Author: Mike Parker

Whether you are a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned Ecommerce businessman, you must be aspiring to establish a large customer base, grow your Ecommerce store to unprecedented heights, and drive a ton of sales– but how do you do that with so much competition at your customer’s fingertips,? Building an Ecommerce store is a no-brainer, and getting your business off the ground is a piece of cake. The main challenge is to generate a tangible number of sales and convert visitors into loyal customers. If you are having trouble driving sales, here are a few actionable tips to boost your ecommerce sales and get the most bang for your buck.

1. Improve Your Site Navigation and Loading Speed

Your site navigation is the guide that new users use to find what they need or some objective. If users can find everything they are looking for in the shortest possible time, they will most likely return to your site next time. This is why you need to make sure that your website navigation is intuitive and clear in order to boost customer engagement. Put yourself in the shoes of potential customers and run a few test cases to see how easy it is for a new user to find anything on your website. In addition, your website load speed also matters a lot, since research has shown that more than 40% of users abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Consumers of today have a dizzying array of choices online whenever they wish to purchase something, so if you want to retain customers, you need to tweak your website to decrease loading time. Not to mention, Google takes loading speed into consideration when ranking site, and a slow loading site could make you lose visibility and traffic.

2. Use Email Marketing

Email marketing has an R.O.I of 4,300%, which means that you can’t possibly ignore it to grow your Ecommerce sales in Dubai. There are quite a few creative ways to use email marketing for your ecommerce store. For instance, you can either create a new email marketing list from scratch or market to an existing list. If you have already accumulated a list – good for you; but if you a new business, you should first focus on accumulating customer data. Most Ecommerce businesses run paid traffic to a page where customers are encouraged to opt in to their email list, for instance in exchange for a giveaway. For instance, you can lure customers with the prospect of putting in their email addresses for a draw to win a hamper of your latest beauty range. When you set up your giveaway the right way, you can easily build a viable email list.
Now that you have your email list, you can start generating sales from it. For instance by cross-selling, where your existing customers receive emails about products that are complementary to what they have already bought. For instance, if someone bought a cupcake mold, you can cross sell them cupcake liners. In addition, email marketing also works best for promoting seasonal sales and events. If you can somehow tie in your store offering with important dates such as Christmas, thanksgiving, Valentine’s day, Easter, Mother’s day, Women’s day, Father’s day, and so forth, email marketing works best to market your products around those events. Email marketing can also be used to run periodic sales or time-sensitive deals, for instance, you can offer a 24 hour discount on your products exclusively for your email subscribers.

3. Highlight Product Benefits

Remember that people pay for benefits, not a list of features that they don’t even understand. One of the best ways of boosting Ecommerce sales is to highlight all the ways your product can solve a real pain point or how it can make their lives easier. First things first, try to include high-quality, professional pictures of your products, capturing shots from each angle. Not to mention, use the right kind of lighting to make sure that your pictures showcase the product as is. Make sure that your pictures portray your products in the best possible light. You can even include product videos, clearly depicting product dimensions and functionality, so that your website visitors can see the product in action for a better understanding. Next, you need to pen down compelling product descriptions to accompany your products. Make sure your product description focuses on the benefits of the product instead of the technical features of the product, and is written in a clear and unambiguous language. If you clearly understand the pain points of your potential audience, you can write the product description keeping in mind the challenges your end users are facing and how your product can offer a solution.

4. Showcase Customer Testimonials

According to a research, consumers are 270 % more likely to buy a product with 5 reviews than one with no reviews!
Customers trust the words of other customers more than they believe in the empty promises of brands. In fact, 84% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. This means that testimonials from legions of satisfied customers can really up your Ecommerce game. Positive reviews and gushing testimonials prove better at increasing ecommerce sales than even the most coaxing copy, so make sure to include customer testimonials on your product pages, Facebook pages, your Google listings and even landing pages. Similar, including a variety of trust signals can also help you instill faith in your customers. For instance, if your business has any professional accreditations or other awards of excellence, they can be leveraged to create a more favorable perception of your brand in the minds of prospects.

5. Display Security Badges

Online consumers are anxious about several things that are unbeknownst to brick-and-mortar customers; especially cyber security. Most people believe that they are putting themselves at risk by entering their credit card details on your website. You need to show your customers that you are trustworthy, which is why you need to make your site secure with SS. SSL certificates ensure that your website is safe for transactions, which will also help you boost Google rankings. Not to mention, new customers have no way of ascertaining if you are a legitimate business. For these and more reasons, Ecommerce stores should help their customers rest easy by displaying all the security badges provided by their merchants, on their websites. Make sure the security badges are visibly prominent at the checkout page so that an anxious customer won’t back off at the time of entering their credit card details.

