As a business owner, you must have heard this infamous line that if you do not advertise regularly, you may face fewer sales, or your brand may not reach your target audience at all!
This still rings true in the minds of many E-commerce owners, and it may have some truth to it, but having sales without ads isn’t that difficult or impossible! You can even increase your sales with no advertisement budget! You must be thinking how? Let’s look at ways how you can increase your sales without spending a ton on ads!
A. Making a Shoppable Instagram Store
You have to admit that Instagram is the new and ongoing hub of social presence where Instagrammers love to follow their favourite brands. They even keep up with the brand launches by keeping notifications on. Instagram acts as a huge driver for online businesses, and 38% of people have said that they have often purchased products that they have seen on Instagram. How have they been influenced to purchase?
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Designing Your Page
Most, if not all business pages have their forefront mentioned in their bio. When you open it, you will get to see a site with all their available products, and prices, along with the site mimicking the aesthetics of the brand, which can often compel you to buy a product. Here the easy availability to shoppers, and your brand aesthetic play a huge role.
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Influencer Marketing:
Customers get influenced by influencers on Instagram and purchase what they show or end up reviewing. So you can also partner with influencers falling under your niche. To do so,
i. You will have to know your goal, budget, and audience.
ii. Use a metric to understand how much influencer marketing is benefiting you.
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How can You do Influencer Marketing?
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Through Product Reviews:
You can take part in a barter collaboration, where you send your product for free, and they post a review.
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Through Product Unboxing:
In this tactic, the influencer unboxes the package and shows their initial thoughts and reactions, which also influence buying history.
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Sponsored Post:
You can pay the influencer to post dedicated content about your brand on their feed through static posts or videos.
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Partnering in Giveaways:
You can partner with an influencer to do a giveaway. This way, the audience will get to know about your website, and your target audience will stay even after the giveaway ends.
B. Hosting Sales Using Loss Aversion Tactics
Tactics like ‘last chance to grab this product at this price’ or ‘first time at this price’ makes one want to buy that product even though they may not have had an interest in the item in the first place. Most of the time loss aversion tactics yield great results.
How to do it?
i. You can use the tactic by giving a countdown timer, or a countdown cart simultaneously. It will give the shoppers more enthusiasm to take immediate action. Limited sales act as a psychological phenomenon, like fear of missing out, which makes the shopper act on the instinct to shop for products.
ii. You also can send abandoned cart emails to remind the buyer about their products.
iii. You can upsell in the meantime, as in, showing another similar product when the customer reaches the checkout page, or adds an item to the cart. It also increases the average order value.
C. Building a Community Online
When you focus on building a community online, it brings a sense of togetherness. A community can sympathize and can help your business grow by sharing about your business, as it gives a feeling of being together and intimate, like your own close-knit group. A community focuses on overall well-being, and it can be a place where-
- You share customer reviews
- Discuss various things with your followers and fans
- Run contests
You can also encourage your followers to share some words about your business, thus generating user-generated content. Then you can use this to get new customers by having a community group included in your website, where others can join for tips, reviews, and more from buyers, and thus get encouraged to buy.
This group should be about helping and recommending, more than promotional. If the former two are correctly done, you won’t even need to run any promotions.
Add great search to your eCommerce site
D. Running Referral Programs
Word-of-mouth marketing is the most traditional, yet one of the most powerful tools of marketing. Many of us still ask our known people before buying something new and expensive, or either of those. A lot of purchases are made by seeing online reviews. Many consumers confess that they rely on the word of mouth reviews.
This is why you need to make a referral program for your existing or new customers. The referral link can be shared with a friend or family who will get a discount on their first purchase, and your customer would get a certain percentage off too on their next order.
E. Rewarding Loyal Customers
Every time your customer makes a purchase, you can give them certain points to use for their further purchase. Why? Because it’s easier to market to your existing customer base, and they are more likely to splurge than new buyers because they have already experienced your service.
Apart from point loyalty, you can also give them a tier based on order frequency, and amount spent, as many big beauty stores do.
F. Having a Good Quality Custom Search Engine for Your Online Business
A good and customizable search engine does most of your work. Search engines like Expertrec help customers to find products easily with its AI-powered custom search engine which has a great search interface, and supports multilingual and voice search, along with working across all major platforms.
Wrapping Up
Paid advertising works, but it is not the only way to increase sales and visibility. Not every brand has started with advertising. Even if you are a start-up, you can take your business to next level without having an ad budget by using the above-mentioned tactics. Thus, you can save more of your budget and invest it to improve your service, which is the most important part of a business.
