Get More Online Sales Using These 6 Digital Marketing Tricks

When it comes to online sales, more is more.

When you drive more quality traffic, you get more quality leads. When you close more quality leads, you get more sales. When you up-sell sales, you get more revenue and growth and get more of more…

With the average website converting traffic at an average of 2.95% — with the highest converting websites measuring  25% conversion rates — you can play the marketing numbers to your advantage and make killer profits.

So you’re probably thinking:

“How can I get more quality traffic? How can I get more quality leads? How do I get more online sales? How do I get more of more?”

Below I highlight 6 proven digital marketing tricks that’ll help you get more of what you’re looking for.

Ready?

Increase online revenue with up-selling

So what is up-selling in the first place?

Up-selling is when marketers suggest a more suitable or “better” product; such as, add-ons, upgrades or a premium version.

And let’s be honest.

Most customers are unaware of “better options” until they are suggested.

With 68% of consumers agreeing to pay 15% more for a product or service if it guaranteed a better experience, up-selling as a strategy has the power — for this case study’s sake — to turn a $9.99 a month prospect into a $49.99 a month customer.

And you see it all over the web because it works…

According to Econsultancy, up-selling is 20 times more effective than cross-selling online.

What’s the main takeaway?

If you have better options, show your customers on relevant product pages and clearly identify the difference between them.

Here’s a good example of an up-sell online:

The Adobe marketers lure prospects in with a $9.99 a month package promo, pitching their ad on places like Google and Facebook.

From here Adobe marketers will take users to a landing page that shows the product initially pitched ($9.99 photo editing) while also offering other packages with more services for a higher monthly rate.

If you’re in the digital creative services field, paying $49.99 for all Adobe applications sounds pretty good when you compare it to their single app option.

It definitely got me on-board, I can tell you that much.

Get more traffic, brand engagement and sales with Instagram

Out of the 600+ million Instagrammers out there, 400+ million are active everyday.

When it comes to increasing engagement, Instagram marketing stats come out as the most promising, raking in 25% more engagement than Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Below I have listed a few easy and effective Instagram marketing tips that you can use today that’ll help you get more traffic, engagement and ultimately online sales:

• Run an Instagram contest
• Post user-generated content
• Post content from behind-the-scenes
• Post your Instagram photos and videos on Facebook and Twitter
• Work with influencers
• Boost your posts
• Research the most popular hashtags and use them religiously.

Improve sales performance by following up on abandoned carts

If you own an eStore, you’re most likely all too familiar with abandoned shopping carts.

And it’s no mystery. Online shoppers are notoriously known for abandoning shopping carts last minute.

According to the Baymard Institute, 69.23% of shopping carts are abandoned before they are completed.

Now if you contextualize that statistic for a moment, you realize that your website is quite possibly missing out on nearly a third of sales.

If that number intrigues you (and it should), ask yourself why?

Could it be your website speed? Is your website mobile-friendly? Should you offer free shipping or a special coupon code?

Test and figure out what works best.

In the meantime, a great way you can win back those “abandoned carts” and turn them into real sales is by launching an email recovery campaign.

You can use MailChimp’s automated abandoned cart email program.

Here’s Zappos’ abandoned shopping cart recovery email below. You can use it as a benchmark.

Get more online sales by boosting organic traffic

In digital marketing, organic traffic is the traffic a website generates from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu to just to name a few examples.

Any time a user visits your website through a search query from search engines, analytics will register its visit as an organic hit.

An easy way you can keep track of organic hits is by using Google Analytics. It’s a free data tool that helps you track user behaviour and gauge your digital marketing efforts.

If you like visuals, here’s a quick screenshot of what organic search results look like for “dentists” in Toronto:

What are the main benefits to organic traffic?

Longevity

When you promote a landing page and rank them online organically, that particular landing page will have a 24/7 shelf life. This means people can access that landing page for that product or service at all times in search results, which is the contrary to paid traffic. Paid search advertising ranks web pages temporarily on page one according to vendor budget and ad quality.

