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September 17, 2021

6 Must-Have Tools for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs to Increase Sales



The ecommerce space is swarming with online sellers.

The competition is fierce. Cutthroat. And unrelenting. So much so that you'll never succeed in ecommerce if you are ill-equipped with the tools to win your customers over.

First, you need to use the best ecommerce platform -- be it a traditional or a headless ecommerce website builder. Without one, you'll be severely handicapped. Not only will you end up doing mounds of manual, menial, repetitive, and short-term work (and lose all your hair in the process), but you might find yourself doing truckloads of firefighting due to your ecommerce platform's lack of features.



Second, you need to have the tools to complement your ecommerce initiatives.

And that's what this post is about...

To help you with your ecommerce business, we will cover several tools seasoned ecommerce entrepreneurs are using to generate truckloads of sales.

1. Dialogue

Improve and personalize the shopping experience of your customers by offering options that align with their wants. The more pleasant and relevant your customers’ experience is with your site, the more likely they are to keep on coming back.

Use Dialogue, an ecommerce and conversion rate optimization tool to accomplish this.

Dialogue uses machine learning and AI to deliver highly-relevant site content, relevant products, personalized messages, and results in real-time according to your unique customers’ journey, interests, and other data.

Dialogue’s AI continuously optimizes its data collection and behavior learning to instantly promote messages that drive conversions based on the user’s unique and specific customer journey.

For example, I clicked on a star tulle dress on Nununu World, a merchant that saw nearly 30% improved conversion rate and the site recommended the following similar items:

Personalized product suggestions like these stimulate your shoppers’ interest to add more items to their carts, increasing your sales.

Plus, once you integrate Dialogue with your store, the tool operates immediately as a natural part of your website, fully automatically.

2. Mailmunch

Mailmunch is a popular lead generation tool that allows you to easily create opt-in forms and landing pages without having to write a single line of code.

For example, if you want to collect more email subscribers for your newsletter subscription, you can create and embed an email pop-up opt-in on your blog pages like this one:

The platform offers a variety of templates so you can choose a design that aligns with your brand. Use these forms to get your website visitors’ attention and collect their email addresses.

In turn, send product or service promotions to these contacts to convert them into customers. Do this in conjunction with your content marketing platforms where you manage your email newsletter creation, quality, delivery, and marketing. This way, you can ensure giving email content truly worth subscribing to.

Mailmunch also integrates with a few major email marketing platforms such as MailChimp and AWeber -- enabling you to streamline your email marketing campaigns and grow your business faster.

To top it off, Mailmunch offers a free subscription to its platform which already includes landing pages and page-level targeting. Meanwhile, their paid subscriptions include more functionalities such as A/B testing and analytics.

With a lead capturing platform like Mailmunch, it’s easier to capture potential leads, grow your lead generation database, and increase conversions.

3. SaleCycle Countdown Timers

When customers see a clock ticking down, they are compelled to make the purchase immediately for fear of not having the opportunity to purchase the product at a later time.

Use timers such as SaleCycle Countdown Timers to trigger or display countdowns on different parts of your website and during several occasions.

For example, countdown timers are perfect for highlighting offers and end dates during a sale period.

Planning your countdown timer inputs is best if you’re keeping timelines of your sale and other promotional events in a Gantt-chart-making platform. Doing this helps you organize and set up your countdown triggers in advance or according to schedule, plus closely monitor their contributions to your sales performance.

Additionally, trigger countdown timers when website visitors are about to leave your page or when they click a certain button to grab their attention and make them take an action or stay longer on your site.

Countdown timers can also be displayed through notifications to influence customers subtly and not distract them from browsing your site.

It’s also a great idea to add your countdown timers beside a fast-loading video so customers visually see that time’s running out and it alerts them to make a purchase soon. Ideally, you want to use countdowns on pages where customers are considering a purchase such as your homepage, product page, shopping cart, or checkout page.

