Top 12 Essential Ways To Attract Customers To Your Online Store
Whether you are selling a high-tech product or even cheese sandwiches in your online store, you will only survive and grow if you have a powerful online presence and wide reach to capture your potential customers.
To attract more people and grow your online store you need to significantly increase the traffic on your store so that you can convert your leads into conversion.
If you are looking for ways to attract more customers to grow your online store, then these proven strategies will help you to develop a strong online customer base.
But before we proceed, bear one thing in mind, there is no marketing strategy that will work for every type of business. The success and failure of each strategy depend upon how it is implemented and executed.
Let’s have a look at the ways that can be adopted by your business to attract online customers.
Table of Contents
Top 12 Essential Ways To Attract Customers To Your Online Store
1. Hold A Sale
Sales and discounts are sure to put up a smile on a person’s face. People love it when they get their favorite items at reduced prices. It makes them buy more till the sale lasts.
When you are holding a sale, promote it as much as you can. Post it on your social media pages, post an advertisement, send an email to your existing customers, etc. People will be tempted by sales and discounts and they will surely visit your online store.
You can also offer deals and bundles to your potential customers. It tricks the customer into thinking that they are getting something extra for the money they are paying.
You can put up a sale on special events such as Christmas or New Year. Furthermore, you can put up a clearance sale and offer amazing discounts to welcome huge traffic of new and existing customers to shop from your store.
2. Give Free Samples
Distributing free samples will enable your customers to experience your products or services. This will give them an idea of what to expect from your product. For instance, if you have an online store that sells organic skincare items, then distributing it for free will allow your customers to have a look at its consistency, feel its fragrance, and the overall result of the product on their skin.
Once the customers have used your product they can place their trust in you easily. There are several ways to distribute free samples.
a. Distribute Free Gifts In An Event
Distribute some of your products in an event as a gift to the attendees. Make sure that the event in which you distribute your goods must be related to your niche. For instance,
distributing maternity clothes in a gym or a strength training program would be futile. Instead distributing it in a pregnancy seminar or to any maternity group would bring you customers who need maternity clothes.
b. Host Giveaways
Another way to distribute free samples is by hosting a giveaway on your social media pages. It will also help you to grow your followers on your business page. People love free items and they won’t mind following you for a chance to win gifts.
Invite people to participate in the giveaway contest and share the post on their profile. This will invite more audiences to participate in the giveaway, it will prove to be an effective strategy to attract online customers.
3. Ask For Referrals
To invite new customers, take help from your existing customers. Ask your customers to refer your online store to their friends and family members. In return, you can give the favor of a certain percentage of the discount.
They would be more than happy to recommend your name to their friends in exchange for a discount. By adopting this way you will be able to score many new customers, as the old customers will market your brand in their social circle.
Referral marketing works well for businesses that don’t want to spend a fortune on placing an online advertisement.
4. Partner Up With Other Brands
Partnering up with a business that operates in a similar market but a different niche, or a brand that deals with the goods that complement your goods.
By collaborating, you will be able to reach new customers and inform them about your existence. For instance, a business that sells baby bottles can collaborate with a brand that sells bottle warmers or sterilizers. Both businesses can come up with a strategy to promote their collaboration and capture the wide base of their targeted audience.
5. Social Media Platforms
More than 3.6 billion people were present on social networking sites in the year 2019. Social media gives access to a large audience. You can easily market your brand here and can invite new people to visit your store.
The infra paragraphs will discuss how you can use famous social networking sites to grow your online store.
In 2019, 2.45 billion people were reported to use this famous website for connecting with their friends and family. Facebook has a large audience of different ages, gender, profession, etc. This means a business gets exposure to different demographics to develop its online marketing strategy.
To begin with, you first have to make a business page on Facebook. Next, join different groups that are related to your products. Don’t just stay as a dormant member, take an active part in the discussion. Let people know that you are well-versed in your field and not an average seller.
Post engaging content on your page. However, don’t spam your business page or else people will stop engaging with your content.
The safe haven for uploading aesthetic pictures to appeal to the senses of people. Keep your feed updated, upload high-quality pictures on your feed, conduct quizzes, and surveys, etc.
Collaborate with influencers working under the same niche as yours. By collaborating with an influencer, your brand will be visible to a wide base of audience.
6. Online Forums And Communities
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to target your hidden customers. You can still be successful by simply staying active on the internet and achieving your goal of attracting more customers.
Participating and discussing online groups and communities, allows you to network with people and share your expertise. This allows people to place their trust in you and think of you as a competent business in the competitive market.
You can join Quora for this purpose. It is a famous question-answer-based website. If you find any question that revolves around your niche then do not hesitate to share your knowledge and come up with a solution for the person. Once you have finished answering the question you can mention the link to your online store.
