Alana and I started in a 70 square foot room. One of our clients Frank (a former professional football player) literally could not fit from corner to corner, yikes.
In the following article we will share 5 tips that helped us morph from this 70 square foot room (services like facials only) into 3 separate 7 figure businesses.
And yes, years later we have calculated we have sold over 30 million dollars in physical products and services (not including amazon). Sounds like a dream right?
Well our dream was to get my wife Alana out of the services room eventually, and it happened quicker than we thought. I’ll never forget our first vacation to Hawaii together, we were by the pool drinking pina coladas, and we realized that we were making money while we were sitting there, and she had not done a facial in over year!
For us, it was and still is all about selling products online, starting with the ones that were on our retail shelves.
Look, if you had the gumption to build your own website, you CAN do it too. So many estheticians, nail technicians, hair stylists, and all around beauty professionals ask us every day how to increase their online store sales so they can spend less time getting their hands dirty with clients.
As the current head of e-commerce for NeilPatel.com, I have had the pleasure of auditing thousands of ecomm websites. Combine that with 15 years of experience selling products in the skincare, makeup, and overall beauty space, I have come up with the top 5 things you can do to improve your online sales right away!
Caveat*** Right now I would say the easiest e-commerce platform for getting started is shopify, if you do not have an online store just yet. Click here for free lessons on how to build a shopify store. https://www.beefysites.com/free-ecommerce-store
1. You are not collecting emails, or if you are, you are doing it all wrong!
Do you have an exit intent popup setup on your site, and is it firing properly on BOTH mobile and desktop?
Every single email you collect means dollars in your pocket, and the ability to generate sales while you are by the pool drinking pina coladas!
Also, are the emails you collect going directly into your email service provider (such as mailchimp) with an immediate auto-responded email campaign?
Most e-commerce platforms have these available natively now, but if not, check to see if you email service provider offers these. I know mailchimp.com and privy.com offer email marketing services as well as popup services.
Here is our highest converting exit popup from over 10 years of split testing, it has given us around 10,000 optins over the last three months, not bad!
2. You have not built out your e-commerce sales funnel properly!
There are four things you can do to build out your sales funnel to its fullest:
- Pre purchase order bump
- Post purchase one click upsell
- Post purchase confirmation page upsell
- Cart page upsell
To keep things concise, I will highlight my favorite, the post purchase one click upsell. It basically shows your customer an offer after they complete their initial purchase and allows them to easily create another purchase at the click of a button.
I am not doing it any justice with this boring description; it really is the coolest thing you have ever seen.
To see it in action visit zipify apps and watch the video: https://landing.zipify.com/pages/ocu20
Don’t have shopify? Check these out:
Carthook.com (works with several carts)
Woocurve.com (woocommerce)
One Click Upsell – https://landing.zipify.com/pages/ocu20 (shopify)
Don’t see one listed for your shopping cart, try a google search such as “one click upsell for squarespace) etc.
Setting up a full funnel will increase your sales by 10% right away, even if you do it somewhat poorly!
3. You designed your website kind of WRONG!
One major mistake keeps beauty professionals from converting shoppers into sales when they set out to build and design their website.
You build and designed your site on a desktop computer, right? These days like 75% of your initial visitors will most likely be mobile.
Google offers a free mobile friendly test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Use it on all of your pages, and make sure your CTA’s (call to actions like add to cart) are all above the fold, which means they are visible without having to scroll down on a mobile device.
Simply stated, if your pages load quickly and properly on mobile, you will make the sale! Fix em up!
4. You did not set up your analytics, or even if you did, you don’t look at them!
Your platform will offer some free analytical tools that show how many visitors you are receiving, your most popular products, and other sales metrics.
Doesn’t it seem like a bit of a conflict of interest to get this data from a company you are paying? I dunno, call me crazy, but I always want to keep these metrics honest.
Most websites I have audited have never set up google analytics or google webmaster tools. They are easy to set up, and you can find easy instructions how to do this simply by googling “set up google analytics for shopify” etc.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup
Here is the key, as you grow your store, you will need accurate metrics so you can put your money towards your highest selling products and highest converting customers in the most efficient way possible.
Set up these tools and get familiar with your analytics in your platform as well! We never spend any $$$ online without fully tracking its success, you should not either!
5. You don’t have any original content!
So pretty much everyone just uses copy and paste to populate most of their website pages on their ecommerce store when they are building out brand and product pages.
Google hates this! Even further, your BEST customers for ANY ecomm store will come through organic SEO through google through longer and more specific keywords, especially starting out.
How do you fix this? Make sure you NEVER copy and paste! Write your own original written product description, make sure they are at least 300 words.
You can check out what content google does not like on your site for free, and more, use this tool here: https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/
You can start getting more organic traffic right away by writing your own content on your product pages, so get to work! More traffic means more sales!
Thank you so much for reading, and there is so much more I could cover, but wanted to keep this article somewhat short and digestible in format. I could go on for days. The cool thing is, I have been able to help so many beauty business owners get out of the services room, it is a passion for Alana and I!
Want to learn more? I teach classes for $97 a month that will help take your online store to the next level. Click here to learn more, and thanks for reading! https://www.beefysites.com/e-commerce-help-club
