Growing your online sales takes more than having a great product and a functional website. Customers have more options than ever, and the businesses that stand out are the ones that make it easy to find them, trust them, and buy from them.
The good news is that there are proven strategies for attracting more customers, converting more visitors, and keeping buyers coming back. Whether you're just getting started or looking to build on existing momentum, small, intentional changes can add up to a meaningful increase in revenue over time.
Keep reading to learn how to use analytics, SEO, social media, and paid advertising to increase online sales.
What are some general strategies for increasing sales?
If you’re looking to increase your sales (and who’s not?), there are a few things you’ll need to do.
First, you need to identify your target audience and ensure they can easily find your product or service. You’ll also need to differentiate your offerings from those of your competitors and create a simple, user-friendly buying experience for your customers.
Whether your small business is entirely online or you have a brick-and-mortar store, the following strategies will always be applicable and can help you achieve a variety of sales goals.
Understand your target audience
The best way to attract new customers with any marketing strategy is to know what they need. Business owners often find themselves so focused on selling the best solutions that they don’t spend enough time thinking about who they’re selling to.
A great product can still generate lackluster sales if you don’t make branding and marketing decisions with your target audience in mind.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you determine how to promote your product or service to customers:
- How does my product or service fit into their lifestyles?
- What are the pain points in their personal or professional lives that my product can address?
- How can my product increase or enhance their leisure time?
- What other products and services do they spend money on, and how can I take advantage of their general buying habits?
- If my product or service isn’t their first choice, what is and why?
In effect, you want to take an imaginary seat in front of your target audience and get to know them on a personal level. One way to do this is by hiring a market research company.
They’ll perform interviews, conduct surveys, and study the marketing landscape to give you the data you need to increase your sales. But before paying for professional assistance, consider how you can use something already available to you: analytics.
Use analytics to understand how customers find your product or service
With tools like Google Analytics, you can research and leverage the paths users take to get to your online store.
For instance, say you sell DJ equipment, and you’re getting a lot of traffic to your store because of a blog post about a popular musician that uses your products. To capitalize, you might consider publishing your own articles about your products and the musicians that use that, or teaming up with the blogger to form an affiliate marketing relationship.
If analytics show that you’re getting the bulk of your traffic from ad campaigns on certain social networks, you could invest more in those particular channels, building on your success.
Analytics can also reveal weaknesses in your marketing, particularly if you’ve invested in a certain approach or platform but haven’t seen results. This information is valuable because it can help inform how you allocate your marketing efforts and funds in the future.
Identify what makes your service or product unique
While investing time and funds in a complete branding campaign is a valuable endeavor, starting by focusing on what differentiates your product or service from others can often help you boost sales. By emphasizing what makes your offering different, you can attract customers looking for those specific attributes.
For example, maybe you own an ice cream shop and offer unusual flavors, such as saffron or olive oil. You might want to market those flavors more than your common flavors, like chocolate and vanilla.
Emphasizing unique elements of your product or one-of-a-kind items could even be more effective than offering discounts or promotions. Remember, the key is to give customers what they want.
Some people want a unique, high-quality product or service more than a discount on their purchase. Touting what makes your product different can help you boost sales with these groups.
Offer multiple payment options
When you offer several payment options, you automatically remove buying obstacles for many people. Some people, for example, prefer to use online payment methods like PayPal more than credit cards. Others prefer direct bank withdrawals.
Do some research into how your target audience likes to pay for your product and consider adding any options you don’t already offer.
Build trust with social proof and reviews
People are more likely to buy from a business they trust, and nothing builds that trust faster than hearing from other customers. Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your website, Google, or wherever your audience is most active, and make those reviews easy to find.
Testimonials, star ratings, and user-generated photos are all great options. You can pull them into your marketing materials or social media marketing strategy and display them prominently on your product pages. Customer satisfaction speaks for itself when you give it a visible place to live.
Simplify the checkout process
A simple checkout process increases sales by shortening the time between adding an item to the shopping cart and completing the transaction. This lessens the chances of the customer getting distracted or going elsewhere to buy a similar item.
One way to keep a customer on track is to include a guest checkout option on your site. Your online shoppers likely already have an account established with one of your competitors, such as Amazon.
