How to Improve Your Company’s Online Sales

Increasing online sales should be a constant marketing objective, especially for anyone running an e-commerce business. The competition makes it hard: more often than not you are selling products or services that plenty of other people already offer on the web.

With thousands of alternatives a click away, standing out takes a strategy that keeps changing as your brand and your customers do.

Effective Online Marketing Tips to Help You Increase Online Sales

Refresh Your Brand's Image

Business growth online is rarely steady, and refreshing how your brand looks can be what brings new customers in and re-interests the ones you already have.

Small details carry more weight than most people expect. A website logo shapes how seriously a first-time visitor takes you, and even the posters you produce feed the same impression, which is why editable poster templates are worth using rather than starting each one from scratch.

If the visual side is not your strength, a professional design service will get you further than a weekend of experimenting. Outsourcing to skilled designers keeps your visual content consistent, which is most of what "professional" means to a customer.

For smaller fixes you do not need heavy software. A free online image editor handles cropping, resizing, color adjustment, and filters from any device with a connection, with nothing to install. It will not match professional tools, but for tidying up a product shot before it goes live, a browser-based editor is usually enough.

Optimize Your Website for Multiple Platforms

Customers will be viewing your website from every kind of device, so all of them need a decent shopping experience when they arrive.

Check that your site works properly on the hardware your customers actually use: Windows and Mac, Android and iPhone, tablets in both orientations. People buy from sites that behave correctly on the device in their hand, and abandon the ones that do not.

That is more work than it sounds, and bringing in an e-commerce development agency is a reasonable call if the front end is fighting you.

Improve Your SEO

Attracting customers means driving relevant traffic, and that means improving your search engine optimization so you reach the right people with the right message.

Relevant traffic is what converts, so anything that brings visitors who were never going to buy is a resource you have spent for nothing. Finding the right marketing mix is how you avoid that: the right media to advertise your products and services on, the right message, and the right price.

In more than one language, that mix has to be rebuilt rather than translated, which is the work behind marketing translation as a discipline.

Work out the value proposition that lands with your audience. Be clear about why someone needs your product, what problem they arrived with, and how you solve it.

Once your audience feels understood they come back, and returning visitors are part of what pushes you up the results page. Sustained rankings follow relevance, not the other way round.

Translate Online Content

One of the real advantages of e-commerce is that your potential customers are not just the people near you, but anyone with an internet connection.

International customers will not engage with a brand they cannot read, though. Translating your website and social output into the languages your markets actually use widens your reach and signals that overseas customers matter to you.

Outsourcing to a professional translation service is what keeps you clear of the mistakes machine translation and non-professionals make. Translators and localizers do more than carry the words across: they account for cultural difference and produce a site international customers connect with, which is what makes them buy.

Work With SEO Translators

It is worth working with a team that handles multilingual SEO rather than translation alone.

Ranking in the countries you are targeting matters as much as ranking at home, and search behavior does not transfer. Search queries, keywords, and in some markets the search engine itself all change from region to region, and your website translator needs to know that.

SEO translators also follow algorithm changes as they happen, which is a meaningful difference to how a business performs overseas.

Use Personalized Calls-To-Action

Conversions happen at the call to action, so that is where optimization pays.

A call to action (CTA) is the element that asks a visitor to do something specific. On a product page that is an "Add to Cart" or "Buy Now" button; elsewhere it might ask them to follow your social media account, join your mailing list, or share something.

Personalizing a CTA makes it specific to who is reading it. It need not use somebody's name to do that: showing a first-time visitor and a returning customer different next steps already reflects where each of them sits in your sales funnel.

HubSpot put numbers on this. Comparing more than 330,000 CTAs over six months, it found personalized calls to action performed 202% better than basic ones. Conversion-rate specialists such as Spiralyze build entire practices on testing this kind of difference rather than guessing at it.

Upsell and Cross-Sell Relevant Products

Upselling and cross-selling are different tactics working on the same premise: a customer who is already buying is the easiest person to sell to.

Upselling offers a better version of what someone is already looking at. Cross-selling offers the thing that goes with it. Fast-food chains built the reflex into their counter scripts decades ago, which is why the question about a larger size arrives before you have finished ordering.

Done well, both raise average order value and pick up purchases the customer had not planned on. Done badly, they read as pressure, so the pairing has to be one the customer would plausibly want.

Use Social Media

Your company's social media is as important as your e-commerce website for driving people to you.

Most people check social platforms several times a day, which is a lot of chances to be seen, particularly when you post high-quality, engaging visuals. It is also where a business can show a more personal side than a product page allows.

Use those accounts to build visibility and trust in what you sell.

In Conclusion

There are plenty of ways to lift online sales, from refreshing a logo to rewriting your calls to action. What they have in common is knowing your trade well enough to convert the traffic you already have, rather than only chasing more of it.

If you are taking your business into international markets, have your online content translated properly into the languages those markets read.

Targeting Latin America? Work with Spanish translators who know the specific countries you are selling into, and with Brazilian Portuguese translators for Brazil, which is a different market and a different language from its neighbours.

Whichever region you are expanding into, BeTranslated's team of experienced translators is here to help. For more information or a free, no-obligation quote, contact us today.