If you’re a merchant selling on WooCommerce, you know that increasing sales can be one of your biggest challenges.
You have a lot to consider: how will you attract new customers? How will you encourage those customers to become repeat buyers? Increasing sales requires both great products and a standout online shopping experience. And it goes even further—to retain loyal customers, you must facilitate a smooth shipping experience.
This article will walk through 11 proven strategies for increasing WooCommerce sales. In addition to sharing ecommerce best practices for increasing conversions and revenue, we’ll share examples from successful brands and point you to some helpful tools.
1. Optimize Your Website’s Loading Speed
In an age of short attention spans, a fast-loading ecommerce website is essential. When your page loads in 3 seconds or fewer, you’ll see higher customer satisfaction and increased sales. On the other hand, slow loading times result in higher bounce rates, with people leaving the site before even seeing your products.
Is your site fast enough? Use Google PageSpeed to test its performance. If it’s not up to scratch, don’t jump straight to a plugin. You don’t necessarily need fancy tools to optimize your WooCommerce website loading speed—just follow a few foundational best practices. It starts with choosing a reliable hosting provider, one with adequate resources to handle traffic and deliver content quickly.
Once you have reliable hosting in place, focus on the building blocks of your page. To minimize HTTP requests, reduce the number of elements on a page. You should also enable browser caching to allow frequently accessed files to be stored locally, speeding up page loading times for repeat visitors. Optimize images by compressing and resizing them to reduce file sizes without compromising quality, and minify CSS and Javascript.
2. Enhance User Experience and Design
Your site’s user experience (UX) and design directly impact how people perceive and interact with your brand. A well-designed, intuitive interface makes it easy for shoppers to find exactly what they need, and shoppers are far more likely to complete their purchase when the buying process is smooth and hassle-free.
Let’s start with the visual experience. Your site should look clean and consistent, with every design element aligning with your brand identity. Fortunately, WooCommerce has a large variety of customizable themes to choose from.
But visual design is just the cherry on top of a good user experience. First and foremost, your site should be functional. The tips below will help you design a user-friendly ecommerce website.
- Measure user behavior. Consumers may be interacting with your site differently than you’d expect. With a tool like the Hotjar WordPress plugin, you can collect data on how people interact with your website, which will reveal potential UX improvements.
- Create a clear, organized interface. Your site should have clear categories and logical navigation, allowing users to easily find the products or information they’re looking for.
- Include search functionality. A robust search feature lets users quickly locate specific products.
- Be strategic about call-to-actions (CTAs). Visible CTAs guide users toward desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. Place your CTAs where they will stand out.
- Write detailed product descriptions. Product descriptions help shoppers know if a product is right for them. Highlight the key features and advantages of each item to inform and persuade potential buyers.
- Optimize for mobile. Many people shop online using their phones or tablets. To convert these users, create a responsive design that works seamlessly on mobile devices.
Focusing on UX and visual design helps build trust with consumers. With a foundation of trust and confidence, you’ll increase sales and get more repeat customers.
3. Streamline the Checkout Process
A shopper has found your website, researched and selected a product, and decided to buy. Now, they have one more hurdle to overcome: checkout. To help your customers finish strong, you need to make this final hurdle as low as possible.
The best checkout flows include minimal steps, don’t require users to create an account, display fees transparently, and use multiple secure payment methods.
- Be transparent about fees. Clearly display all shipping costs and any other fees upfront to avoid surprises that might deter customers at the last moment.
- Minimize required steps. Simplify the checkout process by minimizing the number of clicks and pages required to complete a purchase. This helps keep customers focused and reduces the risk of them leaving the site.
- Allow guest checkout. Letting customers complete their purchases as guests can significantly improve the checkout experience for first-time buyers who might be hesitant to create an account.
- Provide multiple payment methods. Providing multiple payment methods caters to different customer preferences and increases the likelihood of completing a sale. Use trusted payment gateways and implement robust fraud protection measures.
You have access to a wide variety of WordPress plugins and WooCommerce extensions to improve your WooCommerce checkout experience. Some of the most popular include FluidCheckout and FunnelKit, which both provide features to customize and simplify the checkout flow.
In addition to the strategies mentioned above, consider your shipping offering. Do you provide multiple shipping options? What about shipping insurance?
It’s easy to add a shipping insurance option to your WooCommerce store. Just download an extension like Norton Shopping Guarantee with Package Protection by EasyPost. For a small fee, shoppers can insure their purchases against loss, damage, and theft.
