WooCommerce is one of your best options for creating an online store that’s open-source, customisable, and flexible. It’s optimised to suit your needs and can turn your WordPress website into a fully functional eCommerce store.
It’s the fastest-growing eCommerce platform out there.
But as a WooCommerce store owner, you need to understand that to be successful as an online store, there is more to it than just having a pretty store.
It’s about creating a customer base loyal to your brand and from that, consistently making profitable sales.
If you want your sales, revenue, and profits to go up you need to take action. For this article, I’ll be giving you eight proven strategies you can start using to increase sales and conversions in your WooCommerce store.
If you dedicate yourself to these strategies, by this time next year, you could find yourself among store owners packed with orders.
Let’s dive in!
Ways of Increasing WooCommerce Sales
1. Optimize Your Woocommerce Store’s User Experience
Simply put the easier and more user-friendly your eCommerce website is, the higher your chances of retaining customers and boosting sales on WooCommerce. Conversely, if visitors encounter difficulties, they’ll lose interest fast.
As your product range grows, maintaining user-friendliness becomes more complex. To beat this, you will need to make sure your website has clear product categories, a useful navigation menu, a responsive web design, and a functional search feature.
1.Simplify product discovery and purchase process:
Make it effortless for customers to find and buy your products in your store. If visitors struggle to navigate your website, you risk losing sales.
Design your store with the customer in mind. Can they easily locate products, find necessary information, and make purchases in just a few clicks?
Consider using plugins like the YITH WooCommerce Essentials kit, which offers features such as Ajax search, product comparison, filters, image zoom, quick view, wish list, infinite scroll, product add-ons, and catalogue mode.
Alternatively, Jetpack Search is another user-friendly plugin that enhances product search functionality with advanced filters, spelling correction, and live results, ensuring a smooth and efficient shopping experience.
2.Boost your page loading speed
Slow-loading pages deter potential customers, leading them to abandon your site before engaging with your content and making purchases.
If they don’t use your site, they can’t buy anything. So it’s in your interest to make sure your site is running quickly.
If your pages take more than three seconds to load, 40% or more of visitors will simply give up.
To enhance your site’s speed, start by testing its current performance using free online tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed. These tools not only assess your site’s loading speed but also provide tailored suggestions for improvement.
You can also think about adding Jetpack Boost, a free plugin built to improve your core web vitals. These metrics, such as loading performance, visual stability, and interactivity, have a direct impact on user experience and can affect your site’s search engine ranking.
By giving priority to page loading speed, you’ll be creating a smoother and more enjoyable browsing experience for your customers, ultimately driving higher sales conversions.
2. Simplify The Checkout Process
Get rid of any unnecessary fields. Keep only what’s essential to complete the sale. If you’d like, offer opt-ins for your customers to join your email list and other extras, but keep it simple and make sure it doesn’t distract from making the purchase.
In 2022, 24% of customers abandoned purchases because they had to create an account. So, don’t make it mandatory for customers to log in or register just to buy something. Most of the time, it’s not needed. Customers can always create an account later if they want.
If your customers need to have an account, you can let them log in using their social media accounts for an easier experience.
Make sure there are plenty of ways to pay
When it comes to payment, there are a variety of options that exist in today’s world that your customers might be using.
Apart from the traditional payment methods like using debit and credit cards, other options like Stripe, PayPal, Payoneer, and Square exist.
Some might even want to use cryptocurrency to pay or pay with cash upon delivery.
3. Provide Discounts And Coupons
Providing discounts can benefit both you and your customers. By offering price reductions, bulk deals, bundle discounts, and more, you can boost sales, revenue, and conversions on your WooCommerce platform.
To make discounts and coupons more visible, consider using one of the top WooCommerce popup plugins.
The great thing about using coupons to promote your store is that you control their distribution. This means you can target specific segments to attract new customers or re-engage passive ones.
Simply choose the right distribution channels and coupon-sharing websites for your promotion campaign.
Several WooCommerce discount plugins, such as Discount Rules for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing can make it easy for you to configure enticing discounts for your customers.
4. Use Email More Effectively
Most stores send out promotional newsletters, but many neglect to tailor the content to each recipient. This lack of personalization is a major reason for low open rates and minimal traffic from these newsletters.
To effectively drive traffic from your newsletters you will need to present the products that align with the purchase history of each customer receiving the email.
If you are new to email marketing, MailPoet will be a great option.
It’s tailored for WooCommerce stores, seamlessly integrates with the WordPress dashboard, and offers specialized automation.
With MailPoet, you can easily create promotions for specific product categories, follow up with announcements of product launches, and reward loyal customers.
Don’t forget about abandonment cart emails.
The aim here is to convert abandoned cart visitors into paying customers.
These were individuals who were interested in your product but for some reason did not make a purchase. Sending cart recovery emails, serves as a campaign to recover sales.
