The 6 Best eCommerce Tools To Boost Your Online Sales
Looking to improve your eCommerce sales? You don’t have to do it alone. In 2017, there are a wealth of awesome ecommerce tools to help you.
In this article, we separate the wheat from the chaff and take a look at the best ecommerce tools that are designed to put more oomph into your eCommerce efforts.
I know how tough it is to grow an online store.
It’s a challenge.
Whether you’re struggling to drive traffic, finding it hard to form a good relationship with your customers, or you can’t keep on top of your email marketing efforts, it always seems a case of defeating one problem, only for another to pop up immediately after.
So why do guys like the 33-year Trevor Chapman old make over a million dollars from eCommerce? I’m quite sure he has a few tricks and hacks of his own up his sleeve.
But tools certainly help to erase a number of headaches and make the process of growing your online store so much easier.
Here are the 6 best ecommerce tools that will boost your online sales:
Instagram is an essential tool that can help you to grow your brand online. It’s free and currently has 800 million monthly active users.
Among those 800 million users are potential customers who you could be engaging with, building a relationship with, and getting into your store and signed up to your email list.
Naturally, how useful Instagram is to you hinges on what niche you’re involved in. But most niches – from art and crafts to gardening to home-ware to health and fitness – are photogenic.
In other words, it’s really easy to take pics of your products and post them to Instagram to raise awareness.
So many online stores are already doing this. They’re posting professional-looking images of their products to social media, captioning them, adding hashtags, and getting eyeballs onto their sites.
Below you can see how the company MightySkins posted an image of their drone skins and added hashtags in the image caption.
Studies have indeed shown that we respond to images, and that this is actually the most important strategy for driving traffic from social media.
Instagram only allows you to post just one link on your profile. You can post a link to your landing page, and then work on curating eye-catching images of your products with captions that direct people to clicking on the link.
Every now and then, you can hold contests that will increase shares, visibility, traffic and sales.
Install a POS System
A Point of Sales system (POS) is crucial to the success of online stores in 2017.
It makes selling so much easier. It alleviates stress from you and your employees, while also simplifying the buying process for your customers by providing them with more touchpoints to purchase from.
A POS system also provides you with a full inventory of your products and sales so that you don’t run out of stock without realizing it. Thus, it’s easy to track, adjust and maintain your stock.
And it gives you the opportunity to understand your customer more throughout their journey and upload your products quicker than ever, as well as adding one-click purchase options.
Still not using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy?
Or maybe you’re using it, but it’s not working very well?
Either way, Facebook should be a core part of your attack as you look to boost eCommerce sales. In fact, to use a sports analogy, it should be your star striker.
There are at least two ways to use Facebook to your advantage. One is Facebook ads, which help to improve your conversions by targeting the right demographic.
Check the stats: The costs per click for 35-44 year olds is $0.13. In other words, Facebook ads can be affordable.
There are almost two billion active users on Facebook, and you need to be getting in on the action.
When targeting, your ads need to be super specific. Customize the audience so that you weed out people who wouldn’t be interested in your product.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What are the breakdowns in my niche?
- What are my core customers really into?
- What brands would they be following on Facebook?
- What are their passions?
Let’s say I was running an ad that targeted Manchester United soccer fans. I want to target the hard core fans who would buy the memorabilia in my store.
Instead of adding “Manchester United” to the list of interests in my targeted demographic, I’d get much more specific and add Manchester United fan clubs.
Once your ads have ran, you can use the Facebook Insights tool to gauge how successful they were. The ones that received the most engagement are the ones you need to scale by running again with a bigger budget.
You should also be using Facebook to spread the word of your brand via content marketing. Post blogs, hold competitions, and encourage people to share your content.
Below you can see the company Eggo running a Facebook contest:
If there is one way to go viral on the Internet and boost your sales, it’s via Facebook.
RJ Metrics
I find RJ Metrics to be one of the most useful ecommerce tools because it gives us crucial insights into our best performing campaign channels, as well as customer lifetime value.
These are key metrics that give you a better understanding into – for example – how much of your budget you should set aside to acquiring new customers.
You need to know if your average customer acquisition cost is lower or higher than their average lifetime value. If it’s lower, your eCommerce store will be profitable. RJ Metrics can help you understand this.
Google Analytics
It’s not enough that you simply have site visitors and customers – you must also understand them if you’re to maximize them.
The more you know about your customer – including how they ended up in your store – the better you can tailor to their needs, giving them more of what they want.
The Acquisition Overview section is especially helpful. It tells you which channels your visitors are coming from, as well as which channels your visitors who spend the most money are coming from.
This is invaluable information because you can then use it to double down your efforts on that particular channel.
Google Analytics also gives you key insights into which sites are linking to you. It’s only when you know this info that you can then start to look for other, similar backlink opportunities.
Drip
The final weapon in this list of best ecommerce tools is an email marketing autoresponder that’s arguably one of the best on the market right now.
If you’re not already capturing email addresses, now is the time to do it. Once a customer is on your email list, they’re essentially a customer for life.
Instead of constantly chasing new customers, you can instead mail information on new products, as well as promotions and discounts to your list of customers who are already interested in your business.
Drip captures your customers’ email addresses for you using popups on your website. It then funnels them directly into an automated system, where you can send out future emails.
The great thing about Get Drip is that it lets you segment each customer according to their previous purchases, the amount of times they’ve visited your website, and so on.
In other words, you get to tailor specific emails to the right customers, which boosts the chances of you making a connection and making a sale.
Conclusion
These are the 6 best ecommerce tools that will boost your online sales. What do you think of them? Would they work for your business?
Your rivals are likely to be already using them, which means it’s time that you mastered them, too. And once they’re mastered, the eCommerce world is your oyster. 🙂
