How to Increase Your Online Sales: 35 Strategies That Are Worth a Try

If you’ve ever wondered:

“How can I make more sales on my website?”

“How can I quickly and easily increase sales online?”

“Are there some actionable methods I can use right now to improve my sales performance?”

1. Increase perceived value:

A great way to make more sales online is to increase the perceived value of your products.

The goal here is to make your prospects feel obvious that they will get a ton of value from your product ; that they will get more value than the money they will give away.

You can do this by talking about the return on investment. It can be easy to do if the goal of your product is to help your client make more money:

If your client can make $10,000 with a product that you sell for $1,000, buying it becomes an easy choice.

That’s why you need to work on your promise:

What can your customer expect from this product?
What can it actually make him achieve?

What are the short term benefits, the long term benefits?

Think about it.

2. Break the format:

If you sell info products, you can easily raise your prices or make more sales by breaking the format.

In other words, by creating a format that doesn’t exist.

Instead of selling only text (an e-book), sell a package of text and audio. Or a package of text and video.

Why do so?

Because in the mind of your prospect, a book costs no more than a few bucks. You can’t sell a book or an e-book at a high price, even if it represents a ton of value.

We can say the same for a podcast: in the mind of your prospect, a CDs rarely costs more than $30. That’s why it will be difficult to sell an audio info product at a price higher than $30.

What’s the solution then?

The trick here is to create a new format. A format on which they can’t put a price.

An easy way to do this is to mix existing formats: for example selling a package of ebooks and mp3s, or a package of ebooks and videos, or a package of mp3s and videos.

That’s a great way to reduce friction when you sell info products.

You can also split a big ebook into several small ebooks. It will be like selling a big collection of books. That way you’ll be able to set a higher price.

3. Remove all references to buying from the top-fold:

If you announce up front that your prospect will have to pay for a product, he won’t be as receptive to your sales pitch as he would have been if you didn’t mention that he potentially has to pay to get the whole product.

I said « the whole product » because if you plan to sell an info product, you can give away free advice in your sales page. That’s actually a great way to show your prospects that you can teach them some great things.

Let’s get back to what we were saying:

Remove all references to buying from the top-fold.

Picture it:

Will you be more receptive to the content of a page if up-front a price is displayed, or will you be less receptive to the content?

The answer is quite obvious.

Only display the price when your prospects fully understand how much value they can get from your product.

The only exception to this rule is if the prospect has already been offered to buy this product. You can then decide to talk up front about the price, for example if you offer a discount.

But in other cases, don’t mention that one will have to pay to get the product.

Arouse desire, and when the desire is at its peak, call for the sale.

4. Keep them hooked a few minutes after you display the CTA:

Many bloggers make the mistake of ending their sales pitch straight away after their Call To Action.

Their sales pitch in very good, but its very short ending impacts negatively on the sales.

Think about it: the decision to buy is not immediate.

Most of the time, you have to think twice before taking action. And that’s even more true when the price of the product is quite high.

That’s why if you want to maximize sales, you must give to your prospects time to think.

Don’t end your sales pitch right after you asked for the sale.

Keep talking (if it’s a video) or add more text (if it’s a text). For a few minutes.

You can talk again about the benefits of your products, address some objections, talk about the guarantee, talk about the buying process, etc.

These little tips can dramatically increase your sales.

5. Address emotions:

The real buying decision is made through emotions.

I see too many people trying to sell to customers by addressing first to their logical mind.

In B2C transactions, most of the time the consumers made the decisions to buy through their emotions.

Unconsciously, people make the decision to buy even before they know it.

The use their logical mind only to validate their emotional decision.

That’s why you need first to address the emotions of your prospects.

And only then address their logical mind.

You can do so by answering the following questions:

How will your product transform his/her life?
What will his/her life be like?
Describe it. Address his/fer feelings.

6. Increase your product’s desirability by adding beautiful images:

Beautiful pictures help your prospect connect with your products.

It can be images of the product itself, for example, if you have an e-commerce store on which you sell physical goods.

It can be images helping the prospect picture the results he will get with your product. Images of the life he will have thanks to your product.

It can also be images helping the prospect get a sense of how your product works.

Beautiful pictures help address the emotions of your prospects. They trigger emotional responses.

You can invest in photography or you can use copyright free images (There are great websites for this, such as Visualhunt or Unsplash).

7. Address a strong need or desire:

The stronger the need or the desire your product fulfills, the easier the sale.