Countdown timers are effective at any time, but it works best during sales or limited-time deals. With SaleCycle’s Countdown timer, easily add a countdown on your pages, attract customers, and increase your sales quicker.

4. Rain

Run your ecommerce store more effectively with all-in-one retail software programs such as Rain.

Rain runs on a single database, meaning inventory levels constantly remain the same throughout your sales channels.

The POS and website are also always accurate and synchronized since details are automatically stored in the cloud, eliminating the need for backups and in-house servers.

As a result, you and your sales staff don’t have to be in specific locations or on certain devices to produce sales and reports, obtain business information, or do anything else with the POS. You can work anywhere with a WiFi (News - Alert) network or hot spot on any computer or mobile gadget.

Here’s how Rain’s interface looks like, for example, when processing a sale (with a gift card):

Besides cloud-based POS and integrated POS and e-commerce, Rain offers synchronization features suited for businesses such as rentals, services and repair, and online classes.

Additionally, Rain provides automated email and SMS marketing, including social reviews, among others, to help you reach and update your target customers with omnichannel marketing strategies.

Here’s what you’ll see when sending promotional text messages, for instance:

To transition smoothly into this cloud-based system, Rain gives unlimited technical and data migration support.

With these powerful features, you can substantially grow your retail revenue (by 20% or higher) year over year and seamlessly run your sales-related operations.

5. Keap

Using different solutions for your customer communications, payment processes, and other aspects of your sales operations can make you inefficient and waste resources.

Instead, manage those aspects through Keap, a comprehensive CRM, sales and marketing automation software tool.

Keap lets you send your calendar link to your customers to set their appointment schedules according to your availability.

To improve your retail business sales, Keap has a Pipeline feature for you to track and organize your leads (through drag-and-drop) in each stage of your sales process -- all in a single, interactive view.

Keap also lets you send quotes, convert quotes into invoices, create invoices, send billing as friendly reminders, and accept credit card payments right from its app, among others.

Its CRM even lets you house and update all client records, including transaction history, shared file, follow-up tasks, etc., automate the delivery of personalized emails, and collect data quickly.

Additionally, Keap offers email marketing and marketing automation features, analytics, sales, administrative, and other reports, and hundreds of app integrations.

6. Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure DevOps (+ Backrightup)

Did you know that the market share of mobile ecommerce sales in the total ecommerce sales worldwide has increased by almost 40% (from 52.4% to 72.9%)?

Plus, nearly 60% of shoppers say that the ability to shop on mobile devices is a consideration when choosing retailers they will buy from.

That said, here’s an excellent option encouraging more potential mobile buyers and boosting your sales: build your own ecommerce app to go with your website.

With an app, you can further bolster your brand recognition, stay more closely connected with customers, and send promotional alerts faster.

To build your app with seamless processes, use Microsoft Azure DevOps. It offers functionalities covering the entire development lifecycle -- from creation to testing, deployment, and all other phases in between.

It even lets you collaborate with your app development team and create project wikis. To verify your app’s security and code quality, Microsoft Azure DevOps allows you to run automated tests in your pipeline. You can also scan your code plus third-party elements for possible vulnerabilities, among others.

Once you’ve built your app, further protect its code and your future information through regular, automated backups. Doing this guarantees you can resume your operations immediately and not shut down your business should you lose your data to system failures, hackers, etc.

If you built your app on Microsoft Azure DevOps, for instance, you can use tools such as Backrightup. Automating your Azure DevOps backup activities, it duplicates repositories, pipelines, and other items and sends updates about its activities every day.

In this way, you don’t need to take time backing up your code, data, and their updates yourself (which is extremely burdensome). You can focus on profitable tasks and remain confident about your app’s code security.

Up your sales with these tools now.

With these four powerful online solutions, you can turn your business around and further boost your sales before the year ends.

Explore these tools deeply and visualize how they can optimize your operations, customer relationships, and sales and marketing tactics.


 
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