How to Drive Sales for Your Online Food and Beverage Business?

If you are into business, you can ignore the online food and beverage business. The eCommerce industry is growing, and based on Statista research “Food and beverage eCommerce revenue is projected to exceed $16.5 billion this year on its way to nearly $26 billion by 2022”.

Despite that huge market share, the industry has not yet universally embraced the power of eCommerce as compared to other sectors. This is because of the perishable nature of food and beverage products, which typically needs unique storage and logistic requirements.

However, with the recent trend and public response, online eCommerce sales have become more normalized. With the help of advancements in technologies and AI-powered eCommerce marketing platforms, Shopify store owners started flourishing in this industry. 

With the right eCommerce marketing tactics, technology, and logistics solutions in place, food and beverage retailers of all sizes can grow their market share and even manage this sector.

These days customers are also more focused on the added health benefits of the food that they are buying like collagen-enhanced protein shakes and gourmet teas.

These food items give you energy, help you sleep, or support your immune system. The market size of such types of products is aesthetically pleasing especially if your target audience is in the Instagram demographic.

Well no matter what types of food and beverage products you sell, you can build your audience online. Here are some amazing strategies that will help food and beverage eCommerce businesses to grow traffic and drive sales.

To send out in any market, businesses need to have their own USPs (Unique Selling Proposition). Your online food and beverage business must have some unique selling proposition that you can use to attract new customers to your Shopify store. 

To decide your USP, first decide what kind of food and beverage you want to sell. Online grocery has become more popular—especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. 

If you already have ideas about what product you want to sell, then do some research and find out your target audience and the percentage of the audience that is buying similar products. You can use an eCommerce marketing platform to find your target audience and the behavior of the audience. 

Design your product portfolio with HD product images and add a description. Initially, you may offer some limited products, then highlight those products with positive client reviews down the fold on your website. You can also use widgets to display your best products on the pages where you found the most traffic. 

Once you start getting feedback on your current product offerings, you can start building a more conventional inventory. In this way, you can grow your business by meeting customers’ needs.

Use web push, announcement bar, email marketing featuring your logo and brand colors to drive customer engagement. Consider this, when you send a marketing campaign with the same brand voice and color theme, it becomes easy for your audience to recognize you no matter what platform they are using. 

Using AiTrillion, you can send multiple marketing campaigns based on your customer reaction to increase engagement. You can even reserve your marketing campaigns based on their real-time response.

When you’re ready to promote your offerings, select channels from where you want to promote your offers, sales, and best sellers. Create your marketing templates based on the channels you are using to promote your products.

For promoting your products, sales offer on websites, a countdown timer works wonders. It helps in creating urgency among customers and nudges them to click on the promotional banners or product links instantly.

If you have no mood for any sales and offers, you can simply display your reviews as it helps increase consumer confidence in your product.

“According to research, displayed customer reviews increase conversion rates nearly 190% for lower-priced products and as much as 380% for higher-priced items”.

Most people don’t make an effort to leave reviews. So it would be best if you make it easy for them to leave a review by displaying a review box on your product page. Or, better than this design automated post-purchase emails to capture reviews from customers.

Here are some other tactics that you can adopt to promote to drive sales, so use them early and often.

• New products

As a new online food and beverage business, if possible, frequently add items to your product portfolio. Those new items will sell faster and if you promote them with email, marketing, announcements, and social media posts.

• Bestsellers

Customers trust customers, therefore it’s good to showcase your best-selling product with customer reviews.

• Promo codes

Promo codes are great ways of encouraging people to make that first purchase. Include promo codes on your social media pages or use them to create segmented email campaigns to increase click rates.

To keep your business thriving, build loyalty among your customers. These marketing tactics can help you grow your business.

• Add personalization 

Use behavioral targeting to know what people buy from your store and how they respond to your marketing campaign. This strategy works well for a growing business. Use your customer’s data to send more relatable messaging and win their trust by making them feel valued.

• Cross-sell with product recommendations

Send out product recommendations to cross-sell products. Relevant product recommendations help you increase average order value and drive more sales to your store.

A cross-sell message is an efficient add-on to an order notification and can be a profitable tactic for creating future email campaigns that increase revenue.

• Abandoned cart automation

You may find that some people will browse your site, add products to a cart, and leave the website without buying. If you set up abandoned cart automation to remind these users that they have left something in the cart, you can win them back.

You can use these simple email reminders like “You forgot something!”—or you can add a promo code to entice them. For AiTrillion users, abandoned cart emails like these can generate amazing revenue.

Product follow-up automation

When customers have just purchased something from your store, you’re at the top of their minds. You can take advantage of this event by sending out follow-up emails after a purchase. Send thank you email, review email, and product recommendation email might help in influencing customers for their next purchase.