When starting an online store, you first need to take care of the basics: finding an e-commerce platform, listing products, setting up purchases, and choosing a carrier. Then you can focus on attracting people to your store through marketing.
There are countless marketing techniques you can use, but there are some basic, proven ways to get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, SMS (text message) marketing ), social media and influencers.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term you may not be familiar with yet, but it is essential for driving traffic to your online store. SEO is how you improve your ranking on search engines, like Google. To attract people to your store, ideally you want to appear on the first page of search results. (Think about it: how often do you go past the first page when searching the Internet?) To improve your SEO, you need to determine what keywords your customers are searching for and incorporate them into your website and especially your product pages.
There are also structural aspects of your online store that impact your SEO score, such as having a good user experience, using metadata, using H1, H2 and H3 tags in your content, getting backlinks to your store, And much more.
It’s a lot to handle, especially if you’re not an SEO expert. Fortunately, ecommerce platforms, like Volusion, have built-in SEO features to help you.
Email Advertising
Email marketing is an effective way to drive traffic to your online store. To use it, you must capture the email addresses of your customers and prospects. You can send regular communications promoting sales and new products or send a regular newsletter to keep your online store top of mind.
Your email marketing software can integrate with many ecommerce platforms, including Volusion. This allows you to send reminder emails to customers if they leave items in their cart or alert them when products they’ve already purchased are on sale.
SMS Marketing
Text message marketing – or SMS marketing – consists of promotions that you send to customers or prospects via text message. For this, you need to have a database of cell phone numbers to target. These are short messages usually alerting customers to special offers or new products. They can also be used to remind customers of items left in their cart or to promote items similar to other products they have already purchased.
Social networks
One of the most popular marketing methods is using social media platforms to drive traffic and increase sales. Although this is a common method, it is also the most complex and requires the most planning and execution.
- First, you need to decide which platforms to use. To make this decision, you need to think about what platforms your audience uses. You also need to think about what type of content you want to promote on social media: is it images, videos, blogs? The most common options are Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. YouTube, Twitter and TikTok should also be considered. If you’re hesitant about TikTok, you might want to rethink your stance. There is a lot of benefits of using TikTokincluding increasing your brand awareness, expanding your audience, promoting your products, gaining new customers and seeing what your competitors are doing.
- Next, make sure you have consistent branding. Before posting on social media, you should ensure that you represent your business in the same way on each platform, including using the same logo, colors, images, product listings, tone and other elements. This will help your customers recognize your products across platforms. Marketing agency partner of Volusion, M360helps online stores create consistent design and branding across various platforms.
- When your profiles are ready, make sure to link to them from your ecommerce site. You want customers to be able to move quickly and easily from the online store to your social media profiles, and vice versa.
- Next, you need to plan what content you will publish on different platforms and how you will publish it. You can use a social media scheduling platform to do this. To keep content organized, you need a content calendar. This will allow you to plan what content you want to publish on each platform and when.
- When creating posts, you can embed images and videos of your products, talk about upcoming promotions, and much more. If you are stuck for ideas, you can always use AI tools like ChaptGPT. You can ask the AI tool for post ideas to keep your content fresh. You can also use it to proofread your posts and adjust the tone and voice of your content.
PPC
To quickly reach more potential customers, you can run pay-per-click (PPC) ads. This includes Google Ads and social media ads. As the name suggests, with these ads you pay per click. In search engines, like Google, your ads appear when users type certain targeted keywords.
For social media ads, Facebook is one of the leading advertising platforms. A simple option is to set up a Facebook pixel. This connects to some e-commerce platforms, like Volusion. It will store and track the consumer’s site behavior, such as when a person makes a purchase, adds to their cart, starts an order, etc. It will send this data to Facebook, allowing you to better target your consumers through Facebook ads.
Retargeting is another useful advertising tool. If a potential customer visits your site and doesn’t make a purchase, you can use a retargeting campaign to have your ad displayed when they visit other sites.
Influencers
A newer marketing technique is using influencers. These are usually people who have many online followers. When they promote your products to their audience, you can reach audiences you may never have had before through traditional advertising. This not only increases the audience that sees your products, but it can also drive more people to purchase your products after receiving a recommendation from an influencer they trust.
If you need help finding influencers, you can use AI tools like ChatGPT to put together a list.
In conclusion
After creating your online store, you need to focus on attracting customers to your site. Using various marketing techniques can help attract customers. These include focusing on SEO, running ads, using email marketing, SMS marketing, and influencers.
