5 Ways to Increase E-Commerce Sales

According to Statista, global e-commerce sales were worth $4.9 trillion in 2021. With that figure set to increase by 50% over the next 4 years, ensuring customer loyalty is critical. A high repeat purchase rate is key to the success of any e-commerce business. Fortunately, it’s also one of the easiest metrics to track and improve upon. With just a few simple tweaks to your website and your overall marketing strategy, you can improve your bottom line and take your business from one-time sales to consistent repeat purchases.

1 Manage the Customer Lifecycle

Your customers’ lifecycle is every stage they go through, from first finding your website to purchasing to returning for a repeat purchase. These stages included a customer’s awareness of your brand, what information you provide during their consideration stage, the purchase itself and how easy or intuitive it is, what you do to retain their custom, and how motivated they are to share your products or services. According to RJMetrics, repeat customers could spend up to 300% more than first-time buyers. With that in mind, ensuring those existing customers feel looked after is your first step in encouraging them to come back for more.

High-quality data helps you manage your customer lifecycle by collating effective information and ensuring your contact directory is up to date. This allows you to send appropriate special offers – more on that in the next section – and improve customer retention with bespoke contact preferences and relevant marketing. Cross-selling becomes simple as fully integrated data shows what current customers bought alongside similar purchases. Understanding your customer’s needs avoids cart abandonment and helps assure repeat sales. It also creates a better overall customer experience and improves customer satisfaction.

Find out more about how Integrate.io extracts meaningful and actionable business data here.

2 Provide New Customers with Extended Special Offers

Turn first-time customers into instant repeat customers by making them feel special. Marketing automation allows for emails that provide customers with extensions on special offers, discounts, or freebies. This makes it far more likely that those customers will head back to the checkout. You may have a special offer on your e-commerce store that ends on a specific date. By emailing a new customer and giving them a one-off extension of this offer, you let that customer know you’re thinking about them, you don’t want to miss out, and you want to give them the time they need to browse and make a choice. Offer free samples of new products, product recommendations based on data about previous purchases, or invites to special events. A reward for referral can also help get new customers through the virtual door – a win-win.

Consider other retention tools such as a loyalty program to increase repeat purchases. Customers that get a virtual stamp every time they make a purchase with a prize or discount after 5 or 10 stamps will often come back, again and again, to ensure they fulfill this goal. Gamification is another great tool – can you make your mobile app fun or even competitive in some way to get customers using it even when they’re not shopping? Associating a brand with enjoyment is a great way to build brand loyalty.

3 Utilize Social Media

When people think of e-commerce and social media, they might think of those advertisements that suddenly pop up as you’re scrolling your timeline. However, savvy retailers know that you get repeat sales by building a following on your chosen social media platform and rewarding those followers with high-quality content that they come back for time and again. Great examples of top-level content include:

• Competitions with compelling prizes
• High-quality images
• Relevant memes
• Specialist articles
• Unique content
• Story-based content that appeals to the readers’ emotions rather than promoting a product or service

Understanding your audience is the key if you’re trying to increase your e-commerce sales via social media. According to the E-commerce Guide, 55% of Gen Z admit that their latest fashion purchase was inspired by accounts on their social media feeds, compared to only 27% of baby boomers. Creating content that appeals to younger users could be critical to getting more sales online. However, if your customer interactions and contact sheets tell you that your customer base is generally over 40 years old, then this type of content may actually push repeat sales away. With intelligently integrated data, you can quickly develop insights into the demographics your products and services resonate with. Use this to hone your social media strategy. BigCommerce states that online retailers with a social media presence make 32% more sales than those with none. That’s a huge incentive to invest in digital marketing optimization.

4 Improve Salesforce with Data Integration

Salesforce is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) system. It’s able to log a range of customer interactions, from sales to complaint calls. Many businesses use tools like Integrate.io to ensure their Salesforce data feeds directly into their data warehouse for critical business insights. However, it’s also possible to use integration tools to send data directly to Salesforce, improving its effectiveness.

One example of this is integrating e-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce with Salesforce. The e-commerce site can feed updates like sales, customer interactions, and website click-throughs directly into Salesforce, which can then pass that data to a data warehouse for analysis by business intelligence tools. Regular, granular consumer interactions provide businesses an insight into what’s working and what’s not, allowing teams to tweak marketing campaigns and improve content accordingly. This helps improve conversion rate, changing more leads to sales. Salesforce can also give businesses insights into the customer retention rate, helping businesses to understand what really drives the repeat purchase metric.

Speak to Integrate.io about our bi-directional Salesforce connector for a tailored view of your customer data.

5 Keep Contact Lists Updated

Salesforce and other platforms tend to work best with single contact records for each customer. However, this contact record can have plenty of detail in, from email addresses to delivery addresses to Twitter handles – basically anything the customer is willing to share. Consider having a semi-regular automated email or SMS that prompts customers to update their contact preferences. Customers like to be in control of the data businesses hold for them. Empowering them to do this can increase brand loyalty.

One advantage of up-to-date contact details includes being able to send abandoned cart emails and knowing that they’re definitely going to the customer, and not a years-old, unused email inbox.

Conclusion: Using Integrate.io to Increase E-commerce Sales

Integrate.io is a no-code ETL (extract, transform, load) data integration solution ideal for all online retailers. There’s no need to hire experienced data engineers to create bespoke connections. Out-of-the-box integrations include data pipelines to e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce, a larger e-commerce platform that allows sellers to create an online store or promote their goods on other retail websites such as Amazon. These data pipelines allow you to automate the collection and storage of business data, integrating it with information from Salesforce or other CRMs, your own internal databases, your social media accounts, and many other data sources.

Your e-commerce site works better with high-quality data about your customers and their needs. Schedule a demo to find out more about integrating your business data effectively for increased e-commerce sales. Email us at hello@integrate.io for more information.