It’s amazing just how quickly things can change in the wonderful world of the internet. Take a look at how social media and advertising platforms have changed since 10 years ago. There are just so many new rules and regulations when it comes to how you advertise your product, offer, and service.
For many ambitious startups, this might sound like doom-and-gloom because you have to keep up with all of the constant changes. However, with change comes the opportunity to grow and generate more leads and sales in the process.
So how can you aggressively keep up with all of the changes that keep occurring when it comes to eCommerce? Let’s first take a look at one of the biggest changes that you might not be aware of.
Expect To Lose Money Up Front With eCommerce
Almost gone are the days where you can just send traffic to your eCommerce offer and make a ton of profit. While there are certainly instances where this happens, count on it being an exception.
For example, an offer goes viral and thousands of people purchase. Or a big influencer or celebrity happens to recommend a product, and I’m sure that you can guess what happens from there.
To every other online marketer who doesn’t have to catch a big stroke of luck, you have to expect to lose money upfront when selling your eCommerce product. With a heavy increase in advertising spends, it becomes harder and harder to make a profit overall.
So how you can combat this challenge? In quite a few ways. Let’s take a look at them now.
Capture Emails First
This is a very easy step, where all you have to do is put an email capture page before your eCommerce product or products. So why is this so beneficial? Simply for the fact that you get to keep following up with your audience once you capture their email address.
Think of it this way. Let’s say that you just sent traffic straight to your eCommerce product and you converted at 1%. That means out of 100 people, you will only have one customer to follow up with in the future. Rather instead, for every 100 people who visit your lead generation page, you can have 30 (or even more) individuals that you can follow up with to make even more sales.
The idea here is that you are going to make your money in the long term. This is a concept that a lot of marketers not only don’t understand, but just don’t want to be true. This is how some of the biggest online businesses win, and it’s by focusing on losing a lot of money upfront just so that they can profit in the long-term and crush others.
There are ways to expedite the process though, so don’t think that you have to wait a year (or longer) to finally see a return on your investment. With that being said, here are some great ways to really maximize your sales.
Leverage Sales Funnels For Increased Sales
Sales funnels have been around forever, but as of lately, they’ve become a trending topic for many online marketers. If you’re selling eCommerce products, then leveraging sales funnels is going to be a must for you.
Before getting into the benefits of sales funnels, please keep in mind that you might have to replace the store builder that you are currently using. While it might take some time to move your store from one platform to another, the results can certainly be worth it.
On the other hand, you can always utilize both a sales funnel solution and an eCommerce platform. The choice is up to you, of course. Either way, one of the biggest benefits will start with the checkout page.
When it comes to sales funnels, they allow you to add order bumps which allow an extra offer on your checkout page. What’s great about order bumps is that customers will only need to check off a box in order to make the purchase.
The order bump feature, all by itself, is a great reason to use sales funnels when it comes to selling your eCommerce products.
Similar to order bumps are one-click upsell and downsell pages. These types of pages allow your customers to make extra orders with one click of their mouse. The more one click-upsell and downsell pages that you have, ultimately, the more amount of sales that you can make.
However, make sure that you aren’t too aggressive when it comes to the number of one-time offers that you have. The more that you offer, the easier it’s going to be to annoy your customers in the process.
Add Multiple Recurring Income Streams
When it comes to eCommerce, many marketers seem to focus on making one-time sales. In fact, they live and die by one-time sales. How you can really change your eCommerce business is by incorporating numerous amount of recurring offers.
There are two main ways to do this. Either create recurring offers yourself or recommend recurring offers as an affiliate. When it comes to being an affiliate, you’ll have to take a look around for other related offers that your audience might be interested in.
On the other hand, take a quick moment to look at exactly what you have to offer and ask yourself: Can this be turned into any type of recurring offer? For example, would any of your customers be interested in getting their product every single month? Is there any type of clubs or hangouts that they would pay for to be in as well?
While you might not know the answer to these questions right away, it might take some testing in order to find out. If you’d like to take the shortcut here, simply take a look at what is already selling in your niche and model what’s successful.
At the end of the day, you’re going to have to expect to lose some money up front. But with many of these proven tactics, you’ll be able to profit at a much quicker rate.