6. Offer Multiple Payment Options

Some businesses accept cards, some are more partial to WePay or Apple Pay, while some choose Google Wallet payments or Stripe. Consumers have more than one way of paying on Ecommerce stores, but they also have their preferences. For instance, not everyone uses American Express, and having it as the only payment option, can make you lose a chunk of your customers. By offering a multitude of payment options, you can reduce the friction at checkout and facilitate your customers to pay anyway they prefer. Not only that, you should keep a lookout for new services that are gaining popularity so that you can cater to a wider audience base and see fewer abandoned carts.

7. Simply Your Checkout Process

If you are seeing a lot of abandoned carts lately, chances are that your checkout process is too difficult and confusing for consumers. Perhaps consumers are finding it too complex to input payment details, perhaps they don’t want to fill in too many details, they may be forced to create a user account before they can proceed, maybe they are being apprehensive about revealing their credit card details, perhaps they were not prepared for unexpected shipping costs, and so on. All in all, almost three quarters of shoppers abandon their carts on Ecommerce websites and turn to competitors due to a complicated checkout process. If you want to increase sales on your Ecommerce website, you should firstly transparent about shipping costs, and if you can offer free shipping above a certain order amount, you will greatly lure customers to finish the checkout process. Next, you need to make your checkout process easier for customers. For instance, if customers don’t want to register, they should be able to checkout as a “guest.” After all, your end goal is to make a sale, no matter how you do it. Also, our experts recommend incorporating a progress indicator so that the “guests” know where they are in the process and what else they need to do before their checkout process is complete.

8. Implement Upsells

Upselling is all about targeting customers who are buying standard or basic products and coaxing them into purchasing ‘customized’ or ‘upgraded’ versions of the products – in a nutshell, showcasing the ‘next model up.’ For instance, if you have ever bought a computer from Apple, you must have been provided with the option to upgrade by selecting a different processor or even choose from a host of other upgrades along with your purchase. This doesn’t exactly increase sales but instead increases the order value, which proves to be 20X beneficial for businesses than cross selling. While you are displaying the higher ended products to the customers at the checkout, it also helps to include the ratings and reviews of the more expensive product and perhaps a list of the hottest features, in order to entice people to choose the more expensive model.

9. Target your Existing Customers

If you are having trouble making sales, it may not be because you lack new customers. Businesses are often so fixated on customer acquisition that they fail to focus on customer retention strategies. As compared to new customers, your loyal customers are much more likely to add more items to their shopping list, make higher valued purchases, or even have a higher conversion rate. While it’s great to drive more and more new customers to your Ecommerce store, customer acquisition can be costly. It’s much more pocket friendly to target your existing customer base and enhance their experience on your site, since they are the ones who know your brand and know how to use your products. You can introduce customer loyalty programs where customers gain points for their purchase which can be redeemed later.

People looking to eat out in Dubai are met with a dizzying array of choices in this thriving city. Restaurants looking to stay afloat, have to contend with competing for customer attention beyond location. As an independent or small chain business owner in Dubai, you need to have a stellar social media marketing and lead generation strategy in place to reel in new customers and keep loyal ones coming back. If you want to fill your restaurant up with customers, you need to make lead generation your utmost priority. As such, here are a few stellar lead generation techniques that restaurants in Dubai can use to get more customers.

Build a Customer Database

The more customer data you acquire, the higher your chances of closing sales. In fact, lead generation should be an integral part of your sales process. You can start growing your email list by attaching email subscription forms to your website or your Facebook page to shoot out your marketing collateral. This way you can make sure that you are building your email list while customers are knowing more about your business. Some of your visitors won’t be willing to leave their contact information on your site if they don’t get something in return. You may lure those potential customers with appealing incentive for leaving their email addresses, such as a discount coupon or a free drink with their next meal.

Narrate Your Restaurant’s Story

People are always looking for a dose of inspiration. Why not regale them with tales of how you came up with your idea of opening the restaurant, how you stumbled upon the concept of the restaurant, share your achievements with them, show them your human side and tell them how much you enjoy cooking. Your patrons and potential customers would love this personal touch and even encourage their friends to eat at your place.

Post Professional Food Pictures

Food photography is the key to promoting your restaurant across all social media platforms, especially on Instagram where food porn is alive and well. Lure your potential customers with tantalizing pictures of your offerings, your interiors, and show people having fun at your place. It’s best to hire a professional photographer rather than do it yourself or you may want to invest in top-notch tools and equipment to make sure your drool-worthy pictures speak volumes about your service. You may even host a photo contest by asking customers to share their favorite meal at your establishment.

