Studying how to promote your e-commerce store is very important in order to ensure the success of the store. I remember when I opened my first e-commerce store with Shopify, I was more excited about the prospect of being an online store owner, venturing into the unknown world of making money online that I had not yet figured out how to ensure that the store actually makes sales. By the time my store was all set to receive and serve customers, I had no real idea how I was going to get them to come. Someway, somehow, I had thought that once I built it, they would come, how wrong!, oh how wrong was I!
Needless to say, I learnt the hard way that, even before you spend a dime in building that store, you must have a clear strategy on how you will get your money plus profit back.
I have compiled 8 actionable ways on how to ensure you not only get people to your store but also increase the conversion rate, converting visitors to paying customers.
#1 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Use Daily And Group Deals
You can cause an increased number of traffic and sales depending on the nature of the deals you are offering.
Daily deals could be in the form of discounts that will expire in a couple of hours or days.
Group deals can be in the form of having a goal, for example, “invite 3 people to come and shop and you get this product at 75% off or even free while those friends will also get a discount of 10%”. This type of group deal will make your visitors share your link with their friends or family leading to higher traffic and more sales.
#2 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Paid Advertisement
There is nothing like free traffic, you are either paying with currency or with your time, so if you don’t have time to put into advertising your site by yourself (free traffic), you can invest into paying for traffic to your store.
There are various advertising platforms, from Google Ads to Facebook Ads, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Bing ads amongst others. These are very effective and reliable sources of traffic to your site.
#3 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is excellent when advertising your e-commerce store. SEO, though slow can guarantee a continuous large influx of visitors and paying customers if done well. SEO for an e-commerce store involves optimizing each product page for Google’s search engine. This is done by
A)Change the product title
This is something that most online store owners don’t do, after importing their product from oberlo or any other dropshipping app, they often leave the product title the same way they met it, this could hurt your store while helping to rank the original store owner with that same product title.
Change the product title by using words that people will normally use while searching for your product.
For example, if you sell female shoes, your product title could be,
“Cheap 6 inches, pink high heel shoes” OR “Good quality pink coloured 6 inches high heels shoes for females”
These are some of the product titles you can use.
B)Choose a keyword to rank for
Make sure to choose a keyword that will appear in your product title and description 3-5 times, this is important so that Google can know what your product is all about and help you to start ranking for that keyword.
C)Make sure that your description is not less than 1000 words
It has proven that Google tends to rank product pages with longer description, so make sure you put in the effort of writing a lot of words in your description, not only to rank but also to explain your product in full details to your customers in order to answer any questions that they might have.
D)Use magnetic words to increase your CTR
It has been proven that higher click through rates (CTR) tend to make your post rank higher and higher on the search engine, this can be achieved by using what I call “magnetic words” like
-Free shipping
-Next day delivery
-50% discount
etc
So your product title for that female shoe could be “50% discount cheap high heel shoes + FREE Shipping”, this will make a lot of people click your product link, thereby increasing your CTR and making you rank higher on Google to drive more traffic and make more sales.
#4 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Blogging
Having a blog on your e-commerce store is very important in order to build backlinks with other blogs. Having a number of quality backlinks is one of the biggest factors for ranking high on Google.
Building backlinks on product pages of an e-commerce store is almost impossible because people mainly link their blogs to other blogs that can provide value to their readers, hence the need for blogging about your store.
For example, if you write a blog post on “type of female shoe fits a black jumpsuit”, that blog post can get linked on another blog that’s talking about something similar. This gives both your blog and store backlink that increases their rank on Google.
Apart from ranking on Google, blogging also helps to educate your customers on topics surrounding the products you sell, this helps build a relationship with your customers and increases trust, hence making them loyal readers and customers.
Also check out, My Online Store Is Not Selling Anything… 4 Reasons Why And What Should You Do?
#5 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Social Media Campaign
This could be free or paid social media campaign. We have already mentioned some social media paid traffic like Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube advertisement, and the free advert can be extremely rewarding if done well.
If you create and build an Instagram, Facebook page or Youtube channel, etc into a brand with influence, it has the potential of becoming a long-lasting source of income for you and your team. You can consistently, inform, educate, showcase your products or services there to attract more followers and engagement on your post.
Also, replying to your comments and communicating with your audience will build your brand and online presence which will inevitably bring in more traffic and sales. It also creates loyal fans and customers, because they will start seeing you and your products as the solution to their problems making you an authority in that area.
#6 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Email Marketing
Email marketing is very useful in marketing your products to potential clients. It creates a sales journey with your audience starting from when you first alerted them on the availability of your products and services to when they finally paid for them.
As we all know, not everyone that sees your product or service will buy it the first time, hence the need for an email marketing campaign where you can create and schedule a sequence of emails about your product or serviice at certain times or after a certain “event” takes place. This sequence helps to inform, explain, remind and convince your potential customers to buy your products.
The different types of email marketing tools that you can use are Sumo, Aweber, Getresponse etc.
#7 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Abandoned Cart Email Campaign
Abandoned cart email campaigns are triggered whenever a potential client does not purchase items placed in the shopping cart. This is a very powerful tool, it has been estimated to have a 29% success rate at bringing back customers that successfully complete their purchase.
This campaign can be done with Optin monster, care cart for Shopify, abandoned cart pro for Woo commerce etc.
#8 Ways To Promote Your E-commerce Store – Online Newsletters
An online newsletter is an excellent way to maintain consistent communication at a certain interval with your potential customers. This should always be displayed at the bottom of your online store and /or as a popup prompting them to subscribe. When they subscribe, make sure you don’t abuse that opportunity by sending them newsletters every day, this can annoy them, and make them unsubscribe to your newsletter.
It’s advisable to have a particular interval for sending newsletters to your subscribers, it could be every holiday or a special day like 1 or 2 days to Valentine, Christmas, Easter day, etc. These newsletters should also contain fun and informative facts about the products you sell. This creates an avenue for building relationships with your readers so that they can start feeling like they “know” you and can “trust” you which is vital in building long-lasting relationships with your audience.
Conclusion
One important factor in ensuring you build a successful online store is your marketing strategy. “They” won’t come if you build “it” without marketing “it”. Let’s recap the top 8 effective ways of marketing your e-commerce store in order to drive a lot of traffic and sales eventually.
1)Use Daily and Group Deals
2)Paid Advertisement
3)Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
4)Blogging
5)Social Media Campaign.
6)Email Marketing
7)Abandoned Cart Email Campaign
8)Online Newsletters
Comment below if you have any questions and I will reply swiftly, also share your experience if you have used any of these methods.