How to grow sales in your online store without spending more on ads
Running an online store and wondering how to actually grow sales? Good news: you don’t have to pump enormous budgets into ads. As a conversion optimization expert, I’ll show you the proven methods my clients use to grow sales in their online stores. These strategies work, and you can start using them today.
Are you stuck in the “More traffic!” or “Let’s find new marketing channels” trap?
If you work in e-commerce, it’s no secret to you that acquiring traffic keeps getting more expensive. Cost per click in Google Ads is rising, and the industry is slowly abandoning the paradigm of ads as the only cure for low online store sales.
Google and Facebook Ads costs are rising, so you’ve probably started looking at other marketing channels. Maybe you’re investing more in SEO and Facebook and Instagram ads, running newsletter marketing, keeping your brand’s social media profiles active, perhaps you’ve taken up TikTok marketing too, and so on. But unfortunately your e-commerce growth has started to stall. You’ve exhausted every available sales channel and you no longer know how to scale your store’s results further.
Want to grow sales in your online store? Don’t focus on traffic alone!
The problem with the “let’s find new marketing channels” approach is that you’re using only one method to raise your online revenue – you’re looking only at site traffic. Because in a lot of stores that’s how it used to work: push a bit more traffic at the site and revenue and profits went up.
The problem is that very few online stores still see that approach work. Raising ad spend and growing sales purely by acquiring more traffic doesn’t produce the results it once did. So instead of focusing on traffic alone, start using other methods of growing online sales.
The truth is you don’t need new marketing channels at all to scale your e-commerce business.
Here are all 4 ways to grow sales in an online store
Beyond growing traffic, there are 3 other powerful levers you can use to grow your online store. When you think about it, there are only 4 ways to grow sales in an online store:
- growing traffic to your store
- raising average order value (cart value)
- increasing purchase frequency
- raising the conversion rate
If you focus on traffic alone, you’re leaving enormous sales growth potential on the table. What’s more, acquiring more traffic is the most expensive of the methods above for scaling online sales.
Let’s say you want to double your revenue over the next 12 months. Well, you could try to get there by doubling traffic through Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaigns. But will it really be that easy to double your traffic spend and double your store’s sales at the same time?
To get there you’d have to “cast a wider net” and acquire more cold traffic, and start ranking for new, less effective search terms. Which means the additional traffic you get will be not only expensive but also less ready to buy – it will convert worse. Doubling revenue by growing traffic will take an enormous amount of effort and marketing budget. And in the end you may find the return on that investment is… not especially satisfying.
But… you can double revenue with no additional traffic at all
How do you grow sales in an online store without growing traffic? Let’s do some quick math that shows the real potential in optimizing your store.
Let’s say that over a year you have:
- 100,000 visitors to your online store
- a purchase frequency of 1 (every customer buys just once)
- an average order value of 100 PLN (~$25)
- a conversion rate of 1%
Your total revenue is 100,000 x 1 x 100 x 1% = 100,000 PLN (~$25K).
Now let’s say traffic to your store doesn’t change, but you raise each of the other 3 metrics (purchase frequency, average cart value and conversion rate) by 30%. Now your numbers look like this:
- 100,000 visitors (the same as before)
- 1.3 purchase frequency (+30%)
- Average order value 130 PLN (~$32) (+30%)
- Conversion rate 1.3% (+30%)
Multiply those numbers (100,000 x 1.3 x 130 x 1.3%) and you get revenue of 219,700 PLN (~$55K). The magic of compounding – revenue more than doubled! On top of that, you’ll achieve growth in those 3 metrics at a decidedly lower cost than doubling traffic through paid campaigns.
The purchase process – where you lose the most potential customers
Do you know where most online stores lose the most money? In the cart. The customer is already interested, they’ve added a product to the cart, and then… they walk away. Cart abandonment is a genuine plague in e-commerce.
The most common causes are shipping costs that are too high (and that the customer didn’t expect at the start), a complicated payment process, a small error that irritates the user, or simply a lack of trust in the store. Consider offering free delivery above a certain order value – that often translates into higher sales through a higher average order value.
Simplify the purchase process as far as you can. The fewer steps a customer has to go through, the better the chance they’ll buy. Offer a range of payment options (BLIK, bank transfer, cards) and cut the form down to the essential information. Add a guest checkout option too – plenty of people simply don’t want to create yet another account.