Splash Wines includes the Norton Shopping Guarantee trust badges on product and checkout pages, reassuring visitors that they can protect their fragile purchases from shipping issues.
By making the checkout process smooth, transparent, and secure, you’ll improve user satisfaction, boost sales, and foster customer loyalty.
4. Recover Abandoned Carts
Despite your best efforts, some shoppers will abandon their carts. However, you still have a way to convert these hesitant customers: cart abandonment emails. In the emails, remind customers of the items in their shopping cart. Then, prompt them to complete their purchase. Including incentives like discounts or free shipping is an excellent way to encourage people to buy.
Of course, abandonment emails are your last chance to win customers back. The better option is to prevent cart abandonment in the first place. Let’s outline a few things you can do to increase the chances that buyers will make a purchase.
First, you need to have transparent shipping and return policies. Otherwise, customers might get an unpleasant surprise at checkout, realizing that their package won’t arrive in time, will cost too much to send, or can’t be returned.
Additionally, keeping products in stock is crucial to reducing abandonment rates. If customers find that even a single item they want is unavailable, they might abandon their other products too.
5. Offer Discounts, Coupons, and Incentives
Offering discounts, coupons, and incentives is an effective way to attract and retain customers. You might use a special offer to entice a new customer or bring back a returning customer. You could also show appreciation for customers by sending a coupon on a special event, like their birthday or the anniversary of their first purchase.
It’s important to be strategic in your use of discounts and coupons. Using A/B testing, see which offers resonate the most and have the best results. While you can experiment with both percentage discounts and dollar-off incentives, keep in mind that dollar-off incentives can help drive up average order value without decreasing your profit margins too much.
Sometimes, you might want to run a sale instead of providing discounts to individual customers. Running sales, particularly during busy periods, creates a sense of urgency and drives immediate purchases. Limited-time offers spur customers to act quickly to take advantage of the discounts.
Carhartt puts their 25% off sale front and center on the homepage.
Advanced Coupons and OptinMonster are two great plugins for showcasing your deals and making it easy for customers to take advantage of offers.
6. Increase Visibility Using SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is all about increasing your website’s visibility on search engines like Google. Great SEO drives organic traffic, helping you reach new potential customers without having to pay for ads.
To get started with SEO, use a tool like Moz, Semrush, or Ahrefs to research competitors and discover which keywords they’re ranking for. This can provide valuable insights into the competitive landscape and help in formulating an effective SEO strategy.
You’ll want to incorporate relevant keywords in product descriptions, but make sure your descriptions aren’t stuffed with keywords to the point that they feel awkward or unnatural. Well-written, informative descriptions that seamlessly include keywords can improve both user experience and search engine rankings.
7. Showcase Social Proof and Customer Reviews
Showcasing social proof and customer reviews is a powerful way to build trust and credibility. The reason is simple: people have learned that they can’t always trust brands to deliver on their promises. However, they trust their fellow consumers to tell the truth about their experiences with products and services.
So, what’s the best way to incorporate social proof on your WooCommerce website?
- Add reviews to home and product pages. Display customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to highlight positive experiences and encourage others to make purchases. Incorporating these elements on the home page and product pages can reassure visitors about the quality and reliability of your products.
- Personalize reviews. Allowing a reviewer to add details such as their name, photo, and location can add authenticity and transparency to the reviews, making them more compelling to potential buyers.
- Use video. Many consumers enjoy the convenience of watching a video. Video testimonials are an effective way to showcase social proof, as they allow customers to share their experiences in an engaging and dynamic format.
Best Choice Products allows customers to add photos with reviews, and users can filter by popular topics to find the most relevant reviews.
Tools like Customer Reviews for WooCommerce and YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews can help you integrate reviews into your site in a clean, professional way. These types of tools also remind customers to leave reviews (sometimes offering an incentive) and make it easy for customers to review products.
You don’t need to restrict reviews and testimonials to your website—social media is another powerful tool for collecting and sharing positive feedback. If a customer tags you in a positive post or video, share it to amplify its impact and reach a wider audience. This encourages other satisfied customers to share their experiences online.
8. Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful way to engage with customers, drive sales, and build brand loyalty. Its greatest advantage is that you have control and ownership of your audience. Unlike social media platforms, where algorithms can limit reach, you have direct access to email subscribers and can communicate with them on your terms.
First, build an email list. You can collect email addresses through various channels, including website sign-ups, purchases, and events.
SnackCrate encourages site visitors to sign up for emails and texts with a popup offering a $5 discount.
