If you own an e-commerce store, you may have numerous purposes in your mind. Of them, profit-making which is positively correlated with sales might be the most important one as it is a must for the survival of your business. Meaning that the higher you can make your sales volume the more you will be able to maximize your profit. But how can you increase the sales volume?
One of the simplest ways is by generating leads for your eCommerce store. It’s simply because leads of today are the potential customers of tomorrow. Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can generate your leads.
Today, we will go over 12 lead generation strategies that you can apply to drive qualified leads to your e-commerce site.
Show the 1-800 telephone number
A flurry of research has found that visitors feel a website really special when they see a 1-800 toll-free number. Meaning that the caller doesn’t have to pay anything for making the call but the website owner has to pay for the call.
If you check out the top e-commerce websites then you will see that most if not all of them have placed this feature on their website. This is really helpful to repel the communication gap between you and your leads.
Search Engine Optimization
Will you visit the subsequent search result pages when you are googling something for a particular keyword? Well, for most of the people, it has really been a common practice that they will not visit a page if it is not found on the first search result page.
Ensuring proper optimization of your site for the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. will result in organic traffic which means that these visitors will turn into potential customers or leads.
You can visit either Backlinko or Moz or Yoast to learn how to optimize your e-commerce store for the search engines.
Easy navigation and aesthetic appearance
You might miss out many leads if you do not make a user-friendly navigation system for your site. Because the visitors have little time in their hand to ransack in a messed up site for their desired contents. This is why it is necessary to keep the most wanted things in place so that your visitors don’t have to struggle to get to their desired information.
To ensure a higher engagement rate of your leads and faster access to product information, you can use concise and uncluttered navigation bars, categories, tags and improve the overall aesthetic appeal of everything including menu options.
Sign up forms and Email marketing
The big gun corporations do know how much it is important to collect emails. To this end, sign up forms are a very useful tool to get the emails along with other information about your visitors. Later, you can use this email list to do email marketing, for example, you can send newsletters or coupons to your leads. However, getting emails from your visitors is not that easy as it may seem first.
So, how will you get it done?
You can simply show the signup forms as a popup and provide coupons with the popup so that you can get the highest conversion rate. For example, you can ask them to sign up in exchange for a free ebook or pdf copies of certain articles related to your niche that matters to your visitors.
Content marketing
If you are dealing with products that are highly competitive, chances are very low that you will get noticed by the visitors. But still, you can make it through with creating valuable contents for your visitors. You can help out your visitors’ purchase decision by providing with informative contents.
Really gone are the days of cold calling and hard sale approach to your customers. If you take a closer look at the established c-commerce websites, you will notice that they do concentrate on making contents related to their niche. All that you need is keep a blog or vlog section on your website to spruce up with contents that bring leads automatically.
Reading Material: How weDevs is Doing Content Marketing and Reshaping Strategy
Maximize results with pay-per-click advertising
If you fail to beat your competitors with a particular keyword – not to worry- as a last resort you can pay Google for that specific keyword! The interesting point is that you will have to pay only when a searcher clicks on your PPC (or Pay Per Click) ads.
Since Google shows the paid ads first, you can drive more traffic or leads to your website this way.
Social media marketing
Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram are the treasure trove of generating leads. If you are yet to harness their utilities, you are by all means missing a lot of potential customers. We Are Social has found,
The number of social media users in 2018 is 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year
It implies that tens of thousands of leads of your eCommerce store are already prevailing among these social media users. To increase brand awareness and to engage with these leads in a cost-effective way, you can use the social media marketing strategy. Using social media, not only can you reach them but also interact with them with like, comments, messaging and so on.
Personalized Marketing/Use Behavioral Targeting
With the incremental usage of artificial intelligence, it has become possible to track a particular customer’s behavioral data. For example, you can track which types of products a visitor viewed, added to the cart or added to cart but did not complete the checkout process etc. You can track this kind of behaviors using popular remarketing platforms like Facebook, Perfect Audience, Twitter, Google AdWords etc.
However, in order to use these platforms and set up the environment to derive user data, you will have to have a good amount of coding know-how. If you don’t have so, then you can use a free remarketing tool to avoid the hassle of coding.
CRM Solution
Assuming that you have collected loads of leads in your list. But what’s the point of such list when you can not find a particular type of leads from the database and follow up them in time?
This is where a CRM solution comes into play! A CRM tool will not only help you save your leads, potentials, customers etc. but also will allow you to manage them at your disposal. You will be able to schedule meeting with them, send emails, retrieve a contact with filtered search, jot down notes and many more.
Get a free CRM now to manage your leads!
Avoid plain pricing to catch up more leads
If you were to set up pricing for two related products what would you have done then? Would you sell an 80 dollar suit and a 20 dollar watch separately? Never do that. You can sell them together at 100$ and set the caption “Buy a suit and get a watch for free!“.
Another thing is when you are setting the price of a product, will you show the shipping cost separately? No, don’t do that. Instead, include the shipping cost with the product price and write “Free shipping” as a caption. This way, you will be able to create an illusion of lucrativeness in your leads’ mind.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
What is the use of getting leads if they don’t convert into customers? When you gain visitors to your site, you should do everything under the sun (except the kinds of stuff that are detrimental to your e-commerce website’s goodwill or reputation) to make them purchase something from your website.
You can improve the CRO of your e-commerce website by optimizing checkout processes, placing relevant links, proper Call to Action buttons, within your articles, landing pages, newsletters etc. to drive them through the sales funnel.
Note that never do anything that reflects hard sale or cold call approach that will do harm in lieu of doing good. You can test anything to determine which works best for your eCommerce website’s overall conversion rate in the best possible manner.
Site speed and responsiveness for mobile devices
Walmart found that fast site speed affects the conversion rate positively. Take a look at the following graph developed by Walmart: [Source]
If you are yet to optimize your site’s speed, do it right now!
Another point is that, with the increasing rate of mobile device users throughout the world, never encapsulate your eCommerce website on the desktop screen. Make your website responsive for cross browsers and devices like smartphones, tablets etc.
Wrapping up
If you can arm your eCommerce website with these lead generation ideas, you will see that the number of leads is gradually going through the roof. But, you have to be patient at first, because most of these strategies will require a number of weeks to take effects.
Most of the renowned eCommerce websites are applying these techniques repeatedly and are gaining leads increasingly. Finally, you will have to carry out these strategies patiently and on a regular basis to see the good results. “Patience has its rewards” – after all. 🙂
