Are your sales in a steep slump? You are certainly not alone. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, millions of businesses in the United States and beyond have had to shut down, effectively losing their revenue. The high number of people losing their jobs means fewer customers for companies that sell essential products and services online. You are probably wondering what you can do to start making more sales again. As the economy reopens, do not sit and wait to hope for your sales to return to normalcy. You must take action to spend less on ads. Here’s how to increase sales without overspending on.
How to increase sales without overspending on ads
Instagram is a social media that you can leverage to promote your product and increase sales at no cost. It all depends on how you intend to leverage the platform that will help you spend less on ads. But before we discuss ways you can leverage your Instagram to promote your business, I want us to look at the benefits of Instagram.
The Benefit of Promoting the Product using an Instagram Page.
Instagram is mostly a platform where people come to see photos and Images. According to wordstream Statistic, 64% of consumers purchased after seeing brand videos on social media. Photo and video Ads tend to converge more than simple ad copy.
Since Instagram gives you the platform and Instagrammers love following their favorite brands. 75% and 35 % of Instagram users always feel encouraged after seeing a photo and videos respectively. This platform is free and can accommodate as many Videos or Images as you wish to upload.
Ways you Leverage Instagram for Product Promotion
Build your Followers
The first way you can use Instagram for product promotion and to increase sales is to build your followers. When you have your followers, you have a large audience. Those people are your potential Audience since Instagram will always show them your post, videos, and images each time you upload them to your page.
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Instagram Influencers
These are those who have already built enough audience on Instagram and usually have lots of post engagements each time they update their pages. When you can get such influencers who are willing to post your brand or product on their page, you stand a higher chance of increasing your sales.
The challenges with Instagram Influencers
Those influencers are brand conscious and never like to lose their credibility. If you want to contact them, ensure that your product meets all the features that you claim it has. Always make them feel part of your brand, by sending them your products for free.
While not every influencer you contact will be interested in working with you, some will ask for a token of their appreciation. However, it costs less than promotional Ads. Always ensure using Influencers whose audience has an interest relating to your Products.
Using Upsell and cross-sell to repeat customers
Upselling is encouraging your customers to get more products at a lesser price. For instance, a unit of your product costs $23, and you have promised to sell 3 units at $60. Here customers get a discount of 9.09%. When trends have an increase in sales, the reason is that they always want to have more products at less.Implementing upsells and cross-sells.You will follow these simple procedures to get started either upselling or cross-selling:
- Install an upsell app, for example, you can install Boost Upsell.
- Select those products to upsell or cross-sell.
- Perform an A/B test of your offer for 1 or 2 weeks intervals.
- Measure your sales tweak and see what works.
Ensure you will still make a profit when you perform upsell. You can always achieve that by increasing the unit price of your product so that when you implement upsell, it will not affect your pricing.
Send abandoned cart emails
Always know that not all your shoppers who have added products to their cart will take action immediately. And about ¾ of shoppers do leave an e-store without completing the checkout. However, the highest abandonment cart rate is from mobile phone users.
The fact is that, regardless of how beneficial your products are, that situation could still occur to you. It is an inevitable business hypothesis.The secret to increasing sales is by recovering your sales using abandoned cart emails. There are many such automation email tools like Mailbot.
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You should always find a way to communicate with your shoppers who abandoned their cart to remind them of it to take action. In order to use these tools effectively, always separate customer personal and shipping detail pages from the page where they will put their card details. By doing such, get many contact details and emails more than when you have your checkout page as just a single page.
Run referral programs
An affiliate program is a powerful marketing tool. Do you know that about 83% of consumers seek recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends each time they want to buy a product? Also, do you know that 71% of shoppers trust online reviews? When you integrate a referral /affiliate program where your previous customers can recommend their friends and get compensation or some incentives, you have the chance of increasing your sales.
The majority of every big online base business deploys this strategy. This strategy makes other people take up your products and promote them for you. Therefore, you spend less time in advertising and more time on your product and service promotions.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an old and still effective way of reaching your customers. The reason is that when you send a customized email to your customers, they feel special, particularly when you address them by their names in the email.
Although the automation of the email marketing process is possible with email services like Mailchimp, Justuno means that you will spend less on ads. Email marketing has more effect than Facebook and Google ads where you talk to somebody without personalizing your content.
Whenever you are driving traffic to your website, email marketing is a must for you. The reason is that you never know how the visitor stumps into your website. And until you get their contact, you may never get them back. With Email marketing, you can re-target them or send follow-up emails that will lead to sales conversions that increase sales.
Add social proof
Several objecting questions come to the mind of your shoppers, particularly First-time shoppers who are easy to leave your e-store without buying your items. Those questions have to do with your business credibility.
That is where you need social proof. An example of social proof is Birchbox. It shows the star rating and reviews of each product in your customer’s abandoned cart email. Your shoppers feel more comfortable buying from you when they see that there is a product review.