If they have to spend several minutes filling out a lengthy form, giving a lot of sensitive information, they may give up and choose to go to your competitor for a quick, easy checkout. By incorporating a user-friendly, seamless sales infrastructure, you can make it easy for your customers to purchase your product — and increase your revenue.
Reduce cart abandonment with automated recovery
Cart abandonment is one of the worst revenue leaks for any online business. Automated recovery emails give you a way to bring those shoppers back without any manual effort on your end.
A well-timed reminder, sometimes paired with a small incentive like free shipping on their next order or a discount, can recover a meaningful portion of those lost sales online. Setting this up once means it works in the background every day, quietly recapturing revenue you would have otherwise missed.
How can SEO increase sales?
Search engine optimization (SEO) can boost your sales by bringing more potential buyers into contact with your content and, consequently, the things you sell. Here are some tactics you can use to improve your SEO.
Use non-branded keywords
A branded keyword includes the proper name of your business, product, or service. For example, “Ford trucks in Connecticut” is a branded keyword because it has “Ford” in it. “Trucks in Connecticut,” on the other hand, would be a non-branded keyword.
Branded keywords perform well because when people search for your product or service by name, they’re shown results that take them straight to your website. But non-branded keywords bring in customers who aren’t already familiar with your business or what you offer.
Use long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are those that are significantly longer than what most users type into a search engine. For example, “San Diego ransomware recovery services” is a long-tail keyword. For companies in San Diego who have been targeted by hackers using ransomware, this may be a far more effective keyword than “ransomware recovery.”
This is because with “ransomware recovery,” your content has to compete against that of hundreds of other companies providing this service. However, when your potential customers narrow down their search with additional terms, your long-tail keywords may align with their specific needs, enabling you to capture more customers — and more sales.
Additionally, people who use specific phrases usually know exactly what they’re looking for—and they’re often closer to making a purchase than folks using more general search phrases. So, by optimizing your site with long-tail keywords, you’re bringing yourself closer to people who want to buy what you’re selling.
Optimize your site for mobile
More and more people are accessing the web and making online purchases using their mobile devices. Consider using a tool like the Mobile-Friendly Test from Google to make sure your site is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate across all of those devices.
Google and other search engines can spot sites that work well on mobile devices and send mobile searchers to them. Here are some attributes you want the mobile version of your site to have:
- Blog posts that are broken up with images instead of consisting of large walls of text
- Pages that load quickly
- Forms that are easy to fill out
- The option to save partially completed purchases for later
- The most important information above the fold on your pages
If you’re not sure how well your mobile site is performing, you can also use an analytics tool to check your mobile conversion against your desktop conversions. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from mobile devices but significantly more conversions from the desktop version of your site, you might need to optimize your mobile site to improve the customer experience.
Optimize for voice and AI search queries
The way people search online is changing. More shoppers are using voice assistants and AI-powered search tools to find products and services, and the queries they use sound different from what someone would type into a search bar.
Instead of short, fragmented phrases, voice and AI searches tend to be longer and more conversational. For example, someone might ask, "Where can I find handmade leather wallets near me" rather than just "leather wallets."
For any e-commerce business, keeping up with these shifts is a smart sales strategy. Revisit your content and product descriptions with natural, question-based language in mind, and make sure your FAQ pages actually answer the kinds of questions real customers ask. This is a small adjustment to your online marketing approach that can put you in front of a growing segment of shoppers.
How can CRO (conversion rate optimization) increase sales?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the strategy of improving how many website visitors you turn into paying customers.
You can calculate your site's conversion rate with a simple formula: divide your total number of conversions by your total number of visitors.
So if 2,000 people visit your site in April and 70 of them make a purchase, your conversion rate is 3.5%. Even a modest improvement in that number can have a real impact on revenue — without spending more to drive traffic. These strategies can help you get there:
Lead with what makes your product valuable
Visitors decide quickly whether your site is worth their time, so put your most compelling information front and center. Highlight what makes your business different from the moment someone lands on your page, and use images that show your product from multiple angles, with close-ups of details and real people using it.
Build credibility with reviews and transparency
Shoppers want to know they can trust you before they hand over their payment information. Make it easy for customers to leave reviews and display those reviews where people will actually see them. Testimonials from past clients go a long way, and so does having your contact and support information clearly visible.
