How to Increase Website Sales in 2023
I can’t believe we’re already talking about 2023. It feels like yesterday we were looking at targets for 2022, and here we are. It’s been a funny old year. Offices reopened, some people are still hybrid, others are working from home full time.
We’ve had a huge economic downturn, with fears over a cost of living crisis causing people to keep their wallets in their pockets. One of the most notable side effects of this has been the delayed Christmas shopping. In 2022, people were ordering coffee gifts and gift sets as early as October 1st. This year, we didn’t notice a drive in sales until the end of November. Was it the same for you?
The high street has once again struggled. We’re so sorry to see how hard you’ve all been hit, and our entire team are on hand to help in any way we can. Our trade blog is full of tips to help you boost online coffee sales and we’re now offering monthly deals on our B2B portal, exclusively for trade customers, to help you increase your profit margins or run sales to drive traffic.
As well as offering some of our best deals yet, we’re sharing our own experience when it comes to scaling an ecommerce coffee business. Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re not perfect. We’ve faced a lot of challenges this year, up there with one of our toughest years to date. But we’ve also achieved some massive milestones that none of us would have believed possible at the beginning of the year. So here’s how we did it.
Increase brand-related search
If someone is searching for your brand, they want to come to your website. That’s obvious. We hear marketing and ecommerce agencies bang on and on about brand awareness, but there really is a link between brand awareness and conversion.
The same can be said for any of your own products. Take our Brew It Stick as an example. Widely known as the original coffee infusion stick, we designed it to make the switch from instant coffee to fresh coffee as easy as possible. And it worked. That product has won awards for innovation and is stocked across the UK in both large and independent retailers.
As you know, when something innovative comes out the woodworks the copycats aren’t far behind. The greatest thing about working on brand awareness is that we can track, monitor and analyse search and web traffic for brand-related terms. We know people are searching for ‘coffee infusion stick’ and ‘Barista & Co Brew It Stick’. And guess where they end up? On our website.
Investing in your brand and product awareness campaigns might feel like throwing money down the toilet. But hold your horses. No one is searching for brands they haven’t heard of yet. Grow your brand first. The sales will follow.
Make the most of key trade dates
Don’t wait until the last minute to launch your Black Friday deals or send that marketing email out for Mothers Day. We all know these holidays are approaching, and customers are looking for the perfect gift there and then…
Your eCommerce plan will look a little different to your marketing plan. You know when your traffic is highest, what day of the week you convert the most people and how many times people visit your product pages before they convert. With that data, you can build targeted segments, custom workflows and all-round-amazing plans to drive as much revenue as possible out of these key dates.
We changed our abandoned cart flow for Black Friday, increasing conversion rate without offering any incentive. How? We played on FOMO – reminding people that these deals were only going to be live for a very short amount of time.
It’s these kinds of things you’re going to need to think about when it comes to converting website traffic into sales in 2023. Every. Single. Step. And the best part is, you’ve got thousands of opportunities to practice before Q4 hits us all again!
Stop Relying so Heavily on Meta
We’ve all heard the rumours. Facebook and Instagram marketing is becoming rapidly more expensive. Engagement? Easy. Brand awareness? Easy. But when it comes down to it, the thing we all care about is conversions and revenue. Hard.
This year we stopped spending so much of our resources on Meta. This includes time, staff and marketing budget. It was a tough call. All we’ve been told in the decade that we’ve been running Barista & Co is that we need to be present on social media. But I’m starting to think that social media might be overpopulated with ads.
You’ll probably know from your own market space. Everyone is pushing on Meta, both Facebook and Instagram. Social media users are drowning in a sea of ads and incentives. Unless you really are the first to do something, your message is lost in the sea.
While Meta has remained part of our strategy, it certainly isn’t the most dominant. We’ve ran a lot of A/B tests with different email marketing, Google and TikTok campaigns this year… all of which resulted in a better ROAS.
Summary
While we’re not eCommerce experts by any means, our team have spent a lot of this year learning what works and what doesn’t. Everyone’s online store is different, so we just hope you find at least one useful bit of information in this post.
We’re always on hand to help our retailers as much as we can. Whether you want some high resolution images for your product page, or a search engine optimised product description, or both, just send an email to sales@baristaandco.com.
