
According to salesforce, UGC increases conversions by 10% when included in an online purchase path.
Here’s an example of a UGC;
GoPro asks its users to share the images through hashtags (#GoPro #GoProCommunity) and use those in GoPro Instagram.
Increase the Social Proof on GMB
Social proof is a must to build trust and transparency in the business. Social proof is built through User Generated Content and it is vital to boost sales online!
According to Inc.com, 96% of consumers don’t trust Ads, people tend to trust people more than an advertisement. So having social proof such as testimonies are a sort of advertisement with people’s voices!
Having your business a social proof allows your business to be recognized and receive improved reviews on Google My Business and on Facebook.
These reviews and social proof are a one-way ticket to online success and to get your business good recognition.
Social proof shows loyalty to the business and what UGC provides about your business. Through social proof, a business receives the approval of its customers and a recommendation to other visitors about your business.
This is the evidence that shows people have purchased your products online and proves your business’s transparency!
Improve the Website user experience
How to increase online sales through improving the website user experience is all about giving your visitors a unique and user-friendly website experience.
Focusing on how your customer behaves, having a deeper understanding of what they need, value and limitations and providing a better user interaction is the key to improving website user experiences!
By improving usability, accessibility and avoiding friction on checkout pages, increasing page speed and qualities of images allows your visitors to have a good website user experience.
Having an SSL Certificate can assist you to keep your online interaction private. And it assures your users and visitors that your website is authentic and safe to use and share their personal information such as card details for payments etc.
To understand how your customer’s behavior while they use your site and what they are looking to purchase and how they feel, use Hotjar for FREE!
Upsell & Cross-sell
Upsell is basically achieving revenue through selling higher-level products while cross-sell achieves the same through suggesting more products to buy.
This is both performed at mid to late stages of the customer journey where customers have already indicated that they might make a purchase.
While upselling encourages customers to upgrade or include add ons to their purchases that are already in the cart, Cross-selling encourages customers to purchase products and services that are different to the original purchase in the cart!
Both upsell and cross-sell are important to increase sales and can be often used together.
Beeketing is a perfect tool for your business to add upsells and cross-sells to boost your online sales.
Their exclusive features make your customers come back again and proactively engage with the products that they truly want.
Beeketing helps Convert visitors into customers by follow-up emails, target recommendations help to increase loyalty and brings back slipping-away customers.
All of the above-mentioned tips are proven on how to increase online sales in 2023 and to bring online recognition to your business.
These tips also help to eliminate the cost of ads and to bring something cost-effective to increase sales as above is an opportunity for startups, small businesses and even for well-reputed businesses!
A perfectly put-up online campaign along with the above ways is proven to increase online sales and is used in many successful businesses around the world!
Author
An Entrepreneur and Digital Marketing Consultant in Sri Lanka. Helping People with Digital Marketing services, building an Online Business and making Passive Income.
Well written article. Good read …. My take away is affiliate marketing . Specific …