Every business, regardless of the nature of the business or anything else, will at some point run find themselves in need of new customers. Whether it’s just starting off or an effort to fuel new growth, there are different strategies that exist solely for the purpose of helping your business expand.
According to BigCommerce, more than half of the total population (51%) prefer to do online shopping than buy the goods in person, so a good first step is to make sure you’re available online. The rest fall into place more easily from there.
Maximize the Use of Resources You Already Have
Telling the average person to place all their attention online while their physical store rots away is obviously pretty bad advice. To increase the reach of your business, the most logical way to begin is look at what you already have and put it to good use.
Despite all the bad news you’ve been hearing about the death of physical shopping, it might surprise you to know that 91% of all shopping sales are done in traditional stores. Online shopping has been growing at an incredible rate, but by 2025, they will still account for just 15% of all shopping done in the US, according to Forbes.
Every physical store has two major assets that should always be used to promote the business at any time: the window/curbside and the staff.
The window should have constantly-changing items, at least once every week if possible, and should have in display the best your store has to offer.
Your staff is going to be the most important asset that you have. Companies like Starbucks spend a significant amount of their budget just to keep them content and working. A happy employee is a productive employee.
Improve your e-commerce search capability
Designing a high-performance e-commerce website takes a lot of data and time to be able to finally nail down. In exploring your data, you’ll likely run into two kinds of customers – the kind that’s been there before and knows what they want and the other that’s just visiting.
There’s a definite need to optimize your site for both these groups of people, but it’s not as easy as you’d initially imagine.
Catering for the first kind of customer isn’t so much about customizing their experience, since they have likely visited you before. This kind of consumer is more likely to use your navigation bar and go deep into your site to look for what they want.
The other is more likely to use your search bar just to compare items. For which reason, your search experience has to be very performant. The more it can find with less data, the better.
Personalize the landing page
The landing page is perhaps the most important asset any website has in attracting new customers or getting old visitors to come back again. What to include on this page is a subject that’s always up for debate, especially for an e-commerce store.
Most stores seem to have settled on customizing a customer’s experience based on their previous shopping or browsing experience. On a portion of the screen, show them items similar to what they were searching for previously or to what they have bought before to pique interest.
If you don’t have any data on the visitor in question, displaying ‘best-sellers’ or ‘most highly-rated’ or ‘new arrivals’ is a good place to start. For cool landing pages that convert or for whitepapers or research papers, hire a good essayhave review like Essay Services Reviews Club. Professional content is the key to win over new customers.
Optimize your website for users and search engines
Optimizing your website is one of those aspects of e-commerce that’s so important it begs repetition a thousand times over. In the optimization process, there are two important parties to remember: search engines and actual users.
Search Engine Optimization is important of you want your site and products to be discoverable through Google. For instance, consider how many products from Amazon will show up on the first page if you search for ‘best headphones of 2019.’
On the other hand, optimizing the experience for your user means every interaction should be as comfortable as possible. The pictures have to be high quality, the sure has to load fast and the animations shouldn’t be intrusive.
All this requires data on how different aspects of your website are being used. Important questions that analytics will be able to answer include: at what point do users leave the site? Do they visit other pages first or just exit? Does the site load fast for some people and slow for others? Is a significant portion of the visitors from mobile? Does it work across browsers?
Expand your reach through social media
Social media is possibly the biggest thing to ever happen to online retailers since the invention of the internet. With their explosive growth has come a ton of new tools that promise to help you create a marketing campaign and target your market down to their personal preferences.
Advertisement outlets like Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly effective at helping businesses expand their reach. Working with ads on these sites might require a bit of trial and error before you can fully nail it down, so don’t commit too much the first time around. Remember, measure the success of the campaign through ROI, not number of new followers.
Instagram is another of the social media site you should consider having a presence on simply because of its massive popularity with younger generations.
It’s heavily skewed towards pictures, so it’s important to have a branding style and theme in every photo you take. If your store is focused on aesthetics such as clothes or furniture, then IG is just what you need.
Incentivize users to visit your store
Some kinds of shopping are usually preferably done in the store rather than online. Most notably, only 6.4% of shoppers say they never buy clothes in a physical store than the 14.9% that sat they would not shop online for clothes.
Aside from which, it might just make more sense from a business perspective to have people visit your store than it would for you to deliver everything straight to them. Delivering things isn’t cheap, especially if whatever they are ordering isn’t worth much to begin with and you don’t have the resources.
At the same time, businesses like coffee places or bakeries can offer deliveries but it still makes more sense to have in-store visitors.
Businesses that need to optimize their in-store presence can do so by offering discounts for people that purchase on premises or a chance to win something from your brand accessories.
Invest in the local landscape
People are a lot more likely to trust your brand of you can blend in with the local culture. Regardless of whether or not you have a physical presence in the community or not, if they are a potential target audience, you need to be able to reach the locals.
You can achieve this by running geotargetted ads and using the local language and incorporating their dialects when possible. Running offline advertisements through brochures, for instance, while embracing the culture can also prove very profitable.
Conclusion
Smart retailers know that to survive in a dynamic business environment, maximizing profits doesn’t happen without smart marketing. The resources that you allocate to it should not be based on instincts. Rather, it has to be based on effective planning that is promising enough to win you new customers and same time, keep the old customers returning to your store.
Author Bio:
Lilian Chifley is a digital marketing expert helping e-commerce brands build a solid customer base to ensure higher sale conversion by minimizing cart abandonment rate and increasing user engagement on product pages. She’s currently for an essay writer service in digital marketing sphere and for another best essay writing service. When Lilian is not busy with work, she likes to unwind by doing yoga, reading spiritual books and playing latest games.