Secure your site
A secure website is non-negotiable for any online store. Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates and display your security badges prominently. When customers feel confident that their data is protected, they're far more likely to follow through on a purchase.
Use promotions to close the sale
Sometimes a shopper just needs one more reason to commit. Time-sensitive discounts, free shipping offers, and limited-time deals can provide that final push. If you're running a promotion, don't bury it on a single product page. Instead, feature it in a homepage banner or landing page so it gets seen early and often.
How can social media increase sales?
A social media presence can increase sales by keeping your business and product top-of-mind for potential and existing customers. Then, when they’re ready to make a purchase, you’ve got a better chance of being their go-to option.
To increase your sales using social media, you should:
Post consistently
Frequent, consistent posts keep your business visible and increase engagement over time. You don't need to post every single day, but showing up regularly matters. If you don't have the time or bandwidth to create social content, consider hiring a marketing or content agency to help.
Lead with visuals
Images and videos perform better than text alone across almost every platform. This can be product photos, short demos, behind-the-scenes clips, or promotions for deals you're currently offering — anything that gives your followers something worth stopping to look at.
Share your blog content
If you have a blog, post links to your articles on your social channels. Content that informs, entertains, or helps people save money tends to stick with readers, and it builds the kind of credibility that keeps them paying attention to your future posts.
Engage with your audience
Responding to comments, answering questions, and acknowledging mentions shows potential customers that there's a real, responsive team behind your brand. That kind of interaction builds trust in a way that polished ads simply can't.
Use social commerce features
Platforms like Instagram and Facebook let you tag products directly in posts and set up storefronts within the app. Reducing the steps between discovery and purchase is one of the more direct ways social media can move the needle on sales.
How to use email marketing to drive repeat sales
Getting a customer to buy once is a win. Getting them to come back is where the real growth happens. Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for nurturing that relationship after the first purchase.
It's direct, personal, and far less expensive than acquiring new customers. Here's how to use it to encourage customers to come back:
Segment your list based on purchase history
Not every customer on your list wants to hear about the same things. Grouping subscribers by what they've already purchased lets you send more relevant messages, and relevant messages get opened, clicked, and acted on.
Create personalized product recommendation campaigns
Once you know what a customer has bought, you have a starting point for what they might buy next.
Personalized recommendation emails, whether that's a "you might also like" follow-up or a curated collection based on browsing behavior, feel helpful rather than pushy. Done well, they give customers a reason to return to your store without feeling like they're being sold to.
Launch a loyalty or rewards program
A loyalty program gives repeat customers a reason to keep choosing you over a competitor. Points, perks, early access to new products, or exclusive discounts all work well depending on your audience.
Promote the program through email so existing customers know it exists, and make it easy to track progress. The more tangible the reward feels, the more likely people are to work toward it.
How can paid marketing increase sales?
Paid advertising lets you put your business in front of the right people at the right time. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping your target audience is in it, paid marketing uses customer data to show your ads to the people most likely to buy.
Use the paid ad services offered by major search engines like Google or work with a marketing agency that specializes in getting the best results from these channels.
To get the biggest sales boost from paid marketing, you can try:
- Relevant keywords: Choosing the right keywords to use on your site can increase sales because platforms like Google use them to ensure your ads are seen by people searching for that exact word or phrase. If your keyword matches a search term, your ad may pop up on top of the results page, being the first thing your potential customer sees after searching.
- Google Ads: With Google Ads, the platform places the ads where interested people are likely to see them, and then you pay each time they click on your ad. This is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. According to recent statistics on PPC campaigns, people who visit a site after clicking on an ad are 50% more likely to buy something.
- Social media: Social media paid marketing channels are highly effective because they use your target market’s profiles and behavior on the platform to decide where to place your ad. This makes it more likely that your ad appears for people who want your product or are in a position to purchase it.
A powerful platform to increase customer engagement
The most successful online businesses treat sales as a system, not a series of disconnected tactics. Strong SEO brings people to your site.
A smooth checkout experience and compelling product pages get them to buy. Email marketing and social media bring them back. When those elements work together, growth becomes a lot more predictable.
Increasing sales ultimately comes down to customer engagement. With Mailchimp, you can meet customers where they are with powerful automation, giving you back the valuable time you need to create even better products and solutions—and bring in more cash.