The internet is a noisy place, which means it is more challenging than ever for eCommerce businesses to find new ways to reach the target audience and get heard.
Moreover, as brand credibility and trustworthiness take precedence over impersonal sales pitches, eCommerce business owners have a lot of work to do.
Thankfully, many tried-and-tested lead generation ideas can instantly grab the user’s attention, pull them to your eCommerce store, and nudge them to take action. Here are the seven most promising ideas that help expand your business reach:
1. Start a newsletter
A newsletter that delivers engaging, useful, and timely content can be a great way to boost your eCommerce store’s reach. Use the newsletter to send content that fits a theme or that addresses a need. You can create newsletters for all sorts of purposes and occasions.
Some examples include:
- New product launch
- Content round-ups
- Company news
- Customer interview
- Referral program
For instance, you can send a special Labor Day-themed newsletter for promoting a service that reflects the holiday, or share instructions on using your product effectively.
Harry’s, a men’s shaving and grooming products company, once sent an educational email relevant to its product range. Instead of directly selling its shaving kits, the brand shared tips on how men can take care of their skin and get the most out of their shaving experience.
In a nutshell, you do not have to talk about your products or services at all, but emailing your target audience a few times a week can be an effective way to reach out to more people and convince them to purchase your offering — subtly.
2. Interview an industry expert (or influencer)
In the past five years, influencer marketing has grown from obscurity to a form of marketing that is extremely valuable to even the biggest brands. Today, 38.5% of businesses view their success based on conversions and sales.
Interestingly, 50.7% of eCommerce brands work with influencers. There is no doubt that the latter can expand your reach through doing product reviews on YouTube or creating creative Instagram reels or TikTok videos about your eCommerce business.
Blogging is also one of the best ways to build up authority as a business and induce customers to keep visiting the store for more. An excellent addition to your influencer marketing is an interview with a third-party expert.
This helps bring a fresh perspective into your offerings and also encourages followers of the expert in question to visit your eCommerce store.
3. Use on-site retargeting to convert visitors into leads
One way to generate leads is through pop-up forms, which ask for contact information when a visitor is about to leave a webpage or a website (known as exit intent) or when they have spent some time on a particular page.
Rather than simply asking for their name and email address, you can use the pop-up form to offer your visitors some tangible value. For instance, you could give them a $20 discount on any of the products you offer or ask them to sign up to your blog for free tips.
If they are about to abandon their cart, you can trigger an exit-intent pop-up and stop them from bouncing off the site with a well-timed incentive and a proper CTA.
Check out the example from the luxury brand Kate Spade. The copy highlights that the consumer qualifies for two-day free shipping if they go ahead with the purchase:
You could also offer personalized value, such as boost cross-sell purchases related to the product page your visitor recently checked out or upsell with additional products. Strategies like these have a far higher conversion rate than regular pop-up forms.
4. Remarket to enhance brand awareness
This is an important strategy to reach out to customers who have already visited your website and have seen its ads. Essentially, once they have left your site, they continue to see your ads on other pages that they visit.
This strategy is also known as retargeting and is a more effective way of driving conversions than regular display ads. This is because the customer has already visited your site, which means that he or she has some awareness of or interest in your product and is likely to buy.
Customers who are retargeted with ads are 70% more likely to convert. WordStream confirms that:
Tools like Google AdWords or AdRoll are ideal for remarketing. Be sure to give yourself a few months when you start with this strategy to build up a decent list of site visitors first on your eCommerce store.
5. Expand your reach through guest blogging
Guest blogging on different industry sites is a brilliant way to promote your eCommerce store in front of a larger target audience and build inbound links from qualified leads. To put an effective guest blogging strategy in place, you must find relevant blogs in your industry niche.
Google any of the following or similar search strings to identify publications that accept guest posts:
Your Keyword “become an author eCommerce”
Your Keyword “write for us eCommerce”
Your Keyword “contributing writer eCommerce”
Once you narrow down your choice of publications, make sure you:
- Create relevant and compelling content
- Use a CTA in your author bio to drive site traffic
- Deliver what you promise in your guest post when you start getting visits
Please make it a habit of posting at least one guest post a month initially and slowly increasing the volume.
6. Experiment with cross-promotion
Lead generation, when done correctly, can be an excellent way of procuring new leads from an audience that is already interested in your product or service. You will need to work with a business whose product is neither too similar to your own nor too different from yours.
For instance, if you offer personalized interior decor products, you could partner with interior design services in select locations (or cities where your largest customer base comes from) where they are likely to come in to design their house or living spaces aesthetically.
Both businesses can benefit from this partnership. You can promote the consultancy firm on your marketing channels, and the former can do the same for your eCommerce store — thus boosting your online reach.
7. Utilize good old PPC advertising
A fail-proof to expand your store’s reach is through PPC or pay-per-click ads. PPC enables you to measure if your campaigns are cost-effective by comparing the ad costs with the amount of traffic and sales driven by the ad.
Google Adwords is a popular example of PPC advertising. It enables you to create ads for Google search, wherein your suggested ad copies go through an auction process. You start bidding on a keyword, and ads are chosen based on their quality score and bid amounts.
Identify a range of keywords to target and write creative copies to pull the maximum crowd. You pay cost-per-click, meaning you pay every time someone clicks to open your ad. Check out online luxe rug seller Bazaar Velvet ad copy on Google:
Ready to scale up your business?
If you want your eCommerce business to reach as many potential customers as possible, you must apply the tips mentioned above. Not all will work for you, but those that do will undoubtedly fetch you outstanding results.
Image: Depositphotos
This article, “7 Powerful Lead Generation Tactics To Increase Your Ecommerce Store’s Reach” was first published on Small Business Trends