When trying to sell a product, focus on the needs and on the desires of your prospect.

If you manage to highlight in your sales page some strong needs or desires your product can fulfill, your sales will naturally rise.

The easiest way to do so is to design products by constantly having in mind the needs and desires of your prospects.

That way, selling those products will be a breeze.

8. Create buyer personas:

In order to effectively address the needs and the desires of your prospects, you have to know to whom you’re selling.

A great way to do so is to create detailed buyer personas.

By taking the time to picture and understand who your prospects are, you’ll be much more able to communicate how your product will help them and to describe their dream life in your sales page.

Maybe you had once the same issues and the same needs of your clients, and that way you know exactly how to communicate to them.

Or you’re not like your clients, and if tha’st so, you should consider gathering information about them (it can be as simple as exchanging with them by email or on the social network, or in real life).

Bit by bit, you will form a picture of who your customers are. And from this, you will be able to address effectively their needs and desires.

9. Make your copy more readable:

One of the goals you must have in mind when you create a sales page is to bring the readers to read it to the end.

You have to keep them caught to your page, from the beginning to the end.

As you probably know, some people have a shorter attention span than others.

You must format your copy in order to grab the attention of “scanners »

Here are some actionable ways to improve the readability of your content:

Make short paragraphs: big text block are daunting.
Keep your sentences short: don’t hesitate to cut a big sentence into several smaller sentences.
Use short words if you can.
Use bold and italics to highlight keep points.
Use bullet points to ease readability

Follow these guidelines and your copy will be much easier to digest. Thus, your prospects will be much more receptive to your sales pitch. And much more likely to buy.

You can easily increase your sales by changing the formatting and appearance of your copy.

10. Shake things up:

Have you ever heard of ad blindness?

Ad blindness is a term used to describe a phenomenon in which people who have seen an ad too often don’t pay any attention to it anymore.

You’ve seen this ad so many times you don’t even hear or see it.

You’ve been asked to sign up to this newsletter so many times with the same form that you don’t even see this form any more.

You’ve seen this sales page so many times that you don’t pay attention to it anymore.

You get it?

I guess so 🙂

The fact is that if you never change the way you advertise your products, many people will eventually become blind to your ad.

That’s why you must sometimes change the way you advertise your products.

Try different approaches. Maybe many of your prospects will be more receptive to your second or third approach than they were to your first approach.

11. Use social proof:

Social proof is very effective to display credibility in your niche.

It is very effective to reassure your prospects.

Who do you think you’re more likely to trust?

A company with 10 Facebook fans or a guy with 50k Facebook fans?

(This applies to Twitter, Instagram, etc… depending on the social networks people use in your niche.)

So if you have a lot of fans on your social networks, use this to your advantage.

Make sure you display these great metrics somewhere on your sales page so that your prospects can see it and be comforted in this buying decision.

12. Use proof of authority:

Another effective way to display credibility in your niche is to display proof of authority on your website or on your sales page.

This strategy is often used in TV or newspaper commercials. Remember the tooth paste commercial with the dentist praising the merits of the product?

There are a lot of examples we could give here.

Proof of authority is an effective way to influence customers.

If you can get in touch with experts in your niche and get them to test your products in order to leave great testimonials, go for it.

13. Use client testimonials:

Client testimonials are a great way to boost sales. They add credibility to your claims.

Potential clients can relate to them. They can identify themselves to several of you former clients who tried successfully your product.

Of course, client testimonials also act as social proof. Prospects are reassured when they see that your product have been used successfully by many people.

To incite your clients to leave testimonials, you can send their an email a few weeks or a few month (depending on what you sell) after they bought your products.

14. Create a sense of urgency

People procrastinate a lot. As you probably know it, procrastination can hurt your sales.

People see your offer, tell themselves that they will think about it, and never come back. Most of the time they forget about you and your products.

To prevent this, you can create a sense of urgency in your sales page.

It can be a limited-time discount, a scarcity due to a limited number of places available, etc.

Pro tip:

When you do a limited-time offer, it works best when you give a valid explanation.

For example, you do a discount for Christmas, or for Halloween, or for the birthday of your website, etc.

Another example: you limit the sales for your products and this way you create scarcity. You can explain this by the fact that you want to take care personally of each of your clients and that you don’t have time to do this correctly if you take too many people. It can also naturally be a limited number of sales due to the fact that you don’t physically have a lot of products available.

15. Test several prices

Maybe you don’t do a lot of sales because your prices are too high… Or because your prices are to low.

