Getting your first real client is a significant milestone for any entrepreneur.
Why Targeted Visitors Are Crucial for New Stores
As a new online store owner, it’s easy to think you’re improving: tweaking brand colors, hesitating on fonts, adjusting pricing, and getting caught up in the small details while building your business behind closed doors.
However, real improvement is only possible when you expose your business to the world. You can’t know if there’s any interest in your products if you don’t bring in visitors. You won’t know if your prices are too high if you don’t bring in visitors. You won’t know if your brand resonates with the target audience if you don’t bring in visitors.
Therefore, I propose this challenge: no matter where you are in your business, spend the next 30 days focusing on bringing targeted visitors to your store above everything else.
Free Visitor Sources: Going for Low-Hanging Fruit
The first visitor sources to explore are the free ones. This usually involves manually sharing your store with your network and relevant online communities.
Since these sources are relatively easy to establish and available to every online store owner, they are a great place to start. Here are some tips to keep in mind while dealing with free visitor sources:
Tip #1: Consider offering a discount code to entice people to check out your store.
The Jewelry Wardrobe uses LinkedIn to manually reach out to potential customers and offers $25 gift cards in exchange for email addresses and survey responses.
Tip #2: Every action you take online has the potential to bring visitors to your store. Add your store’s URL to your online profile, such as your bio on Twitter or your Disqus profile for blog comments.
Tip #3: Do not send repeated low-quality promotional messages to large audiences. Instead, try to provide value and build genuine connections. Leverage your personal networks.
Many entrepreneurs make their first few sales from their personal connections, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So share your store on your personal Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat pages to announce it to your entire network.
Also, send direct emails to your closest contacts to let them know your store has launched. Ask them explicitly to share – they don’t need to buy from you to show their support.
If you don’t make any sales from this route, don’t despair, as this is the least qualified visitor source on this whole list.
Paid Advertising: Spending Money to Make Money
The best way to make money online is to quickly get targeted visitors through paid advertising. The good news is that many paid advertising channels allow you to pay per click. In some cases, you can start with a budget as low as $10.
Each advertising platform is different, and you should choose these channels based on the audience you are targeting and how they enable you to reach potential buyers. If you are targeting specific countries, you might even want to check social networks that are popular in certain markets.
Before exploring paid social media marketing, fill your primary profile feed with several posts (you can easily repurpose published content). That way, it won’t be completely empty of activity when visitors check it out. Advertising on Facebook
According to Pew research, Facebook is one of the most popular social networks with the most diverse user base in terms of age, income, gender, and ethnicity.
So,
A wide range of brands can benefit from Facebook targeting options that include age, gender, job title, location, and interests to reach their ideal customers.
Engaging with Existing Audiences
The messages that speak about your brand won’t have a significant impact if they’re coming only from you. Fortunately, the internet has made it possible for anyone to build a platform, and thus you can collaborate with them.
These strategies not only help in bringing visitors but often utilize content to do so – a news story or a product review, for example – which helps you build your brand’s credibility. In fact, you’re hitting two birds with one stone through every successful collaboration.
Analysis: Going Backwards to Improve Performance
At this point, we hope you’ve tried enough tactics to see an increase in traffic and perhaps even some sales. This challenge aims to be an exercise in creating a feedback loop, where you expose your store to traffic, set a benchmark for its performance, and then work on improving it.
So, you can now start diagnosing potential issues in your store by looking at your analytics dashboard (whether in Shopify or Google Analytics), along with the feedback you’ve received from actively promoting your store.
There are numerous reasons why customers may not purchase your products based on informed guesses from your traffic behavior: if your bounce rate is high – meaning visitors come to your site and leave immediately – it could be due to low-quality visitors or your store may take too long to load (you can test the latter here). If none of the visitors are adding products to their shopping carts, it could be that you haven’t achieved a product-market fit (in this case, you need to find the right category or try different products). Or maybe they don’t trust your store enough to make a purchase. If you have many abandoned carts during checkout, you may need to reconsider your shipping policy.
