4 Ways To Improve Your Online T-Shirt Sales

Do you own a t-shirt brand and want to level up your sales?

Here are four ways to improve your t-shirt sales:

#1 - IMPROVE YOUR T-SHIRT DESIGNS

Simply put, if you're struggling to make sales there's a very good chance that your current t-shirt designs aren't compelling enough to push people to buy. In our business the trend we see for winning designs is they are aligned with our niche and either funny, controversial or elicit deep emotions.

Too often we blame factors like Facebook ads as a reason we're not making sales when the truth is people just don't want to buy what we're selling. Trust me, if you have a great t-shirt design (which can be very simple and even solely a text-based design) and you're marketing it properly, you WILL make sales. And if you don't have a winning design, then I recommend that you stop spending your hard-earned money on poor performing ads and focus on creating and testing new designs.

One winning design is all you need to take your business to the next level, but without a winning design, you'll continue to struggle.

#2 - IMPROVE YOUR CREATIVES

By creatives I'm referring to the imagery that you use for your products and ads as well as the ad copy and call to action that you use in your ads.  

Personally, I've always found that imagery is much more important than ad copy for t-shirts. You could have the best copywriting in the world, but if people don't like the image enough to buy the shirt then it's not going to make any difference.

I could do a full video on this topic but one of the most common issues that I see is that either the imagery itself is poor quality or that the design is just too small or partially hidden. It's important to realize that likely 80 to 90 percent of your viewers are going to be viewing your products on a mobile device and if the design is too small or partially hidden most people will skip over it.

Make sure that your design is the hero of the image and that the entire design is easily visible from a mobile device.

#3 - IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE

When was the last time you checked your website's checkout process?

It seems crazy but I've seen a number of t-shirt stores that are VERY challenging to purchase from. Not only does this negatively affect customer trust but if it's challenging for someone to buy, many times they're not going to buy.

Start by making sure that your website is fast, runs smooth and that the checkout process is quick and easy. It's important to realize that many times when customers have not heard of a t-shirt brand they'll be quick to abandon their cart at the first sign of friction.

Additionally, be sure to conversion optimize your website with features that increase social proof such as high quality imagery, a thorough FAQ, customer reviews, and trust badges, just to name a few. You can never have enough social proof!

#4 - PRICE (maybe...)

To be honest, I actually almost didn't want to include this one because price is rarely a reason for poor sales in our experience. Personally, I feel that many t-shirt brands actually underprice their items, which lowers the perceived value and causes them to compete with other low priced and likely lower quality t-shirt brands.

This may be controversial but I believe that you should never compete on price, as someone will always be willing to go lower than you. Instead focus on increasing perceived value through areas such as branding, imagery, high quality products, a great website and incredible customer service.

That said...

Some audiences are more price sensitive than others and if the perceived value doesn't align with the price this could be an issue for your business. If you think this is the issue then you can test lower price points using "compare at" prices, which allow you to maintain a perceived "Regular Price" and the test price.

However this is rarely the case from what I've seen.

SUMMARY

If you own a t-shirt brand and want to level up your sales then there are four easy ways to do this: one, improve your t-shirt designs by testing new designs that are either funny, controversial or emotionally compelling for your audience; two, improve the creatives, making sure images are high quality and designs are legible on all devices; three, conversion optimize your website; and four, if you really think price is the issue then test.  

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