Customer acquisition is an integral part of e-commerce marketing strategy. We all heard that acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing one. But at the same time, only this strategy enables your business to grow and scale in any way. What you need to do as a business owner is to find the balance between efforts for customer acquisition and the result you get.
In this article we share ten simple tactics that will help you connect with new customers and lead them to making a purchase in your e-commerce store.
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1. Get Listed in Business Directories
These days when customers get used to doing everything online (searching for solutions, businesses and products). So, being listed in business directories can connect you with new clients. It may happen when a customer has an urgent need and the company that meets it is located just around the corner. But the person will simply Google for the solution instead of asking locals, they will make an order online and then simply go and receive it in minute
What to do: It can sound trivial, but spend some time to create your Google My Business and Yelp profiles, add your store to Bing Places and more. Don’t hesitate to add real photos of your team, company and products you sell. Remember to choose those directories that will benefit your business most.
2. Invest in Website Design
E-commerce website is the representation of your business, and it definitely influences how customers perceive your brand. What do you sell? What is your target audience – their age and taste? All this should be reflected in your design and should look modern to a certain degree. As the average user needs only 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about a website, you should take this opportunity to win more clients.
What to do: Make a deep analysis of your ideal customer profile and change the design of your store accordingly. Hire a company or a consultant to learn about the best design practices and ways of their implementation in your store. Sometimes it needs only a few easy tweaks to make your store look more clean and attractive.
3. Be the First
Being the first not only means becoming an industry leader by financial indicators and being well-known. It is more about the ability to quickly react to new trends, shifts in consumer behavior and express your opinion on hot topics. This influences your brand reputation among the target audience and improves SEO rankings too. Statistics show that 70% to 80% of users completely ignore paid ads and focus on organic search results. And 75% of searchers never click past the first page of results. Impressive, right?
What to do: Monitor the market, notice even the minor changes in consumer sentiments. Focus on search engine optimization (SEO) of your website by improving the main pages of your website like homepage, category pages, product pages. Don’t forget about the corporate blog. Pay high attention to semantic core compilation, contextual keywords grouping and analysis.
Using a project management tool allows you to quickly react to new trends and shifts in consumer behavior, enhancing your SEO and improving your brand reputation among your target audience. Monitor the market and efficiently manage tasks such as updating website pages and your corporate blog to stay ahead in organic search rankings.
4. Encourage Loyal Customers
The easiest way to attract new customers is working with your existing ones – show them your respect, how you value them and offer exclusive opportunities. Proven that 65% of new clients are direct or indirect referrals from those who already purchased something from your store or who shared your product on their social media accounts.
What to do: don’t ignore solutions designed for easy integration of social share buttons on the product pages. This simple tool can highly increase social sharing and your website promotion. Motivate your existing customers to refer your store to friends and family by offering them coupons or other benefits in return. A loyalty program carefully designed for your e-commerce business and customers will facilitate the process of results tracking.
5. Be Active on Social Media
Social media is another marketing channel that allows you to promote your e-commerce website for free. Activity on social media makes your business more humane and open for customers. With the right posts you can show your brand identity and engage with customers on the basis of your common life values. This is very important for younger consumers who make their purchasing decisions in 72% cases on the basis of photos and posts in social media.
What to do: make qualitative photos of your products, office and staff. Prepare original and interesting content which in combination with great photos will create an outstanding experience for your potential customers. Don’t hesitate to express your opinion on sensitive topics, show your internal business processes – people are always excited to know not only about products or services you sell but also like to see how you create them. Post on social media regularly – at least once per day, so customers don’t forget about you.
6. Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing is a cheap and at the same time efficient solution for attracting new clients to an e-commerce store. The latest statistics show that nearly 49% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from the brands and 54% of people have a more positive attitude towards companies that send them confirming the importance of email marketing campaigns.
What to do: first of all, send emails to customers who were inactive for a long period of time sharing special offers or discount codes pushing them to make a purchase. Force potential customers to leave their email addresses for getting discounts or viewing exclusive collections. Even if they don’t make a purchase immediately, you can use their email addresses to create a special marketing campaign sending emails with new products, sale offers, tips on how to style or use products they previously viewed and many more.
