After pouring so much time and energy into the planning and development of your brand and your ecommerce store, you’re probably eager to start making your first few sales!
These initial sales will tell you a lot about product pricing, consumer interest, marketing strategies, and logistics so that you can better manage your ecommerce site going forward.
They can also infuse your business’s bank account with much-needed cash to replenish your startup expenses and to fund growth efforts!
You may be fortunate enough to draw some initial sales from your own circle of family and friends, but this represents a limited number of sales. How can you clinch sales from other customers?
You can’t count on search engine optimization (SEO) to drive organic traffic to your new ecommerce store’s website right away, even if the products that you sell involve popular search terms on Google.
You must therefore utilize a few other great methods at first to help get more people to start checking out your business’s site so that you can gain customers online.
Your potential customers can’t visit a website that they don’t know about, so a critical aspect in helping you to find your store’s first customers is to improve its online visibility. When your target audience sees marketing for your website, they must have some incentive to follow a link to your landing page.
With this in mind, you can utilize the following effective tips to boost your ecommerce store’s visibility and to drive people to your website. From there, your website design, products, and promotions will need to do the rest of the work by converting leads to increase sales.
If you’re set on finding more customers for your online store, you can’t go wrong with these five tried-and-true strategies!
1. Create high-quality content on your website
Before turning your attention outward to draw traffic to your website, focus on the content on your ecommerce store’s website. High-quality content is important for two primary reasons.
First, it ensures that the visitors who do make the journey to your website find value in what they discover. If people aren’t thrilled by your website's content, they’ll quickly exit the website without making a purchase, and you can’t be sure that they’ll ever return.
Creating a good customer experience with your content is crucial to help increase conversions and turn visitors into loyal customers of your business!
Second, high-quality, relevant content plays into SEO. Even though SEO strategies won’t help to bring traffic to your website on day 1, focusing on these strategies will set you up for a greater payoff later, regardless of the products that you’re selling.
After all, you’ll eventually want to be sure to start taking full advantage of the benefits of organic website traffic for your business.
High-quality content for an ecommerce website includes an inventory list filled with great products that will appeal to your target audience. Your customers should be able to easily navigate through the website to find the products that are specifically relevant to them.
The content should include specs, good, clear images, and solid product descriptions. You don’t want extraordinarily high prices to drive a potential customer away from your site who otherwise would have been interested in making a purchase.
For this reason, ensure that you set reasonable prices for the products that you sell by conducting online research before you create your website.
Keep in mind that your website should present high-quality content beyond the product pages to deliver the best overall experience to your customers.
For example, a blog with posts covering topics related to your online store, the items you’re selling, and the people you’re targeting can help bring regular traffic to your site.
This content can also highlight your brand’s expertise and experience in your field, show off exceptional product features, and accomplish other goals. Your posts might also include your best tips for how a customer can use or take care of a product that you sell.
What’s more, when your blog posts are marketed on social media platforms, they may be shared by your followers, which will help to expand your store’s visibility online.
2. Master email marketing
Email marketing is an essential component of any online store’s ecommerce marketing checklist. If your store’s website hasn’t launched yet, you can use social media and other outlets to begin building your email marketing network.
Create excitement about the launch by sending timely messages to your growing network of subscribers. By doing so, you can start to generate customer interest in your brand, and your website may receive a great initial stream of traffic.
Once your ecommerce store has launched, use one of the many email marketing tools to continue gathering email addresses from your site’s visitors. You can entice visitors to your website to sign up by offering special promotions, coupons, and more through your newsletter.
To avoid spam-like behavior, be sure to only send emails to those people who have signed up to receive them. Collecting emails for ongoing campaigns is a powerful way to maximize the benefit of each new lead that other marketing efforts produce.
All of your email marketing should feature your logo, align with your brand, and appeal to your business’s target audience. It’s easy for email newsletters and other promotions to lose their appeal to otherwise interested customers.
This often happens when the ecommerce store sends these newsletters out too frequently or when they lack content that the recipient perceives as valuable. A solid email marketing campaign is essential for maintaining interest and fostering customer loyalty.
