If you have already set up your own e-commerce, you know the importance of the digital world when it comes to selling. An online store has no hours, breaks geographical limitations, and its costs are much lower than a physical store. Each year, 100% digital consumers grow increasingly, at the expense of those who only shop in physical stores. In special situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, an online store becomes the most important, even the only, business channel, but the reality is that selling is not that easy.
Setting up an e-commerce can be relatively simple, depending on the needs of each business. There are more and more platforms that allow you to open your own online store without needing programming or design knowledge. We can register on a platform, buy a domain, choose a web template, add products, and be ready to sell.
And now, what?
Sales generation happens in four steps: Attract, convert, sell, and retain.
If we don’t have customers, the first step is to attract them through marketing strategies. But first, we need to define our buyer personas, that is, our ideal customers: who they are, their gender and age, their family and professional status, what they like, what they are looking for, what interests them. This way, we can define our strategy based on the customer segments we want to target and convince them to buy our products.
When planning our campaigns, we need to consider several factors:
- What are our strengths and weaknesses, not only to communicate correctly but also to invest wisely.
- Which channels our buyer personas use.
- How much budget we have available.
An appropriate mix of advertising media will allow us to bring potential customers to the website and optimize spending to achieve the maximum return on investment. Investing without planning and optimization will only generate traffic to our store that will never return. PPC, Social Media, Comparison Sites, Email marketing, or Affiliates are just some of the channels where we can invest.
Additionally, working with different methods like SEO positioning—free search engine results—blog and social media activity, or newsletters for our subscribers, will prevent us from depending entirely on advertising investment to achieve sales.
Choosing the mix is important, but ultimately the most important thing is to know how to analyze the ROI of each advertising channel and campaign. And this is where most people fall short. An agency accredited by Google and Facebook like Dos Setenta can tell you how many euros you earn for every euro you invest, and this is the only way an online store grows.
Do you have visitors but few sales?
It’s time to convert and sell. Let’s focus on our digital storefront. Let’s think as if we were the consumers ourselves. If we wanted to buy a product or service online, would we do it in our store? Let’s check.
Let’s visit our website: Does it load quickly? Is it accessible from different devices? Can it be navigated comfortably? Can users easily find what they are looking for? Is the purchase process simple and clear?
If a potential customer enters our store but cannot see it correctly or it takes too long to load, they will go to another website and buy there. For example, studies show that a 1-second difference in load speed critically increases conversion rates.
Let’s work on our brand: What are we offering, and what is our value proposition? Why should users buy from our store and not from the competition?
It is essential to focus on our strengths: if our strength is the lowest price, highlight it. If competitors sell cheaper, look for exclusivity, good customer service, and better prices for regular customers.
It is also essential to use different techniques that allow us to sell more and leave a better impression on users. For example, reminding users via email or SMS that they have started a purchase but haven’t completed it, and perhaps providing an incentive such as a discount or free shipping. Or adding recommended products to the shopping cart to increase the sale amount. Creating product bundles, providing gift options, offering as many payment methods as possible… in short: making the user’s life easy translates into sales, satisfaction, and loyalty.