Reputation

Brands who rank online are viewed as reputable companies. If your website reaches the highly-coveted first position of search engines for a particular keyword, search engines view that specific web page as the most credible and reliable resource for that query on the internet.

Affordable

Investing in long tail landing page for long tail keyphrases is a lot easier and more affordable than draining tens of thousands a month on paid ads. Also, when you create a landing page for an evergreen audience, that particular landing page is reusable and remarketable through time.

And I know, you’re probably scratching your head and asking yourself: “How do I get more organic traffic to my website?”

The easiest way you can drive more organic traffic to your website is by publishing more landing pages targeting long tail keywords.

This is why blogging and other forms of content marketing are so effective at improving organic hits.

Here’s what I mean about blogging for long tail keywords.

Let’s say you own “3D printing company” in Toronto.

You probably already have one page targeting keyword “3D printing” on your website — if you don’t shame on you.

But really…

You can get more organic traffic by designing and creating a new landing page titled, “Top 20 3d printing projects in the world” or “Why 3D printing is booming in <city name>“.

Another easy way you can increase organic traffic is through search engine submission; join different search engines and create different landing pages in different languages.

Classic link building works as well.

When you build links to your web pages, you’ll improve your overall search position for keywords and ultimately improve organic traffic.

With 91% of users online never looking passed page one of search engines, ranking for page one has never been more crucial.

Get more website traffic and sales with Facebook

Businesses use Facebook because it’s where customers hang out online.

If you want to get more online sales, Facebook is a great tool for lead generation; giving you an easy and affordable way to position your products and services to targeted prospects online.

You can also set up a Facebook shop as well, which helps you close more of those impulse purchases; pulling in more sales from Facebook’s store application.

All you have to do is add the Shop tab on Facebook and load up your products.

If you visit your Facebook fan page, most of you will notice that the Shop tab is gone.

Facebook gives a great quick run down on how to add the Shop application onto your existing Facebook fan page.

You can also run targeted Facebook ads for cheap and position your products or services in targeted audiences’ Facebook feeds.

Spike online sales with affiliate marketing

According to the great affiliate marketing guru, Pat Flynn:

“Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or companies’) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.”

If you own an online store, you can create an affiliate program with affiliate publishers and commission them a percentage for each referred sale coming from their website.

The best part about affiliate marketing for non-product website owners is that website owners can start collecting commissions without having investing time into developing a product or even an eStore.

For vendors, the best part of affiliate marketing is the revenue sharing based model. Vendors get more traffic and online sales through their affiliates who gain commissions.

If you’re a new startup struggling with sales or an existing small business who just wants to get more online sales, you can create your own affiliate army, piggy-back on affiliate referrals, get more impressions and ultimately more sales from affiliates.

So how do you get started with affiliate marketing?

You can join affiliate marketing networks like Clickbank, Rakuten, and even Amazon.

There is also a paid WordPress plugin that you can use called WP Affiliate. This allows your web developer to easily create and manage affiliates from one dashboard; automatically granting commissions to all affiliates.

Boost online sales with social proof and online reputation

In the words of Warren Buffet, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

With 84% of customers trusting online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, having a positive online reputation can make or break a sale.

According to a study by Merchant Warehouse on the impact of Yelp reviews on company performance, 90% of Yelp users claim that positive reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

What’s more concerning is how one negative review can cost a business 22% of new customers.

Here are a few easy ways you can manage and take control of your online reputation:

-Monitor your brand mentions with online marketing tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Keyhole.

-Get digital properties on sites like Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Yelp.

-Create a content strategy and publish your own blogs for the keywords you want to rank for, including your own brand name.

Summary

Digital sales is a numbers game. When you drive targeted traffic to a website that is designed for conversion, all you have to do is market the right ad to the right audience at the right time. This is why big name brands spend millions and even billions in advertising every year — it’s like flipping a coin in a way. So if you’re like most online businesses and looking to get more online sales, the 6 digital marketing tricks listed above will help you get what you’re looking for: More of more.

Seph Walter

Seph is a HubSpot and Google certified Digital Marketing Director and Web Designer with over 6+ years experience developing digital strategies for startups and marketing agencies.