And you won’t know it until you conduct severals tests. So try different prices, higher prices, as well as lower prices.

It may be that people don’t buy your product because they find it too expensive. Or maybe that they don’t buy your product because they find it too cheap (yes, it happens).

16. Shorter prices

The longer the price, the higher it seems.

Here we’re going to use a little psychological tricks:

$59.00 seems higher than $59, because it’s longer.

And $99 seems lower than $99.00, because it’s shorter.

Have this in mind when you manipulate your prices.

If you want to make a price appear low, use fewer digits.

And if you want to make a price appear high, use more digits (that can be useful if you do a discount and you want to make the previous price appear really big compared to the discounted price).

17. Use anchor prices

Anchor prices are a great way to make some prices appear high or low.

Think about it:

What is the best way to sell a $1000 watch?

Any idea?

It’s to put it next to a $20,000 watch.

This reminds me of the day I was visiting a very expensive jewelry store in Paris with my girl friend. There were pieces of jewelry priced $50,000, $100,000, even $500,000… So many demential prices. And when we came across a ring at $700, we found it really, really cheap. Whereas we would have found it expensive in a standard jewelry store.

We found it cheap, because compared to the others products in the jewelry store, it was cheap.

You can use this psychological trick in your business too.

If you want that a product appears relatively cheap, put it across a very expensive one.

You can also do this by displaying several offers for the same product of service:

a cheap offer with the basic features
a medium offer (the one you want to actually sell)
an expensive offer (with a lot of features and bonuses)

By setting a very high price for the expensive offer, you can make you medium offer appear cheap.

18. Allow multiple time payments

Allowing multiple time payments can help you increase your sales for two reasons:

– You allow people who can’t afford to pay the whole price up front to buy your product
– You can display a fraction of the price, the fraction that will be paid monthly. People will see a small price compared to the whole price, and will be less likely to develop price resistance.

Start thinking about it. It can be a nice way to make more sales.

19. Offer more payment options

Nowadays many means of payments are available online: Paypal, Clickbank, direct credit card payments, bank transfers, etc.

If you want to maximize your sales, you should consider allowing as many payment options as you can.

20. Offer a money-back guarantee

Many people don’t buy because they are afraid of spending money only to be disappointed afterwards.

By offering a money-back guarantee, you defuse this fear.

Put people at ease at the end of your sales pitch by offering a refund if they’re not satisfied.

21. Address every objection in your copy

Think of every objection your prospect might have when reading your sales page or listening to your sales pitch.

Make sure to address every objection at the end of your pitch.

Answer every question your prospect might have about the product or the buying process.

You must erase all worries that might emerge.

The clearer it is, the more likely the prospect will buy.

22. Your product will work for him

Many people quit the buying process because they think that the product is not going to work with them. They think that their case is a special case your product won’t solve.

It’s very common.

That’s why you must convince your prospect that your product will work for him.

Explain to him that this product has helped people in a much worse situations than he’s in.

Tell stories about desperate cases that your product solved.

Convince him that your product is exactly what he needs.

And frankly, what does he have to lose? You offer a money-back guarantee, so he has nothing lose, and everything to win.

23. Simplify the checkout process

Many people quit the buying process because it’s too complicated.

Make the checkout process very clear. Reduce the steps, and make them easy to follow.

And don’t force your potential client to register to your website or to create an account on your platform to buy. It’s very annoying and can often lead to cart abandonment.

24. Conduct split tests

Split testing is a great way to boost your sales.

You can conduct as many tests as you can to identify the best ways to market your product.

You test different sales pitches, different checkout buttons, different guarantees, etc.

And as the days go by, you progress toward a sales page with a really good conversation rate.

Think about it: Maybe if you adjusted some variables of your sales page, you could make twice as many sales, or more!

25. Over deliver

Customer satisfaction should be one of your priorities.

A happy customer is a customer who will buy more of your products.

And a happy customer is a customer who will recommend your products to friends and family.

Think long term.

An easy way to make a customer happy is to over deliver.
For example, by giving unexpected bonuses, or by giving out free samples.

That way, you create a lovely surprise when they open your package.

So think about it. It doesn’t cost much and it can pay a lot.

26. Create more products

One of the best ways to make more sales is to have more things to sell.

Plain and simple.

If you have a blog and only one info product to sell, realize that you could make many more sales by creating more products.

Chances are, you have a lot of fans that would love to buy every product you create.

