Are you looking for ways to increase your online store’s sales?
Whatever you do, they all circle back to one thing: customer acquisition. However, if you thought attracting customers to a brick-and-mortar store was harder, operating an online store will prove you wrong. Although a vast majority of people in the U.S. are shopping online, the over 2.9 million US-based e-retailers are all competing for their attention.
If you need help, you’re in the right place. Read on to learn how to attract customers to your store.
Table of Contents
1. Build a Quality E-commerce Website
Your e-commerce website is your business shop. It’s where customers from all over the world will come to check out your products/services and make their orders.
Is your website up to the task?
Some online entrepreneurs build business websites on their own. There’s nothing wrong with this if your website design and development skills are superb, but if you’re a beginner, DIYing your website is a big mistake.
At a minimum, you need a website that’s secure, fast-loading, and responsive. People visiting your site wait around if it’s taking longer than three seconds to load pages. The same applies if it doesn’t load properly on their devices.
As such, investing in a professional e-commerce website goes a long way in helping you attract more customers. Hire a professional developer who understands the ins and outs of search engine optimization. This way, your website will stand a decent chance of showing up on the search engine results of people whore looking for the product/service you’re selling.
2. Sell on More Platforms
Selling on your own e-commerce website is a smart move. It allows selling directly to the customers, thus eliminating middlemen who eat into your margins.
Unfortunately, as a small business, relying on website sales alone isn’t going to suffice. Most ecommerce entrepreneurs often sell on multiple platforms, including established marketplaces like Amazon, and social media channels like Facebook and Instagram.
Creating a shop on third-party platforms opens up your business to new consumer markets.
For instance, millions of consumers prefer shopping on Amazon because of its well-established reputation and consumer protection policies. These consumers will rarely shop on independent, lesser-known e-commerce websites because of fraud and security risks.
So, when you set up an Amazon shop, your business could gain a sizeable number of new customers. Of course, finding success on Amazon isn’t that simple. But with proper optimization and utilization of Amazon SEO techniques, your products could gain good exposure.
3. Use Paid Search Advertising
Having a search engine optimization strategy is a good place to start. But, let’s be frank; as a new online business, your website isn’t going to show up on the first page of search engine results tomorrow or the day after. On average, it takes about 15 months for a new website to rank on page one — and there’s no guarantee it will stay there for long.
This is why smart e-commerce business owners turn to paid search advertising. Google and other search engines allow advertisers to purchase ads that will show up right on top of organic search engine results pages.
The cost of buying a PPC ad will depend on how competitive your keywords are, but the best news is you’ll only pay after someone clicks on the link. Advertisers set up a budget, which gets depleted as more visitors click on the ad.
PPC advertising has a great return on investment as most people who click on sponsored links have an intent to purchase. However, the success of your PPC campaigns will depend on how well they’re researched, designed, and executed. Although search engines offer tools to enable anyone to set up a PPC campaign, it’s best to outsource the task to a PPC advertising agency.
4. Run a Referral Program
Whether it’s to get a discount after a successful referral or qualify for any other reward, consumers love an attractive referral program. They’ll do their best to recommend your business to their friends and relatives and grab those discounts.
A referral program can get you a steady stream of new customers, but it needs to be a well-designed program. Throwing a discount here and there isn’t going to work if that’s not what your customers want.
Start by collecting feedback from your customers to learn what they’d like to see in a referral program. Perhaps they want free company merchandise and promotional products. Or maybe they want a buy one get one free (BOGOF) kind of reward when they refer a customer.
Remember to switch up your rewards from time to time. Your customers are going to quickly get used to what you’re offering them, so introducing new rewards can help keep them excited.
5. Offer Quality Customer Service
96 percent of customers will stop buying from a business after one instance of bad customer service.
In other words, you only get one chance to impress a customer and increase your chances of getting their patronage again.
Yet, small businesses often struggle with customer service. Many are not well-equipped to handle a surge in customers once their marketing efforts start to bear fruit.
Learn from the mistakes of these businesses and do better. Offering things like multi-channel customer support and 24/7 live chat availability help improve the experience of the modern online shopper.
With great customer service and a great product to boot, you can bank on a sizeable chunk of your first-time customers to come again and bring their friends along.
How to Attract Customers to Your Store Made Simple
Running a successful online store is the dream of every e-commerce entrepreneur. To improve your chances of reaching this dream, you must know how to attract customers to your store. With this guide, you now know how to establish the foundations of a business that will become a customer magnet.
It takes a lot of learning to build a successful business. Our blog has the resources to get you there. Bookmark it and visit often!
Last Updated on July 13, 2023
