9min
e-commerce can be a real challenge, especially when it comes to bringing in new customers. At the end of the day, online marketing is all about selling. That's why your job as an eCommerce marketer is so exciting - you're one of the people responsible for turning more visitors to your website into paying customers!
However, creating a successful online business that can generate top-notch leads through eCommerce is best when you follow some effective strategies. To get more sales, one way is to be able to generate as many leads as you can. Without increased leads, there will be no sales at all. So, if your team wants to continue seeing sales figures climb, we advise they read our list of the best eCommerce lead generation tips below and start implementing them immediately!
1. Set Up an Email Subscription List
Setting up an email list is the best way to start building your eCommerce business. You should nurture leads that could potentially be interested in going through the checkout process with you, and you can do this efficiently by communicating and engaging with customers via email marketing. The most recent statistics on email marketing show people still read emails and enjoy receiving emails from companies doing business with them. You can keep prospects in the loop by sending out a few emails every week to help facilitate more engagement between yourself and potential customers as well as generate more sales opportunities for you.
Now, to build an email list, you have to start somewhere. Many people find that they get their best results when they use an email service provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact. While both of these companies are great, knowing which one to pick depends on your own specific needs and goals! The reason for this is simple, as we'll explain. If you're just getting started, Mailchimp can be your best choice because it’s free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. However, Constant Contact also has some of the most affordable plans for larger lists, which is the only main difference between them in terms of features.
The next step is to make sure your eCommerce lead generation account is operational.
2. Set Up an Opt-In Form for Your Email List
Opt-in email marketing is an excellent strategy to help engage your target audience and turn them into paying customers. You can send email newsletters, promotional materials, and nurturing campaigns. Opt-in means your visitors have personally chosen to receive emails related to your products or services.
Marketing professionals use the double-opt-in protocol as part of this strategy because it's so effective. The double opt-in process verifies each email address added to your database by adding a steps. This setting will send a follow-up email to contacts who are created with a link that allows them to confirm their subscription. Adding this extra step to your email campaigns could help you generate higher-quality leads. Using double opt-in ensures that visitors to your website want to subscribe to your newsletter.
When designing your opt-in email marketing strategy, start with the basics of form creation where you should outline for your customers exactly what you intend to offer in regard to how you plan on improving their lives or increasing sales within their business. After that has been established, it's important to work with your list to understand their needs to not send out generic electronic communications too frequently and thereby become irrelevant. Using a progressive profiling strategy will help you build an opt-in database of prospects who want more from you and are anticipating future marketing communications. Tools are available on the market which can take care of building these lists for you but they're not cheap and they often come with a catch so be careful before committing down that path.
3. Develop An Effective Lead Magnet
A fantastic alternative to a simple email signup campaign is called lead magnets. Lead magnets are bonuses that you offer your customers in exchange for their email addresses. You can use this as an effective lead generation technique because it provides subscribers with additional value for opting in, which gives them a reason to commit to your brand and continue to be interested in what you have to say.
The best lead magnets are a combination of simple and sincere; they should provide valuable information to a reader AND result in the creation of at least 1 warm, fuzzy feeling about your company. A bonus if your magnet produces feelings of admiration for your brand in the reader and motivates that person to follow through on their curiosity about your products or services!
4. Implement Exit Intent
When visitors are about to leave an eCommerce site there is a moment when it is crucial to get them to stay and not close the window or browse away panicking because you did something that got their attention long enough for them to reconsider. An Exit Pop-Up can do just that. This type of pop-up appears automatically under certain conditions depending on what you want to happen i.e., when a visitor has scrolled halfway down your site or on the 'x' of your site etc. The purpose of this is to ensure you don't lose those visitors!
A Wisepops study found that exit-intent pop-ups convert 5% more compared to conventional pop-ups, which renders them valuable of testing. Another option might be to use a chatbot instead. Whether you choose one method over the other can be determined by your target audience and what they respond to. However, Wisepops have shown it to be an effective way of getting in touch with potential leads and closing deals more effectively. So, it’s time you start implementing them.
5. Give Discounts and Promotional Offers
Discounts are popular with online shoppers. 71% of people say they’ll decide whether or not to buy a product based on the availability of a coupon (pro tip: make sure your affiliate program is working). The next step is to eke out an extra percent or two by allowing them to get the discount even if it means that they have to give up their email address to do so. By making them commit to a subscription before letting them see the coupon and thus reducing bounce rates, you’re giving yourself a better chance of encouraging repeat sales amongst your existing customers, as well as turning new ones into long-term clients
With the following tip, you can make your discount or coupon even more appealing ...
6. Offer A Time-Sensitive Deal
We all want things more when they're about to run out. It's human nature to want things more the less they are available. That's just the way we are.
It’s usually better to offer our customers a discount at regular price than offer them a high incentive for an exchange. Although the former can be perceived as behavioral manipulation, it has proven in successful projects that reducing prices instead of only raising them is not only more productive- but simply more profitable. This is because the psychology behind this is that when we think we are getting a deal - even if it was “regular” originally - we perceive it as more worthwhile than its “non-sale” alternative.
Using fear and scarcity as eCommerce lead generation strategies seems like an obvious choice for most brands, but it often comes off short in practice because customers may feel resentful rather than enticed. It could generate interest in some cases, such as announcing the best discounts or flash sales on social media and other sources, but ultimately what works best tends to be simple incentives - things such as loyalty rewards or reward points (or gold stars!)