Based on these learnings, you can start tweaking things in your store to have a better chance when you do another round of marketing.
You Need to Step Out to Grow
Bringing in visitors is about connecting the dots between your brand and your customers in a world of constantly increasing opportunities. This is part of what makes marketing so exhausting – the fact that there are so many opportunities available.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach in this regard. Exploring, experimenting, failing, and improving is the only way to know what works for you. So launch your store out there, as it’s the only way to grow. And if you’re still having difficulties, check out our guide on how to diagnose and improve your store if you’re bringing in visitors but no sales.
Illustration by Eugenia Milo
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How to Make Your First E-commerce Sale Most Effective
How do you create e-commerce sales?
1. Optimize product pages: Make sure to optimize your product pages and include an effective product description, high-quality images, and customer reviews.
2. Use email marketing: Use email marketing to reach your current and potential customers and inform them about special offers, product launches, and so on.
3. Leverage social media: Use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to reach new customers and stay connected with existing ones.
4. Offer discounts and promotions: Regularly offer discounts and promotions to boost sales.
5.
Provide excellent customer service: Ensure that your customers have a great experience with your business by offering outstanding customer service.
6. Invest in search engine optimization (SEO): Invest in SEO to ensure your site appears in search engine results and is easy for customers to find your products.
7. Create a loyalty program: Create a loyalty program to reward customers for their loyalty and encourage them to purchase more.
How can I bring more customers to my e-commerce store?
1. Optimize your website for search engines: Ensure that your website is optimized for search engines, as this will help customers find you more easily.
2. Use social media: Leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach new customers and create engaging content to attract them to your site.
3. Offer discounts and promotions: Provide discounts and promotions to incentivize customers to purchase from your store.
4. Focus on customer experience: Ensure your site is user-friendly, and that your customer service is excellent.
5. Invest in paid advertising: Use paid advertising on social media or search engines to increase visibility and bring more visitors to your site.
6. Try email marketing: Use email marketing to keep customers engaged and informed about your products and offerings.
7. Invest in content marketing: Create content such as blog articles, videos, and podcasts to build an audience and educate potential customers about your store.
How can I start selling online?
1. Choose a niche: Before starting an online business or launching an online store, it’s important to know your niche. Decide what products you want to sell and what type of customers you want to target.
2. Test your product: Before investing in inventory, it’s important to test the demand and popularity of the product you’re thinking of selling. This can be done through online surveys, focus groups, or by leveraging current sales data.
3. Create an online store: Once you know what you’ll sell, you need to figure out how to create a website for selling. You can use a platform like Shopify to set up your store quickly and easily.
4. Market your store: After launching your online store, you should focus on driving traffic and converting visitors into customers. Use all available marketing channels, from email campaigns to social media, to attract people to your store.
5. Manage inventory: Once you start receiving orders, you need to ensure you have the right inventory levels. You should have a system in place to track and manage your inventory levels so you don’t miss any sales.
6. Track performance: Finally, you need to track your business performance to ensure its success. Use analytics to monitor your store’s performance, customer data, and sales figures to ensure your business is growing.
What is the e-commerce sales process?
1. Establish an online presence: Establishing an online presence is essential for any e-commerce business. This includes having a website and other digital assets such as social media accounts.
2. Attract customers: The next step is attracting customers to your online store. This can be accomplished through various online marketing techniques like SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising.
3. Make a sale: Once customers are drawn to your store, the next step is to encourage them to make a purchase. This can be accomplished by providing helpful product descriptions, images, offering discounts, and providing a secure checkout process.
4. Fulfill orders: After the customer places an order, the next step is to fulfill that order. This involves processing payments, packaging the order, and shipping it to the customer.
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Customer Follow-up: The final step in the e-commerce sales process is to follow up with customers after they have received their order. This can be done through email marketing, social media, or other digital channels. This is a great way to build customer loyalty and increase the chances of repeat sales.
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