These reminder emails are the most cost-effective method to bring back customers who have left their carts. The abandoned cart emails need to be attention-grabbing and compelling enough to lure customers back to complete their purchases.
You can use WooCommerce marketing tools like Retainful to send attractive recovery emails in the right sequence.
There are a ton of other emails you can use to boost your sales, check this article out to learn more.
5. Flash Sales
Flash sales are discounts or promotions placed on products in your store for a certain amount of time. Putting discounts on products is one of the oldest and most effective eCommerce business strategies.
Even though it is short term, flash sales can do wonders for brand awareness because your customers are not only enjoying discounted offers but are also getting introduced to the products your store sells and the uniqueness of your brand.
How long should a flash sale last? Keep your flash sale events short and to the point.
According to a study by Experian, an investment-based company, email open rates increased by 59% during 3-hour flash sales.
The optimal duration seems to be around 3 hours. However, depending on the number of products you’re selling, you could extend it to 12-24 hours. Anything beyond that may not yield profitable results.
Here’s a detailed guide on how you can start a flash sale.
6. Focus On Your Product’s Customer-Centric Benefits
When writing product descriptions, put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. Think about the questions they might ask and the information they need before making a purchase.
To keep your product benefits centered around your customers, you can ask your website visitors and customers for feedback on what they appreciate or how they use your products.
This gives valuable insights into your customer’s needs, helping create better products and services for a better customer experience.
You can use Hotjar to collect real feedback and insights from users. Their NPS survey questions can allow you to directly inquire about your customers’ experiences and offer insights into customer loyalty, while CSAT surveys can help you assess customer satisfaction with your products over time.
7. Work On Your Marketing Strategy
One of the great things about using WooCommerce for your online store is that it maintains WordPress’s natural SEO-friendliness.
Start by refining your keyword list and understanding which keywords you will need to target to increase your WooCommerce sales by conducting competitor research.
You can try out the Moz browser extension to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for on their homepage and key product pages. You can also use a specialized SEO tool like SEMrush to identify these keywords.
Next, you need to develop your product description and other related content be it blogs or social media posts. Cleverly insert the keywords you have searched into this content.
While doing so, think about how your customers would use the keywords when searching on Google.
Don’t go overboard with keyword optimization—keyword stuffing can hurt your rankings. Google may flag down pages, blogs, or descriptions that are overly optimized. As you are building your content make sure it flows naturally.
You can also choose to use pay-per-click online ads. These will allow you to target people who are searching for your products or something related.
This way, you don’t have to rely just on organic search results. The downside though is that you’ll have to pay for every click, and once you stop paying, it all stops.
Despite this, online ads are an effective way of driving traffic to your website and gaining insights into the search terms your audience is interested in.
You can also optimise the SEO of your images. Instead of using random file names for your product images, name your images clearly and also include descriptive alt text. This will help Google understand the image context, and boost page ranking.
8. Start a Loyalty Points Program
Loyalty programs are a fantastic way of keeping existing customers and attracting new ones. By offering rewards for shopping, you encourage customers to return and earn loyalty points.
It’s a powerful incentive for both visitors and customers to shop with you. Giving points for purchases and referrals can boost sales and signups.
Simply install a plugin like WooRewards (or explore other excellent options), and you’ll have a complete loyalty program ready to attract shoppers to your store. Once the program is up and running, be sure to launch a dedicated marketing campaign to spread the word.
9. Use Customer Reviews To Build Trust
Business growth relies on building trust with customers, and one effective way to do this is by showcasing customer reviews. Customer reviews are a form of social proof that gives your potential customers an overview of the product from the perspective of other customers.
Before purchasing, customers will prefer to see what other customers are saying about a particular product to help them decide if it’s worth buying.
So, as more buyers purchase a product, the reviews they drop become proof that your products are trustworthy, thereby attracting more potential buyers and resulting in increased conversions for your store.
A survey from TrustPulse revealed that as much as 15% of customers don’t trust a business that either has no reviews of their products or does not display them.
By showcasing the quality and reliability of your products through reviews from satisfied customers, you can build a strong customer base.
One great way to get reviews from customers is through ong-form surveys sent via email. However, it’s important to avoid asking too many questions, which can overwhelm recipients.
Exit-intent survey popups are also a valuable tool for collecting customer feedback. They’re triggered when a visitor is about to leave your website, regardless of the scenario.
The purpose of these pop-ups is to ask departing visitors why they’re leaving. This helps you understand their expectations and reasons for abandoning your website.
Conclusion
These nine strategies are the key WooCommerce sales tips you need to keep in mind to bolster the sales of your online store. Use these proven tactics if you’re serious about boosting sales.
Beyond these strategies, there is a lot to take into consideration when running an online store. For example, what happens after a customer orders a product, how does it get to them? What if they return the product, how will you handle that?
The best way to manage all these is to outsource to a third-party logistics service that can handle all these. The best option I can recommend for you is Globallyfulfill. They provide all these and more. Check out their services here.
