Marketing An Online Store And Increasing Monthly Profits
Starting an online store is difficult in the sense you will be faced with so many things that you have to do and that you may not know much about. The biggest problem is always to get people that would visit the store. You want only those that are interested in your products and many marketers do not actually know how to get in touch with them.
The good news is that you can market the online store properly. You basically need to follow a suitable approach. While different marketing options appear, some stand out of the crowd. Those are the ones that you want to always consider as they can bring in immediate results.
Remember your goals:
- You want traffic to your site
- You want that traffic to convert into paying customers
Bring Traffic To Your Online Store Through:
- PPC Advertising – You can easily use services like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads for this. Just make sure that you target your audience properly.
- Offline Advertising – A lot of online marketers forget about the offline channels. Do not do that with an online store since customers want your product in real life. It makes sense to use offline channels to get traffic to your internet store. Connect offline marketing with online marketing!
- Strategic Partnerships – If there are other people in the industry that you can arrange a strategic partnership, do that! You can so easily get new customers for your business and the partner can get new clients for his business.
- Discussion Groups/Online Forums – This is a great way to promote an online store if you do it properly. To put it as simple as possible, you are interested in locating those communities that are interested in products like those you are currently selling. If you find that, you can even end up with a viral response, which is always great.
- Social Media Channels – We already mentioned Facebook Ads but you can also use all social media channels in order to get free traffic to your online store. Ads are always recommended but if you cannot afford the expense, you should at least have a strong social media presence.
Don’t Forget About Search Engine Optimization!
The truth is that an online store is usually not great from a search engine optimization point of view. That is especially true when there are similar shops around the world. You need to make sure that your site is properly optimized because on the long term, clients coming from search engines are incredibly valuable. SEO is perfect for the long term marketing approach and has to be combined properly with social media marketing.
Don’t Forget About The Business Side Of Things!
As you get more traffic and your customer base grows, it is easy to lose track of the actual business. This is something that we see all the time. Managers forget about modifications that have to be made to their personalized terms and conditions page or forget to properly manage their stocks in order to always have what sells best available for potential clients. Make sure that your business operates perfectly while you focus on your online marketing strategy.
Email Marketing Still Works!
It is surprising to see how many people out there believe email marketing does not work anymore. This is completely false. You should ask all your customers if they agree to sign up to a newsletter. That newsletter that you send is much more likely to bring in return customers when compared to simply waiting for them to need something from you again. Don’t forget about email marketing since it can help you a lot in reducing bounce rate and generating repeat customers.
Monitoring Conversion Rates
A huge part of marketing an online store is analyzing the conversion rates you have. What worked great in the past might not be tremendous right now as products changed or you are covering a much wider audience because of an expansion. Always know exactly what the target audience is and increase your conversion rate through:
- Free gifts offered for new customers
- Offering bundled products
- Sending a regular newsletter
- Adding helpful content to the site (this can also help your SEO efforts)
- A companion blog
Whenever you notice that your conversion rate drops, see why that happens. You need to identify the problem or at least make tweaks so that the rate can increase. A good way to increase your conversion is to add authority factors to your online store. For instance, you can set up a nice Trustpilot based review system and invite the customers to write a review. Highlight the ratings and show people that the quality of your services is high.
Marketing an online store is all about identifying suitable marketing channels and increasing conversion rate to as high as it can be. If you manage to do this, your promotion will be successful.
