Easy Ways to Generate eCommerce Sales From Instagram

Instagram is more than just a social media channel. The integration of the e-shopping option is quickly turning it into an excellent platform for businesses to use for driving sales. However, despite higher engagements, you may not always derive excellent sales from it. That’s why a proper strategy is needed to generate eCommerce sales from Instagram with ease.

Here are some tried and tested techniques using which you can generate sales from this platform.

Make Your Products Easily Accessible

Many people think that it’s bad to be excessively sales-oriented with their IG posts. While that is true, it’s often seen that many businesses would be overly cautious. They become too restrictive in terms of not posting anything salesy or posting too little of such content.

If you want to generate eCommerce sales from Instagram, it’s important to incorporate a touch of sales in your posts. Here are some ways in which you can do that. 

Instagram Stories

IG stories are an interesting feature which platforms like Snapchat and YouTube have also picked up. If you’re a brand that has over 10,000+ followers, you can use the ‘swipe up’ feature of the stories. You can use it to link your product and eCommerce web pages. Check How to Add Links to Instagram Stories with Swipe up and more. We can also take a look at how Gary Vee is using the Swipe Up option on his Instagram story below.

Links in Bio

Not many people do this but IG bio contains space for clickable links and it can definitely be a simple little great tool to generate sales from Instagram! You can even add multiple links for your product web page, user guide, or anything that you’re selling such as a book or something. Check out the link in the Ampfluence bio below.

Action Button

You can compare action buttons to clickable buttons. You can add them to serve a variety of purposes such as allowing direct purchases. Although most brands use it for shopping, you can also use it to place delivery orders, buy tickets for an event, and several other purposes. Let’s take a look at a classical example below.

Every time you feature a product in your post, take advantage of that opportunity by creating a link for its landing page. Don’t use your posts simply to showcase what you’re selling. Use it to also create the top of the sales funnel. Place relevant CTAs so that you can direct customers towards your site. 

Keep in mind that, it would be better if the link leads the person to the shopping cart directly, so you may need to create phases towards the “Buy Now”, “Add to Cart”, or “Check Out” button to be as few as possible.

Contests and Giveaways

Surely, all of these are self-explanatory. If you are witty with conducting contests it could do wonders. Not just generate sales from Instagram but any platform too. You can come up with interesting ideas such as posting selfies or taking a shot of your product and sending it in. 

You can always make it an event by asking people to vote on their favorite entry. Come up with ways that encourage people to share the details of the contest with their friends and family. Make it interesting. 

Ideally, you should keep the barrier to entry as easy as possible. The easier it is to enter the contest, the more people will join you. Most successful giveaways will ask people to share, follow, and like the post. In this way, you can ensure high levels of engagement. You can also use some platforms to running contests and giveaways. Check Top 5 Instagram Giveaway or Contest Software to get started.

Discounts and Promo Codes 

The trick to getting more and more people to use a promo or a discount code is to avoid placing it in the caption area. That’s because not all text in this space is clickable. Instead, you can ask people to head to the bio section and create a link that auto-applies the code. It’s best if the link takes the user directly to the checkout area after applying the discount.

It’s also good to start announcing the big discount days before the actual event so as to create hype about it. You can also put a countdown till the sale ends.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is all the rage right now; especially on social media platforms like IG. You can think of it as a cross between celebrity endorsement and word-of-mouth publicity. At the heart of it, influencer marketing is about forming meaningful relationships with customers.

It’s one of the finest and most successful tools for increasing the sales as well as conversion rates. The thing is – e-commerce business comes with many issues. For one thing, the customers cannot hold the product physically or test it out to make an informed decision.

Influencers on IG tackle that problem easily. They will describe the product, create demo videos, add high-quality photos, and will share their experience with the product. On top of that, interesting descriptions, captions, and product reviews can further eliminate any apprehensions that customers may have about it. 

Influencer marketing is a part of B2B SaaS marketing and is extremely powerful in that people love to receive recommendations from their favorite IGers and YouTubers. Often, their recommendation is the last push most people need before buying or testing a certain product. 

Many influencers would even personally discuss the product and are happy to answer queries about the product too. 

If you want your campaign to be successful, you can ask the influencer to share a discount coupon or a promo code that’s applicable for a short period only. However, you must be careful. The success of this entire enterprise depends upon how good of an influencer you can find and how you two work together. 

Take a look at these two examples of influencer marketing that uses discount codes to give that push:

While there’s an element of collaboration, the best campaigns are those that give the influencers the creative freedom to explain/incorporate products in their IG stories.

Be Creative With The Content

Around 90% of the data that we process mentally happens to be visual. This is because IG happens to be image-oriented (mostly) it gives you the perfect opportunity to leverage that visual power and use it to your advantage. 

There’s not much room for you to play around with the type of content you can publish here. For example, you can only post photos, videos, and stories. Therefore, you must be creative with your content usage; especially when it comes to generating e-commerce sales. Here’s how you can go about it:

Photos

When it comes to influencing people, photos work better than descriptions or a lengthy review. Most people will only move to the description part and read it out after they have liked the product.

That’s why you must invest in quality photography services. Be sure to post high-quality images and arrange them in the order of story-telling. Don’t use IG only for selling something; rather use it as a way to engage and captivate users. Get them to trust you.

If you only post salesy stuff, it will soon bore your customer. Therefore, aim for a mix of engaging photos.

Videos and IGTV

These two features were recently introduced by Instagram. You can use both of these to create powerful and informative content. You can use the video feature for posting explainer videos, showing behind-the-scenes, short advertisements, client testimonials, products in the making, etc. 

Keep in mind that you must create videos that are engaging from the beginning otherwise, users will quickly ignore and scroll down. 

You can also use longer videos a.k.a IGTV (Instagram TV) in a variety of ways. For example, you can post a series of videos based on a particular schedule. For example, you can create a series that covers the product creation right from the idea conception stage till final production. You can divide the videos into weekly posts.

You can also create a series that talks about the brand history every week or something along the same lines. Let your imagination run wild to come up with creative ideas.

Captions

Do not underestimate the power of captions; especially to generate sales from Instagram! For instance, you can include clickable links to redirect users to your e-commerce site. Or you can supply a relevant message to share the idea about the photo. 

You can also use relevant industry hashtags so that the image can reach more and more people who are possibly looking for similar products.

Hashtags

One of the most powerful ways to engage followers on Instagram (which is like 90% of the effort) is to use branded hashtags. You can take a look at the following examples of how a few Instagram pages used them creatively:

You can also use similar creative ways to spark conversations and encourage users to create user-generated content. 

When users notice your branded hashtags and share posts around them, you can reshare the content to show that you care about your followers. 

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Instagram is all about understanding how to use visual appeal in the best possible way. But, some things transcend the images also such as hashtags, captions, clickable links, action buttons, etc. In the end, it all comes down to your creativity and love for the platform to generate sales intelligently.