Social Media Engagement

Social media is a critical part of your restaurant marketing game. If you are a social media aficionado, you must be aware of tips and tricks that top restaurants are leveraging to capture and engage their audience via social media channels. If you look at Instagram alone, there are approximately 200 million posts tagged as food and around 23 million hashtags for drinks and food. Research says that 88% of online users are influenced by reviews and comments. No matter the platform you choose to send your message, there are plenty of online tools that help restaurants post on social media and track engagement. In order to increase engagement, make sure your posts are relevant and personalized to your end audience.

Promote Your Restaurant’s Mobile App

Does your restaurant have a mobile app? Are you looking for ways to get more downloads for your restaurant app? If so, it’s prudent to create a landing page to promote your mobile app. simply promote the URL in push notifications, your website, and other social media channels, so that your customers can directly download it right from your site.

Focus on Creating More video content

One of the top lead generation tricks for restaurants is to carve their presence in online communities. Video content improves SEO, increases conversion rates, and so much more. Restaurants can post quick recipe videos of their hottest items, share a recent customer’s experience, post behind the scenes videos – the sky is the limit. Video content can do wonders for your brand identity. You need to impinge your brand in the minds of your customers so that your customers automatically think of you when they are looking for a place to eat. Be sure to use high-quality, informative videos as gated content and add a call to action at the end of every video to start generating more leads.

Design a Stellar Restaurant Menu

Most of us look up a restaurant’s menu and what people are saying about the food and ambiance, in advance before deciding to eat there. As a matter of fact, 93% of people view menus online prior to dining out. For most people, a restaurant’s Facebook page is the obvious choice to check out the menu in the current era of social media. This is why it never fails to surprise me that a lot of restaurants neglect to display their menus on their Facebook page or website. If you haven’t added your menu yet, design a stellar menu and make it available for your customers to view.

Create A Blog

If you want to drive customers to your restaurant, be sure to create a blog and share value adding stories for your audience. While no one is asking you to leak out your secret ingredient, make sure that customers find your content useful and relevant. You may share your knowledge about different cuts of meat, exotic spices or new techniques, tell them your successes and struggles, share your favorite author’s cookbook, or keep readers updated about the upcoming events or expected changes at your restaurant. Ask people to contribute and be sure to give them a shutout when they do so. A creative and useful blog not only helps you attain direct leads through SEO and other organic traffic sources, it also helps you instil trust in your audience by positioning you as an authority in your field.

Word Of Mouth

No matter how many out-of-the-box lead generation strategies you employ, word of mouth will always remain one of the most viable ways to grow your business. When you consistently offer flawless service to your customers, they will most likely recommend you to everyone they know and even endorse your restaurant on different pages and social groups. This endorsement will make the task of converting leads much easier. Seeing the importance of referrals, why not go a step ahead and even incentivize referrals by offering something to each customer who writes a positive review about your restaurant or even offer a referral bonus for each new customer that they bring.

Influencer Outreach

Influencer outreach is all about finding the right leaders and other influencers in your niche, who are somewhat of an authority in the food business like food bloggers and famous food critics, and building a mutual relationship with them. It always works to your advantage when you have a high-profile name supporting what you’ve done or endorsing your food. If you are finding it difficult to generate reviews and hype about your business, invite food bloggers with a substantial following to your restaurant and ask them to post pictures of themselves enjoying at your restaurant, pen down a nice review or even make a short video of their surroundings. Even just one write up or mention from a major foodie can turn out to be a big game changer.

Add reservation links to Google Business

2021 is almost here and it is high time you stop wasting time over Yelp reviews. As Google continues to dominate online food searches, Yelp is losing its standing. Chances are, you already have a Google Business account, including your restaurant name, location, operating hours, website link, map location, some pictures, and so on. If you do so, start leveraging Google’s Open Graph and local discovery to take reservations directly from your GMB page. The reservation field automatically links to your online reservation system without customers having to visit your website. Some restaurants using this simple technique have reported a 20% increase in online reservations.

Send Birthday Emails

People go out to celebrate their birthdays and you may want to capitalize on these diners throwing birthday bashes. Make sure to include a field for birthdays when you are collecting customer data, such as review forms and survey forms. You may also ask for their birthdays when making reservations. Be sure to send them a personalized email a week or two out from their big day wishing them happy birthday in advance and explaining how you can make their birthday extra sweeter. You may even throw in a nice discount or a free cake for a party of 10 or above.