When I first started my vacation rental marketing blog, I only had one product to sell (at around $50). My fans couldn’t buy more than that.

And when I decided to create other products, I had some fans who would buy every product I created.

So instead of spending $50 on my website, some people would spend $200, $400, sometimes $1000!

If you have a blog on which you sell an info product, think about other products you could create in your niche. Chances are you can come up with several other products that your clients will be happy to buy.

27. Use affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make more sales.

You can use affiliate marketing in two ways:

– If you want to make more sales on your website, but you can’t create other products on your own, selling others’ products allows you to display more products to your fan base.

– If you have great products that you want to sell outside of your website, you can offer an affiliation partnership to other businesses in your niche, so that they can sell your products on their website. People who sell your products get a commission on every sale they make.

28. Start a membership

Starting a membership can be a great way to generate constant income.

Your clients pay monthly or yearly for a service or for private access to premium content.

You can include many things to your membership content: podcasts, videos, ebooks, private forums, webinars, seminars, etc.

29. Use cross-selling and up-selling

You can easily make more sales by using cross-selling and/or up-selling strategies.

Cross-selling is when you entice your prospect to buy other products to complete his/her order.

It can be a product that completes the actual product they are going to buy. It can also be a product that people usually buy when buying the product (« People who bought X also bought Y »).

Cross-selling is a very effective way to increase sales, because when you offer your prospects the chance to buy these products, they are already making a purchase. Their mind is far more open to buying than it would normally be.

Up-selling is when you entice your prospect to buy more expensive products of yours, during or after their purchase. It can be products they could need to go further, or a more complete course (if you sell info products).

Up-selling is also a very effective way to make more sales, and most of all to make more money, because those sales are often for relatively expensive products.

30. Make big discounts for products that don’t sell well

If a product don’t sell well, it might be because people don’t attach a lot of value to it. They don’t think it values its price. Or they are not ready to pay that price for it.

Doing a big discount on this product can be a great way to trigger more sales.

You can also gather products that don’t sell well and sell the package at a relatively low price. That’s a great way to increase sales for your products you find difficult to sell.

31. Experiment other communication channels

A quite obvious way to make more sales is to try more communication channels.

If the only place on which you’re selling your products is your website, you can try to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, your mailing list, etc.

Multiplying the communication channels that you use may allow you to make a whole lot more sales.

32. Grow and harvest your mailing list

Your mailing list is your guarantee. It is your capital.

What happens if your website disappears from Google? Or if your ranking drops? What happens if you Facebook page get closed? What happens if you Youtube channel get suspended?

Think about it.

You’re not free from these kind of misfortunes.

Growing a mailing list is the best way to make sure you won’t lose your business if those things happen.

But growing a mailing list is also a great way to make more sales. Here is why:

Whenever you want, you can send emails to your subscribers to sell them products; for instance, if you have new products or if you create a big discount on some of your products.

Try to capture the email addresses of your visitors/customers.

33. Be consistent

Whether it is on your mailing list, on your blog, or on the social networks, try to be consistent.

Ensure that they have you in mind most of the time.

Send them emails several times per month or several times per week.

Send emails that contain free information, or useful information they can use in their life or in their business.

Because if you only send emails that are trying to sell products, your subscribers are not going to pay attention to you for long. Remember ad blindness?

You must give reasons to your subscribers to open your emails or to read your posts, reasons that don’t always include buying.

If they know that they will learn something interesting by reading your emails or your posts, they will be much more receptive to the content. And when you do sell something, they will be much more likely to pay full attention to your sales pitch and to buy.

Giving away free tips is also a way to make them feel in debt to you. That way, they will be more likely to buy, to « thank » you.

34. Don’t try to be someone you’re not

It’s important that your prospects view you as a honest person. It’s important that they consider your company trustworthy.

That’s why I advise you not to try to be someone you’re not.

If you’re alone in your company, don’t try to pretend that you are a big corporate company.

Bear in mind that if people come to you, it might be because they want something more intimate than a big company.

By being honest and coherent, you display trust.

35. Be sure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile

Mobile traffic on the web is consistently growing.

Chances are, more than 50% of your traffic comes from mobile.

This is why you must have a website that is optimized for mobile.

Because if you don’t, you probably leave many sales on the table.

Increase sales online – final thoughts:

Now that you have all theses tips and strategies in mind, you can take action now and start making more sales.

Take the time to test all theses strategies.

Identify what works best for you.

And never stop craving for the best.