7. Offer Promos
Is there one person in this world who doesn’t like promos and discounts? We’re sure not. The word “free” or “discount” affects the subconscious and makes people feel inexplicably excited and positive. Affecting the fear of missing opportunity (FOMO) promotions motivates them to make a purchase without any doubts.
What to do: start with free shipping, really. 79% of US consumers consider free shipping as the key indicator for making a purchase online. Isn’t it a reason to review your shipping conditions? Another thing to start working on is discount codes distribution. The easiest way is to offer them for the first order, encouraging customers to shop online you can showcase these offers on targeted popups on your website.
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8. Don’t Forget About Reviews and Ratings
Let’s discover this statement from the two points important for consumers:
- Reviews for your business
- Reviews for the products or services you offer
Both of them influence customers’ buying behavior as people tend to use external conscience for making a decision. Reviews for your company that can be found on the internet will affect the feeling of trust and the desire to start any relationships with your business. Reviews available for products and services on your website will show the previous customers’ experience with your products and how positive or negative it was. They grab customers’ attention and can increase sales.
What to do: first of all, enable customer reviews on your website if you haven’t done that before. Then talk to your existing customers and ask them to leave feedback for your company or exact product. Simple, isn’t it? It can be another part of your customers’ loyalty program, if you provide benefits for such active clients.
9. Enable Guest Checkout
As a customer do you really want to create your account on each website you make a purchase? Definitely, not. So why do you being an e-commerce merchant push people to do that? Yes, we understand that this tactic is made to get customers’ email addresses, learn more about them and use this information for marketing purposes. But as Baymard Institute research on customer abandonment shows – 34% of users abandon an order because they were not offered a guest checkout option. Result is that you don’t attract new customers because of this simple thing.
What to do: let’s start with enabling the guest checkout option to keep people from leaving your store. You may feel worried about losing connection with clients. There are three tactics we offer in this case in exchange:
- Offer customers to create an account after purchase. Let customers finish the task they came to your website forgive them an easy way to make an order and complete payment. Then you can offer them additional options – create an account, sign up for exclusive offers and news, leave an email to get updates about their order and more. After making a purchase people are more likely to agree on that.
- Integrate social sign up option. People don’t like to create an account as there are usually too many fields they need to fill with their personal information. Give them an opportunity to autofill data from Google, Facebook, Linkedin and other platforms. So easy, but so efficient.
- Use cookies to recognize your returning customers. In the modern world, cookies are one of the instruments that can bring customer experience and personalization to a highly new level. If a customer has previously visited your website, you can always recognize him among others and show him tailored recommendations pushing to making the desired purchase.
10. Be Honest in Your Sales Copy
This is the last, but not the least point in our guide. It may seem obvious, but let’s repeat again – customers always feel if you try to fool them. Your website copy not only can build the reputation of your business but also is able to inspire confidence and encourage people to stick with your brand.
What to do: don’t claim what you don’t really stand for. Don’t hyperbolize every product description you write or any offer you prepare. Be true to yourself, your business vision and your customers. It is better to touch the vital values of your customers with a considerate copy than trying to engage the whole world with universe scale promises.
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Final Thoughts
The ten instruments described in this article can be a great solution for e-commerces that are looking for efficient ways of their business growth. Hope we could prove that you don’t obviously need millions of dollars to improve customer acquisition strategy. The main aspects required here are your creativity and understanding of the right marketing channels to choose from. Adapt all the knowledge you have now to the particularities of your business to win new clients and sales!
To attract more customers to your online store, you can focus on optimizing your website for search engines and social media platforms, as well as offering promotions and providing excellent customer service. Additionally, creating engaging content and leveraging influencer marketing can also help attract and retain customers.
To attract more customers to your physical store, you can focus on creating an inviting atmosphere, offering promotions and discounts, and providing excellent customer service. Additionally, advertising through local media outlets and participating in community events can also help increase foot traffic.
To promote your eCommerce business, you can leverage social media marketing, email marketing campaigns, and search engine optimization to increase visibility and drive traffic to your website.
To make your eCommerce store successful, you can focus on providing high-quality products, optimizing your website for user experience and search engines, providing excellent customer service, and leveraging marketing tactics to increase visibility and drive traffic to your website.
Offering quality products and services, creating a pleasant shopping experience, and promoting through various marketing channels can attract customers to your store.