Retarget Marketing

Do you want customers, who have visited your restaurant page even once, to be followed by your ad for weeks afterwards? Now we are talking retarget marketing. In essence, retargeting works by attaching a cookie to each user who lands on your site. This cookie activates your ads even when the user browses the web somewhere else. This is an effective strategy to reel in customers who have already visited your site but failed to convert the first time. Your aim is to stay fresh in their minds so they automatically think of your restaurant when they are looking for a place to eat out.

Online Reputation Management

Your overall lead generation strategy should also include monitoring the online reputation of your restaurant. Your online reputation and what people are saying about you has a direct bearing on how the customer perceives your business when they come across your website, ad, or social media page. Online reviews have as large an impact on your restaurant as personal recommendations. Reputation management is all about learning how to effectively manage negative business reviews, satisfy enraged customers, responding promptly to complaints, and encouraging happy customers to leave feedback for other customers to see. A stellar online reputation makes all the difference when it comes to improving customer engagement and standing a head above competitors. You may consider using Google Alerts, which notifies you when your business appears in a new conversation or a piece of content on the web! It becomes easier to eavesdrop on who is talking about you.

Remember when you first met Google, the motto was “Don’t be evil”? which was transformed in 2015 to “Do the right thing.”

Most of you will argue that this perfectly symbolizes Google’s evolution over the past years. Taking the critical stuff and pushing them on the bottom of the page on their guidelines page.

Every Google search uses the same energy that turns on a 60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds. A small insignificant amount, you might think, but when there are 79,009 searches per second, it adds to a significant amount. I bet you haven’t heard or thought about any such thing before searching for things on the internet. Do you know that some search engines do social good to people? 

Hold your breath and buckle your seatbelt, we are here to update you on six alternative search engines that don’t promise “Don’t be evil” – instead they do good with every search that you do.

Give Water

The first in the list is a search engine called “Give Water” that aims to solve the poor water quality issue one search at a time. The company was formed when the CEO, Michael Feeley, met Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity and got inspired instantly to make a difference with his work. When a user searches anything and then clicks on the paid ads, the site generates revenue. Give Water than shares its profits with partners from various charities that are working on sanitation facilities and busy in improving the quality of the water.

However, GiveWater founders warn not to click on ads to do some good. This might terminate the affiliate agreement, which can throw them out of business. GiveWater is not totally a non-profit. It is just a new breed of companies that aim to do good and build a business around that good.

Ekoru

Another search engine – Ekoru aims to share 60% of its profits with several partner charities that deal with animal welfare and reforestation. They pick different charities every month. Moreover, Ekoru claims not to store any user data or information on their data servers. The only downside is that Ekoru is limited to some countries, which makes it difficult for everyone to access the search engine and make a difference.

Ecosia

A German-based search engine that plant trees with the profits that they get on every search query. Ecosia managed to plant 75 million trees at the time of this writing. A ten-year-old search engine that developed a reputation of the search engine with a conscience and won a couple of awards for its noble cause. Furthermore, the company has its solar energy to run its data center instead of relying on external providers. Up till now, the company invested over $10 million in planting trees and successfully able to cut costs by 22 cents per tree.

Everyclick

This UK-based search engine takes the affiliate model one step ahead. Everyclick was founded in 2005 as a tool for raising funds for charities, which later added Bing as its primary search partner, along with its tool Give as you live that raises money for charitable causes. Tons of websites promise to give something back to users with every purchase but Everyclick directs that money to charity instead. Like other search engines, Everyclick provides a browser extension making the whole process simple and easy. The Give as you live program is compatible with more than 4,400 various stores online. You can even raise money for charity at no cost to you.

Givero

Taking a different approach to helping others, the search engine Givero allows its users to select which causes they want to back. The privacy-centric inspiration is taken straight from DuckDuckGo. The users don’t need any profile, and no history is ever stored regarding the searches, and most importantly, the tool is not hooked up with any affiliate site either. Although the search engine is merely a new addition in the marketplace, the good news is that people are helping the tool in brining new charities on board. Users can support environmental and children charities as well, with 50% of the company revenue going to charitable partners.

Lilo

At the time of writing, Lilo has a half-million users that are doing 40 million searches, which raised around $2.5 million in charity. Along with protecting user data, the search engine prevents ads from tracking the privacy of users. The most exciting part is the waterdrop system. With every search, there will be a waterdrop and every waterdrop can be assigned to the charity of your choice to help you fund them.

In the End

Whether you use Google or even Bing to search for things, you may want to try these search engines in parallel and contribute your part in making our world a better place. 

Most of these search engines give you an option of a browser extension and other goodies just like all other mainstream search engines. The marketplace for socially conscious search engines is thriving, which means that you won’t struggle to find one that supports a charity that you care about.