Squeeze as much as you can out of your store traffic
I don’t want to suggest here that traffic doesn’t matter. If you have no traffic at all to your store, you should definitely work on that first through SEO, Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
But remember that growing traffic has a point where it stops paying off. If acquiring traffic is getting more expensive in your business, work on purchase frequency, average order value and conversion rate before you invest in more traffic.
And once optimizing those three metrics starts to work, your traffic becomes more profitable. Which in turn frees up additional budget to invest in acquiring more traffic.
In short: get traffic, build mechanisms that squeeze as much as possible out of every visitor, then acquire more traffic and keep optimizing. And round again – growing sales is a continuous process.
All right, but what if you don’t have store traffic yet? Let’s go through that too
SEO – a long-term strategy for growing store traffic
One of the most important ways to grow sales in an online store is proper search engine optimization. That may sound dull, but SEO is one of the most cost-effective customer acquisition channels over the long term. Why? Because people typing a specific product into Google already want to buy it.
The key is for your store to appear in Google’s search results for terms related to your industry. Start by checking what your prospective customers are typing. Begin with broad terms and work down to very specific ones (long tail). A term like “sports shoes” may look attractive, but the user typing “New Balance ML408V1 white size 40” is the committed buyer you want.
Don’t forget mobile devices either – more and more customers shop on their phones. If your online store works badly on a phone, you’re losing potential customers. Google prioritizes mobile pages in its search results – and more than that, Google’s crawlers currently index your store in the mobile version only, so this is a factor that directly affects your search visibility.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads – how to advertise your online store effectively
Campaigns in Google Ads and Facebook Ads are still among the most effective ways to grow online store sales quickly. But there’s a catch – you have to do it intelligently, not just pump budget into it.
In Google Ads, focus on product ads (Google Shopping) – they show your products directly in search results with an image and a price. That significantly raises the chance of a click and a purchase. Don’t forget remarketing either – you can reach people again who visited your store but didn’t buy. That often gives the best return on investment.
Facebook Ads, meanwhile, is an excellent tool for building brand awareness and reaching new customers. Use a range of formats, from simple images to dynamic product ads. But most importantly: test, test and test again. The same campaign can work brilliantly in one industry and fall completely flat in another.
Newsletter and social media – build relationships, don’t just sell
Effective online marketing isn’t only about acquiring new customers, it’s about building long-term relationships. The newsletter remains one of the most effective tools – but only if you do it well.
Don’t just send product ads. Create a newsletter with real value that delivers useful content related to your industry. You can share advice, trends, or tell stories connected to your products. People will love your brand instead of avoiding it.
Social media is another important channel. Instagram and Facebook let you build a community around your brand. But don’t do it the way everyone else does – encourage customers to share photos with your products. Authentic content like that from customers (UGC) is worth more than the best ad campaign.
Customer service – an underrated sales tool
Excellent customer service is often an underrated way to grow e-commerce sales. Satisfied customers are your best salespeople – they recommend you to friends and come back for more.
Consider adding live chat to your homepage and product pages. Plenty of people have questions before buying, and being able to contact the store quickly can be the deciding factor. You don’t have to invest in expensive solutions right away – even a simple chatbot can answer basic questions.
Gather and analyze customer reviews of your products. Positive reviews are a powerful sales tool – new customers buy products with good ratings more readily. And respond to negative reviews quickly and professionally. That shows you care about customer satisfaction.
The most powerful way to grow online store sales – conversion rate optimization
Conversion optimization (CRO) is probably the most underrated way of growing online store revenue. Which is a shame, because it’s also the most powerful lever for growing your e-commerce business.
If your store already has traffic, don’t grow it mindlessly forever — focus on convincing more of the people who already visited your store to buy. Test different elements of your site, from headlines, through product images, to “Add to cart” buttons. Even seemingly small changes can produce significant conversion growth. What matters is not making those changes blind.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to understand how users behave on your site. Check which pages have the highest bounce rate and which products get added to the cart most often but never bought. That data is gold – it will help you identify areas to optimize.
The possibilities are endless – from simple A/B tests of different product page versions, through form optimization, to better product photography. Every percentage point of conversion growth is a direct increase in revenue without spending a single zloty more on advertising.