If you want to get the best deal, do one more thing ...
7. Optimise CTAs For Ecommerce Lead Generation
Calls to action (CTAs) are an essential component of any marketing campaign. They give your visitors direction on how to proceed. Effective calls to action include:
- Be clear about the benefits of taking action
- Put action words in your sentences
- Use scarcity or urgency
- Lead generation CTAs can, for example, encourage visitors to:
- Get Instant Access!
- Get a Free Demo of Our Products
- Read our free Ebook
8. Offer Free Trials
If you’re selling a SaaS product, then another way to get your hands on more leads is by offering one of the most effective lead generation techniques available to B2B companies in this day and age – that is, giving away a free trial. According to Totango, 62% of companies get 10% or more of their business or more from giving away free trials. And 16% of companies end up making at least half their money from them! Free trial marketing works.
Using free trial marketing will generate leads if you:
- Concentrate your marketing efforts on the 20 percent of customers who are truly interested in your service
- Streamline the signup process by reducing the required information
- Make sure your landing page is credible
9. Optimise SEO To Help You Attract Leads
Speaking of traffic generation, SEO can be a huge factor in how many people will come to know about your eCommerce site and what it offers. A lot of online buyers tend to do an online search for products or services before they decide to buy anything from nearly any kind of website. And the ones that happen to find your site after a Google search will most likely become customers too.
SEO isn't just about getting people to visit your eCommerce site. It's also a great way to boost organic search engine rankings and increase visibility once you have the traffic coming through! We love how you're thinking and understand how important it is to be able to optimise your content without having to learn every single piece of knowledge there is about SEO for it to work for you.
You can accomplish this in a few ways:
- Use keywords that people use when considering purchasing
- When optimising the content of your site, use keywords in the titles, descriptions, and headings
- *Use social media to attract leads by sharing your content
- Increase your site's authority by acquiring inbound links through guest blogging, expert interviews, and other marketing techniques
In a later tip, we will discuss guest blogging.
10. Include Gated Content
People love to indulge in what they perceive to be 'the forbidden fruit.' This is why we suggest including gated content in your marketing strategy.
locking up content behind a form such as webinars and educational videos, reports, checklists, and cheat sheets can increase signups as it provides a sense of value and gives people just enough of a teaser to entice them.
11. Offer A Different Campaign to Returning Visitors
Once you have a couple of clients, work on getting them to repeat business! The best way to do this is by offering special deals every time they return. For example, you might sweeten the deal with something new each time they shop with you. Take Expat.com for example Their cookie-detection system targets logged-in members with ads based on what sort of products and offers they were looking at previously so that ex-pats returning to the site will be happy to see exclusive deals on things their browsing history suggests they may want from Mexico or Spain for example! This then helps generate up to 30,000 new members monthly just by using personalised content. Huge, right?
12. Utilise Live Chat to Generate Ecommerce Leads
When you're sending your lead generation plan out into the world, it would be great to know if people are wavering about it. You could use live chat software for that and we'll tell you why! First off, live chat's also a powerful tool for winning sales. Live chat’s been able to increase conversions by 38%. That's a dramatic improvement in lead conversion rates! The reason behind this increase is due to a live chat being able to work out what information your site visitors want and how they can get it quickly, thus preventing them from leaving your website. If people leave, then you've lost potential customers, don't let them do that!
On that note ...
13. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Improving the number of leads generated can be challenging, but there are a few areas that business owners might want to focus on to see improvements. Experts recommend taking advantage of mobile websites. The growth in smartphone use has led shoppers to visit web pages using smartphones more than ever before. For example, Google's research shows that mobile searches for product reviews have increased by 35%. This is because people are turning to their smartphones and tablets when they begin thinking about making big purchases! Mobile search has also increased by 80% for searching for the "best" products. If you make your site mobile-friendly, customers will be more likely to click through!
14. Create Leads with Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great marketing content strategy for online shops and service providers. This strategy gives you access to new audiences, where you can highlight your skills and capabilities. It’s an opportunity to build links back to your site or landing page, which are essential when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), building brand awareness, and converting new leads into clients.
You need to do the following to effectively guest blog:
- Finding the sites visited by your target audience
- Content creation that is of the highest standard
- Include a call to action on your author page to encourage visitors to your site
- Deliver on your promises when they arrive
15. Use Social Media to Attract Leads
Social media can be a great way to build your following and help advertise your latest campaign! It’s free and it allows you to know who is interested in what you have to offer. But people may not even know they want what you have to offer until they see that advertisement! That’s why it’s important, as an entrepreneur, to make sure you are advertising effectively. To do so, it just takes one sentence of text linking back to any page on your website or even blogs for prospective customers or guests to learn more about whatever it is that makes you an expert at whatever it is that impacts others' lives.
Even if you aren't looking to pay for anything right now, it's still very important that you don't neglect your social media profiles and take full advantage of all the free advertising, content promotion, and customer outreach tools at your disposal. This may not be a short-term strategy to gain immediate sales but rather a long move towards nurturing leads down the road about brand building. For example, fashion retailers can create different ads for targeting men’s fashion, women’s fashion, and apparel for children of both genders; as well as older people and parents who are interested in their family members shopping on social media, school kids who might have some spare cash from time to time…etc.
Round Up
We hope you enjoyed our blog on how to generate leads for eCommerce businesses. With this knowledge, we know that you can give yourself a great head start when it comes to generating leads for your eCommerce business. So, what are you waiting for? Start generating leads for your eCommerce website today
