Get Even More Customers to Your Online Store

The ultimate objective of any online merchant is to meet or exceed customer expectations while selling as much of their product or service as possible. There are countless ways to attract visitors to your online store and convert those visitors into customers. There are also many ways to increase the amount sold to an online shopper. Here are some potential initiatives to help you accomplish more.

Post Product Reviews / Recommendations

A great product review from a loyal customer (or brand advocate) posted on your website can help influence a purchase decision. This is the online equivalent of “word-of-mouth” and is trusted by more than 70% of consumers polled. Word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family are trusted by more than 80% of consumers polled.

Offer a Money Back Guarantee

Customers come in all shapes and sizes and successful online merchants strive to satisfy the needs of all of them. A shopper that is indecisive, cautious or risk averse by nature, may read online referrals but still have worries about making a purchase. One way to help alleviate the worry is to offer a “Money Back Guarantee”. If the product does not live up to expectations, you could offer a refund. If your products are well received in the marketplace this may be a low risk offer with good upside potential.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

A growing problem for all online merchants is the abandoned shopping cart. This is where a consumer has added items to their cart and have abandoned it before completing the purchase. There are many factors that lead to an abandoned cart and it is important for merchants to know what they are and eliminate them as much as possible. One reason for an abandoned cart is where the shopper was interrupted during the checkout process for one reason or another. An automated email can be sent to the shopper within hours to remind them to return and complete the almost finished purchase.

Have a Blog

You want more visitors to your website, but how is it they get there? In short: blogging; social media; and search engines. Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more indicator for Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published that they should index. Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website through organic search.

When you write a blog post, make it easy for viewers to share on social networks, which helps expose your business to a larger audience. A blog helps maintain your social media presence by extending your social reach with content and driving new website visitors through your social channels.

Kitpak Fulfillment is a leading Winnipeg fulfillment company offering a broad range of e-commerce fulfillment services to offline and online merchants.

To find out how Kitpak Fulfillment can streamline your fulfillment processes, while saving you money, REQUEST a QUOTE or CONTACT US today!

Online Shopping

Get More Customers to Your Online Store

Creating an online store is quite an undertaking. Getting the right design, writing content, selecting product images, website hosting and more, takes time and effort. Finally, you launch the store and wait for the orders to start rolling in. After a few days, you start to see some orders arrive and you hope that sales will continue to ramp up. You begin to wonder if the hordes of potential customers you expected are ever going to come to your store and purchase your products.

The question you ask yourself is “How can I get more customers to my online store and make a purchase”. Here are a few ideas to help answer that question.

Have a Sale

Everyone likes a sale. Consider offering a popular product for a deeply discounted sale price (Loss Leader) to attract visitors to your online store. Once they are in your store, you have multiple opportunities to increase the sale by offering other related products at higher margins. Other types of sales work well too, such as a BOGO sale (buy one, get one) or a volume discount where the discount increases with the amount purchased. Your sale will run for a limited time to instill a sense of urgency and stimulate action in the minds of your customers (fear of missing out).

Give Free Products or Samples

Giving free products or product samples is another effective method of attracting visitors to your online store. For example, to stimulate sales of a new fishing rod and reel, you could offer a free spool of quality fishing line with every purchase. You could limit the expense by making the offer available to the first 100 purchasers only.

Ask for Referrals

Referrals are another great way to get visitors to your online store. Rewarding your existing customers for making referrals leads to more visitors. Referral visitors from brand advocates are four times more likely to make a purchase and spend more on average. They also remain loyal with a higher lifetime customer value than an unreferred customer. Referrals (word-of-mouth) work well as they are trusted by more than 80% of consumers polled.

Start a Loyalty Program

The success rate of selling to a new customer can range up to 20%, while the success rate for selling to an existing customer often exceeds 50%. It can also cost five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. A great way to retain existing customers is to offer a loyalty program. You could offer discounts to existing customers only or offer something free based on volume of purchases made. Creating a loyalty program is not complicated or expensive and the rewards can far exceed the program cost.

Use Multiple Sales Channels

Having an online store on your own website is a great way to start selling your products. However, to scale up and meet higher sales expectations, consider utilizing multiple sales channels for your products. There are numerous, well established online marketplaces you can utilize to achieve greater market penetration. Not all customers shop in one place so being in multiple places increases the chance of your product being found. Consider selling through Amazon, eBay, Shopify or Walmart for almost any product. Specialty marketplaces such as Wayfair and Etsy may also be great for your products.

Build an Email List

Staying in touch with your customers is a key component of sales success. Build your list and use it to remind existing customers how much you value them. Email is the standard for communicating sales or promotions to your customer base and can provide a great deal of valuable data, on which to base future promo emails. Your email database is likely the most important tool in your marketing toolbox.