Your email marketing campaign should include a marketing calendar that clearly outlines when each newsletter will be sent. For many ecommerce businesses, a monthly newsletter is appropriate.
Then, focus on developing each newsletter with information about the newest additions to your store, special pricing available for loyal customers, coupons, and even links to recent blog posts. Your email messages should include multiple links that bring recipients to your website to entice them to purchase your business’s products.
Note that when you build your online store with WiziShop, you’ll enjoy access to all kinds of tools designed to increase sales and make managing your business easy!
This includes a complete emailing tool known as Auto-Mail Booster. With this handy feature, you can send newsletters with personalized content, program automatic email follow-ups, and more.
In addition, you can design email campaigns to celebrate customers’ special milestones, such as birthdays or anniversaries of their first orders. Consider giving them a coupon for free shipping or a buy-one-get-one offer for their next purchase.
3. Have a strong social media presence
With your thorough knowledge of your store’s target audience, you likely have a great understanding of how your customers spend their time online. Use this knowledge when you’re in the process of ramping up your store’s social media presence on the most effective platforms.
For ecommerce stores, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are often popular marketing outlets. However, the best channels for your business will depend on your unique store’s products and customers. Your social media marketing efforts can involve both free and paid methods.
After establishing your professional social media accounts, spread the word about your store to family, friends, colleagues, and others in your network. Ask them to share your ecommerce store’s link and social media pages with people in their own network to create a wider reach.
From this point, however, it’s up to you to generate awareness about your store and its products!
Regular posts with interesting content can be shared by others to expand your group of followers and to help inform people about your brand.
Using hashtags strategically is also an effective way to help people find your business and connect with potential customers who are aligned with your target audience’s traits and interests.
Many social media platforms offer other exciting opportunities for ecommerce stores to connect with customers online. For example, Facebook has a store feature that enables you to showcase your products on a dedicated platform. These products will then each have a unique link back to your store’s product page.
Paid advertising is also available through social media outlets. These advertising options include the use of social media influencers as well as paid ads that run in a potential customer’s feed or in a sidebar.
Remember that whether the social media marketing is paid or not, all content should be meaningful and created to appeal to your target customers!
4. Build partnerships
Building excellent relationships with social media influencers can have tremendous rewards, but other relationships can be equally advantageous. You may even want to take advantage of networking opportunities that are available offline.
This process might include by attending live networking events, trade shows, fairs, and other events that put you in touch with customers and potential affiliates. Affiliates are those who you can partner with for reciprocal marketing benefits, and they’re often in a related field rather than being a direct competitor.
You can also establish relationships with other companies that ultimately enhance trust and loyalty for your customers.
For example, you can become affiliated with a company that specializes in securing online financial transactions. You can then place that affiliate’s logo on your website.
Even though this type of affiliate may not create a link to your store on its website, your ecommerce store can still benefit tremendously from that arrangement.
5. Offer incentives to first-time customers
Driving traffic to a new ecommerce store is often challenging. For this reason, you want to maximize every opportunity that you have to make a sale.
A special offer of free shipping or a discount for new customers when they make their first purchase could play a critical role in boosting your website’s conversion rate. At the same time, marketing your special promotion for first-time customers can potentially drive more traffic to your website.
After your new customers make a purchase, you must focus on fostering loyalty and bringing them back to your website. It’s generally much easier and cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new customer.
For this reason, you can’t overlook the importance of targeting your current customers in your marketing efforts and creating the best customer experience possible.
Start getting more customers today!
Each of the ecommerce tips detailed here can play a role in developing relationships with your customers and inspiring them to return for future product purchases. With this in mind, your marketing strategy should continue to focus on driving new customers to your website.
You’ll also want to encourage them to revisit your site later on when they have another need for your products!
Getting potential customers to your new ecommerce store’s website is a significant undertaking that requires your regular attention. However, it’s only half the battle. Once your customers arrive, they need to be enticed to buy what you’re selling.
To ensure that targeted visitors arrive at your site’s landing pages, pay attention to your marketing methods and messages. After all, the last thing that you want is to spend time and energy driving visitors to your website who have little interest in what your store offers!
