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.

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 order fulfillment process and save you money, REQUEST a QUOTE or CONTACT US today.