How To Attract Customers to Your Ecommerce Business

01/05/2021 | Share:

Setting up an ecommerce business is an attractive proposition for many. Hundreds, if not thousands of new stores come online every week.

It’s not only relatively easy and cheap nowadays to create an online store but there are also plenty of tools out there to help you reach your customers.

Assuming that you’ve picked the right ecommerce niche and have built an attractive website that looks good on mobile as well as a desktop, the next step is to start attracting visitors.
The long and the short of marketing is this: You can have the best offers in the world and the most beautiful website, but if no one can find you, your ecommerce store will sit gathering digital dust and eventually fall into oblivion.

Accept the market is competitive

The first thing you should do is accept that ecommerce, whatever niche you choose, is likely to be pretty competitive.

Don’t let this dishearten you.

You should, however, acknowledge that getting off the ground and becoming popular online takes a coherent marketing strategy and a good deal of work.

Understand your audience – who do you want to attract?

The groundwork you put in here is vital for success. Knowledge of your audience, what they like and how they communicate, will be pivotal to the marketing approach you take. It ensures you focus better and don’t waste any of your time or your limited budget on people that don’t matter.

Understanding your audience goes way beyond their age, gender and where they live. The deeper you can drill down to their likes and dislikes, their goals and interests, values and opinions on various topics, the better.

To do this you can carry out market research, check what your nearest competitors are doing, and gather as much data as possible. Check out this guide to buyer personas here and why they are important.

Find these people you’ve identified

Once you’ve worked out who your audience is, the next step is to discover where they hang out online. This will dictate the kind of content, approach and marketing channels you are going to use.

For example, let’s say you sell eco-friendly products. Your audience may well be young, idealistic and vocal. You might find them on groups on social media sites such as Facebook that related to saving the planet.

If you’re targeting young professionals, you might want to produce content that helps improve their career prospects through detailed blogs, video tutorials and webinars. The key here is:

• The content needs to be useful to your audience.
• It needs to lure them towards your ecommerce site.

Develop an inbound marketing plan

In short, an inbound marketing plan is designed to get people clicking links that bring them to your ecommerce site.

• SEO: Search engine optimisation is how you make yourself rank on the first page of Google and other platforms. It’s more than just keywords and often involves creating really useful content for your audience.
• Blogs: Adding a blog to your ecommerce site has several advantages. It allows you to target certain keywords and it allows you to provide added value to your audience and build your reputation and credibility.
• Social media: Joining sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter give you a direct line to your audience. While all sites are free to use, there’s a lot of work that goes into building a successful following and creating the right content. For example, Nike use a mix of stunning imagery, social commentary and user-generated content on Instagram.

There are lots of other marketing options you can choose from depending on your audience including video, webinars, infographics and even creating a dedicated app that can be downloaded onto a smartphone.

Paid advertising

While many of the above marketing strategies will take time to bed in, you can get a more immediate response and drive traffic to your website through paid advertising. This is relatively easy to set up with platforms such as Google PPC and Facebook Ads and allows you to target specific demographics and stay within your budget.

Influencer marketing

Influencers are people with large followings online. You’ll see them on sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Many of these charge large amounts of money to advertise products for big companies.

Influencers don’t have to be high profile, however. Building relationships with smaller influencers with sizeable but not huge followings can help your ecommerce business reach a much wider audience and it’s worth identifying them and reaching out.

Offer efficient delivery

Finally, one thing people hate nowadays is the poor or slow delivery of the products they order. Sites like Amazon have raised the bar and expectations over the last twenty years. To get customers coming back again and again:

• Make it easy to buy: Have the right payment options on your site and make it easy for your customers to pay. That could include options such as one-click buying.
• Offer flexible and fast delivery options: Build a relationship with the best delivery businesses and try to get delivery times down to just a few days, not several weeks.
• Operate a returns policy: You should always have a good returns policy and make it easy for your customers to get their money back – don’t quibble, provide an exemplary service instead.

There’s a lot to absorb here and it can seem overwhelming when you first start to put together that all-important marketing plan but it should all be worth it.