Your ultimate goal on such forums should be to first help the person and then invite him to visit your store. If you will only talk about your brand and the product you deal in, nobody will pay attention to it and will ignore your answer altogether.
This will help you to gain more visitors from different websites if your answers help them.
7. Promote Customers Reviews
It has become a common practice for customers to ask their friends and the people around them about a product before purchasing it.
When it comes to online shopping, customers are highly cautious. They don’t want to spend their money on a product that is not liked by the people. The reason why many online stores welcome reviews and feedback from people is to convince their potential customers to invest in their goods.
Around 87% of people read online reviews before making an online purchase. Therefore, do not keep the customer feedback and reviews to yourself. Flaunt them on your social media pages and websites.
If people read positive reviews about a product and how it helped them, then they are inclined to buy the product and reap the same benefits from it. If the customers are not giving you feedback or a review about your product, then you can politely ask them about their experience. If they give you a positive review then you can request them to post it on your social media pages or your online store.
Customers’ reviews help other potential customers to place their trust in the brand.
Product review sites are one of the best platforms on which you can actually go ahead and create a number of tutorials, articles, and listicles that can work in your product with a review-based story.
With that, let us understand the importance of product reviews and find here some best product review sites.
8. Create A Blog Page
The majority of renowned online stores have created a blog page to invite more visitors to their websites. By having a blog page, you get a chance to include the keywords that will be entered by your targeted audience in the search query.
Creating targeted content will help you to boost your online store’s SEO, this, in turn, will drive organic traffic to your store, and that too, without paying a single penny.
Furthermore, people nowadays want to see brands as more than just commercial organizations. They love it when brands go the extra mile to help their customers. By creating engaging and informative content, you can help your customers to learn something useful and productive.
For instance, a brand that deals with baby items can write different articles about how to handle babies, how to make them sleep longer, etc. This keeps your current customers interested in your website and at the same time, it is one of the excellent ways to attract more customers.
9. Paid Advertisement
It is quite a common strategy to attract online customers. This works when you place paid search ads on the search engines.
When people enter the keywords for buying something on the search bar of a search engine, like Google or Bing, the ads placed by the businesses will rank up.
For instance, if you own an online store that sells winter apparel and you place a paid ad on google. The link to your online store will always appear when a person enters a search query about warm winter coats, jackets, or any other winter clothing item.
This method is usually adopted by large online stores for small online sellers which might put a strain on their resources.
If you have a blogging site and enabled Adsense you will have to make sure your AdSense account is safe and you are not getting spam traffic, for this, you will have to check google analytics for Ad fraud detection and filter out the spam/bot traffic.
10. Offer Free Delivery
Offering free shipping on purchases is another way to increase your sales and invite new people to become your customers.
This allows first-time customers to buy something of a lesser price to test your product before they order something expensive. If the shipping is free they will not mind spending a small amount to purchase something from you.
Shipping charges add extra cost to the customer’s bill and they aren’t quite happy about it (Unless they want quick delivery!).
If offering free shipping is not possible for you, then you can set a minimum amount after which the delivery will be free. This tactic makes the customer add a few more items to their cart to get free shipping.
11. Leverage On YouTube Videos
YouTube is the least used channel to invite potential customers to your store. Just as Google is the master of all the search engines in the market, YouTube is the famous search engine for videos.
You must have noticed that many times YouTube videos are also displayed on the search engine result. It proves that using YouTube is a powerful strategy to attract online customers.
Create a channel by the name of your business and start posting videos on it. You don’t have to hire an expert videographer or editor for that, (you may do so if your business allows).
For starters, you can post video testimonials for your customers on your channel, or you can demonstrate how to use your product.
If you want a more positive response, then you can collaborate with famous YouTubers and Vloggers in your niche. For instance, if an online store deals with protein shakes and other supplements, then it can collaborate with a fitness enthusiast on YouTube and create a video together. This will help to grab the attention of the other fitness freaks who follow that YouTuber.
12. Mobile-Friendly Websites
Nobody wants to switch on their computers to place an order online. It would be a big turn-off for your new customers if your website is not mobile-friendly. Try to develop a responsive website to make it easier for people to visit your website on their phones.
Many businesses have also developed a mobile application for its customer to make their shopping experience even better. You can also do the same if your business is growing, if not then you can stick to optimizing your website and making it responsive to various digital devices.
Conclusion
The above-listed ways to attract more customers will help you to grow your online store and take it to new heights of success.
Do you know of some other ways and strategies to attract online customers?
If yes, then please share it with us by commenting below. We would appreciate your valuable input on this topic.