Busting sales conversion myths: “A small team won’t cut it”
How can you increase sales conversion today? Should you push more money toward ad spend or hire freelancers? Perhaps you think you need to hire more people to see better sales conversion. We’re here to bust that myth!
Now, there’s a difference between being a small team, and understaffed. Online businesses that lack expertise, will struggle. Likewise, those who have the expertise but in individuals who are overworked, will not prosper.
However, by focusing on the 2 strategies we’re going to outline, you can boost your sales conversion rate, without hiring more people. A combination of smart work (not harder!) and automation can put much higher revenue goals within reach of your small but agile team.
Cheatsheet: How do you increase sales conversion rate without more staff?
We’ll split our strategies to increase sales conversion into 2.
First, perfect your site, SEO, and social. Second, automate to your heart’s content. You need to bring shoppers to you first, then keep them for longer.
Let’s start with the first mission.
1. Buff up your site, SEO, and social:
Drive traffic to your ecommerce site by polishing your site, SEO and social presence. You can learn plenty about these 3 areas without hiring new people, and we’ve got the resources for you to do so, right here:
Site
Ensuring your Shopify store is usable is the first step to getting sales. Here are the essentials:
- Fast loading speed is crucial.
Use compressed images and avoid sliders for hero images. Employ accelerated mobile pages and delete any integrated apps that you don’t use on your store. Want to know how to do all of these, like the pros? Here are more details on site speed.
- Stores should perfect on-site branding.
When competing with brick-and-mortar shops, online stores need to stand out with branding. Consistency helps shoppers trust you. Use psychology to choose your color palette, fonts, and order. Here’s how to get add-to-cart vibes on your site in no time.
Once your website is fast, readable, and attractive, you’ll want to drive people to it. Shoppers usually come from the following sources:
- Ads: People who click on paid ad campaigns might discover you on Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Google, Bing, or many others. You can choose to run ads as soon as you feel ready to meet large orders.
- Referral: These shoppers might find your store via other websites. You can boost this traffic by asking other sites to mention your store and link to your site, by building relationships with relevant websites. Note, however, that this is a long-term play.
- Marketing: Visitors or returning customers might come to your site after receiving SMS or email marketing.
- Organic: When potential customers visit your store after finding you on Google search (more on how to get organic traffic next!) we call this organic traffic.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means trying to get your website on the first page of Google. Imagine your website among the top results when someone searches for what you sell! More shoppers visiting your site should lead to more sales.
To effectively utilize SEO, you need to create high-quality content, use titles that accurately describe your products, and keep your website tidy with clear and accurate links.
When your content is genuinely useful, your products are well labeled, and images are labeled correctly, Google can easily crawl through your Shopify site and increase its appearance in search results. Our CEO wrote more on this topic.
Social
Hitting the social media bullseye is essential to driving more shoppers to your store. Get ahead of the crowd by ensuring these 2 points are covered:
- All your social media accounts should be linked to your store.
We see the mistake all the time of stores not linking their social. Remember, shoppers might check your social media to see how legitimate your business is. - You should be actively present on all platforms.
How can you start being present? By engaging in social media groups and forums where people might have interest in your products, you’ll build brand recognition and add value to real conversations. This is a source of sales that almost anyone can learn!
Facebook is great for building customer relationships as it’s popular with Shopify stores. Ensure your posts are authentic rather than solely a sales attempt.
If organically engaging your audience doesn’t work, you can try social media campaigns and paid ads, though note that there’s no guarantee these will generate revenue. It can be deflating to spend a lot on ads that nobody buys from.
2. Automate your loyalty incentives
Now you’ve polished all of your digital presence on-site and on social media, it’s time to set up some automations to do the hard work for you.
- Program social media posts.
While real engagement in forums can’t be automated, you can ensure your posts go out at the perfect time on all your social media. There are dozens of platforms you can use, but if your budget is as small as your team, consider supporting another small business like Nuelinkfor social media programming.
Try automating posts that share promotions with your loyal followers, with exclusive offers only available to them. You can share this via a newsletter to those who’ve subscribed, for example.
Upcycle your content.
Rather than creating new content for social media, your webpage, and marketing, remember that our memories are fickle, and we all forget posts until we’ve seen them several times! Plus, reach can be different one different formats. Therefore, you can republish content with small tweaks.
Canva has automations that allow you to adapt posts with design to different platforms, without you needing to recreate multiple formats. The way to use content to build loyalty is by presenting it in different styles to suit readers’ preferences, but staying true to your message and branding to build trust.Automate your seasonal campaigns.
Know your product is perfect for Mother’s Day or a hot gift for the winter season? Plan seasonal campaigns ahead of time so that email and SMS marketing is organized, and you’ll see more sales without the leg work.
These automations will increase sales conversion long-term. Now, what else can you do to keep a steadily increasing conversion rate?
It’s crucial to understand how repeat purchases work and build loyalty. Mastering this will help you raise the average order value and also keep shoppers coming back.
How do you encourage repeat customers?
According to Reynier Matos, Head of Deliverability at Aument and a member of Forbes Technology Council: “having effective communication with customers can increase the chances of conversion happening a second or third time.”
- Setup personalized product suggestions.
A communication tool that you can automate is “suggested items” with apps like Luigi’s Box. If your site can automatically tell customers about other useful products in your store before buying, they’ll increase their average order cost
- Automate shopper follow-up.
Aument does this via email and SMS marketing post-sale, allowing you to suggest your top sellers or more items based on the first order they made. You can also use Aument to draw customers back in, when they’re detected as at-risk of falling off the radar by data analyst tools.
Myth busted: “You can’t increase sales conversion with a small team.”
We hope that myth is thoroughly busted for you!
With automations, a little time perfecting your site, and some fun interactions with potential customers, you’ll be increasing sales conversion rates and encouraging repeat customers, with the exact same team size you have today.