Once you have an email list, you can communicate a variety of messages:
- Announcements about new products
- Exclusive discounts
- Rewards program details
- Referral rewards
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Holiday deals
- Offers for special occasions, such as birthdays
- Recommended products
For your emails to be most effective, they should be personalized to recipients. Segment email lists and personalize content based on customer preferences and behavior. For example, emails can be tailored to show a customer products based on their past purchase history.
MailChimp and Klaviyo are two of the most widely used email marketing platforms, each allowing you to customize email templates, segment audiences, personalize messages, automate emails and texts, and more.
9. Upsell and Cross-Sell Products
Upselling and cross-selling are effective strategies for increasing your average order value and maximizing revenue per customer.
- Upselling involves encouraging customers to purchase a higher-end or more expensive version of the product they’re considering. For example, you might suggest that a customer upgrade to a deluxe model of a camera with additional lenses and accessories.
- Cross-selling is the practice of recommending related or complementary products to customers based on their current purchase. For example, if a customer purchases a camera, your website might suggest batteries, a memory card, or a camera strap.
One way to upsell is to offer discounts if customers buy more or purchase additional items. For example, businesses can incentivize customers to buy larger quantities with bulk discounts or bundle deals. To cross-sell, strategically showcase related or complementary products during the checkout process or on product pages to encourage customers to add more items to their cart.
Atoms cross-sells on product pages with a section that says “Pairs well with…”
Upselling and cross-selling strategies not only increase revenue per transaction but also enhance the overall customer experience by providing additional value and convenience to customers. Popular upsell and cross-sell solutions include Cart Upsell for WooCommerce and UpsellWP.
10. Leverage Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a powerful way to reach and engage with your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive conversions.
When you’ve established a strong presence on popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you’ll be able to connect with potential customers in a space where they go to find and research products. This is especially true of younger generations, with one survey finding that 63% of people under 25 discover new brands or products on social media at least weekly.
Get creative when making and sharing content on social media. Choose relevant and engaging topics that resonate with your ideal customer. This might include informative blog posts, entertaining videos, captivating images, and interactive polls or quizzes. You can also use social media to inform your followers of flash sales or limited-time offers.
In addition to organic content, consider leveraging paid social media advertising to expand your reach and target specific demographics. Social media advertising platforms offer advanced targeting options that allow you to tailor your ads to reach the most relevant audience segments.
Finally, remember to treat social media as a two-way street. In order to drive audience engagement, you need to engage with your customers. Respond to messages, comment on posts that mention your brand, and look for fun ways to highlight customer testimonials.
11. Monitor and Adapt Based on Performance Data
As you consistently implement the strategies above, you’ll start seeing more sales. To keep the momentum going, monitor your progress by regularly analyzing performance data. This will show you what techniques are working best and help you optimize strategies.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the standard tool for website analytics. Many businesses unlock deeper insights by integrating their GA4 data with another tool, such as Conversios or MonsterInsights.
You can dig deep into your website data, but it’s helpful to begin with a few key metrics:
- Conversion rate measures the percentage of site visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase. Tracking conversion rates across different channels and campaigns will allow you to identify which strategies are most effective in driving conversions.
- Average order value (AOV) represents the average amount spent by customers per transaction. Monitoring AOV over time will help you understand purchasing patterns and identify upselling and cross-selling strategies.
- Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of shoppers who add products to their shopping cart but leave the website before completing the purchase. High cart abandonment rates are a sign of potential issues in the checkout process.
- Cost of customer acquisition (CAC) measures the amount of money spent on acquiring a new customer. By comparing CAC to customer lifetime value (CLV), you can determine the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts and make informed decisions about where to allocate resources.
In addition to these metrics, you should also track other relevant data, such as website traffic, engagement metrics like time on site and bounce rate, and customer feedback.
Ready To Increase WooCommerce Sales?
This article has shared 11 strategies for increasing sales on your WooCommerce store. These strategies will help you reach a wider audience, attract more shoppers, and convert them into paying customers. Even more importantly, you’ll be able to bring those customers back with the help of frequent email and social media touches.
The most successful ecommerce merchants begin with a foundation of customer trust and confidence. One of the easiest ways to build trust with shoppers from the get-go is to use a trust-building solution like Norton Shopping Guarantee with Package Protection by EasyPost.
With sitewide trust badges, various consumer protection guarantees, and shipping insurance, Norton Shopping Guarantee creates a secure online shopping experience that reduces cart abandonment and increases sales.
Talk to an ecommerce specialist today and start increasing your WooCommerce sales with Norton Shopping Guarantee.
