Developing effective ecommerce customer acquisition strategies is a long-lasting process and takes a lot of your time and efforts. If you want to take your ecommerce business to reach new heights, it is absolutely important to garner the attention of new customers every single month and retain the old ones.
Customer acquisition in the ecommerce industry is not only about selling your products but also includes building and maintaining a strong relationship with your customers. And it’s not an easy task at all to convert those strangers on the web into your loyal customers. Thus, you need to map out propitious customer acquisition strategies in order to excel in this competitive ecommerce industry.
Let’s first understand the different stages of ecommerce customer acquisition:
Stages of customer acquisition in ecommerce
1) Awareness
In this stage, users are not aware of your ecommerce platform at all. You need to create a strong presence of your brand via various digital channels. The customers are going to shape the first image of your brand in their minds. So, it all boils down to the marketing strategies that you are going to use to market your product.
2) Interest
In this step, people are already aware of your brand and now you need to evoke interest in them about the products you sell. There are many powerful ways in which you can attract customers to your ecommerce store like offering special discounts/deals, running a contest, giving free samples, etc.
3) Consideration
Now in this stage, you’re dealing with the in-market audiences who are having a strong purchase intent and are considering your brand for it. There are dime a dozen ecommerce stores out there and why they will choose only yours? So, there must be some significant advantages of opting for your ecommerce store over others. And there must be a USP (unique selling proposition) that will make users stick to your brand.
4) Purchase
Finally, users are going to make a purchase from your ecommerce store in this step. Make this experience as swift and easy as possible. Notify them with post-purchase emails and text messages about the same with an estimated arrival time along with tracking number.
5) Retain
Retaining largely depends upon the quality of your products and the kind of user experience you provide. Obviously, customers will come back if they loved the shopping experience with your ecommerce store. And this only happens when you provide them seamless support and solve all their queries in their buying journey.
6) Advocacy
There is not any better marketing strategy in the world that can influence your potential buyers more than your satisfied customers recommending your brand via awesome reviews. Nowadays, everybody checks the reviews of the product before making any purchase. Therefore, encourage your customers to write reviews and sometimes genuine feedbacks may help you to improve your services.
Now, let’s directly jump to the top strategies to increase ecommerce customer acquisition:
Tips to improve ecommerce customer acquisition
1) Integrate live chat support
When users are stuck with some doubts in mind about the product, they need the answers right away. In fact, a study by Forrester revealed that almost 50% of US adults will abandon a purchase if they are unable to find a prompt answer to their question. No doubt, the FAQ section helps in some cases but they are only capable of covering generic queries. And users will always choose to receive personalized support rather than scanning all FAQs.
With that said, the importance of live chat tools in improving your ecommerce customer acquisition is foreseeable. There are many amazing live chat software available in the market that are easy to use and won’t cost you a fortune.
2) Leverage social listening
Most people don’t know what social listening really is and why it is important. In simple words, it’s a way to listen to your audiences and know what they are talking about your brand on social media platforms. The importance of content in social media cannot be neglected. It may be negative or positive but it gives you a better idea about the likes, dislikes of people and their opinions.
So, social listening allows you to interact with your customers on social media platforms. And you have to appropriately respond to them. Customers really like those brands that interact with them on social media. Indeed, according to research by Sprout Social, 83% of respondents like when brands respond to their queries, and 68% like when brands join conversations. Thus, social listening can be your vital strategy for enhancing ecommerce customer acquisition.
3) Design compelling product pages
The high-quality product pages play a key role in reducing bounce rate and increasing the conversion rate. Users may have come from social media platforms or search engines, but the ultimate goal of the landing page is to satisfy the intent of the customer. If you succeed in doing that, you will certainly prevail in getting a decent conversion ratio.
Some substantial factors that make highly converting product pages for ecommerce platform:
- Satisfying users intent
- Simple and Aesthetic design
- Easy Navigation
- High-resolution images and videos
- Full description and specifications of the product
- Using reviews as social proof
4) Continues A/B testing & optimization
A/B testing everything is a great way to achieve excellence. Ecommerce landing pages are the ones with comparatively lower conversion rates. Therefore, acquiring the customer in ecommerce takes a lot of your efforts as stated earlier.
By A/B testing you get to know the behavior of users on your website. Google Analytics can help you in that and it may assist you to set up the goals. From content to design, you can A/B test everything to determine what works best for your brand and optimize accordingly to improve customer acquisition of your ecommerce store.
5) Avoid cart abandonment
This cart abandonment issue might sound like a small problem to you but what if I tell you that 7 out of 10 people abandon their cart during their purchase from ecommerce platforms. The two significant reasons behind cart abandonment are the addition of hidden costs and enforcing visitors to provide too many details.
Users are forced to create an account which might be tiresome for them. So, allow them to purchase the product as a guest user and ask only necessary details. People often think that the product is too costly after adding it to the cart. To tackle this, you can create an exit pop-up containing an additional discount and send them a cart abandonment email sharing the advantages and positive reviews of the product they left behind.
6) Personalized suggestions
Customers love personalization. And here is an interesting stat by Instapage that backs up this point – “77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience”.
Shoot emails to your customers containing related items in which they have shown interest. You can create a different section of “suggested for you” to show personalized suggestions on your ecommerce platform. This will definitely contribute to improving your ecommerce customer acquisition.
7) SEO coupled with content marketing
Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to bring new customers to your ecommerce website. The more you dominate search results on popular keywords, the more targeted traffic you’ll drive to your website. Great content produces great results and SEO itself always goes hand in hand with content marketing. Focus on creating interactive and engaging content that provides value to the users and satisfy their search query.
To appear on top pages of Google and other search engines, you need to properly optimize your category pages and follow an appropriate backlink strategy as well. Long-form articles can be your best companion in generating an immense amount of traffic.
Most people are going to perform a search before purchasing any product and if you have a presence on that keyword, it can make a huge impact. And thus, SEO is one of the most effective ways to improve your ecommerce customer acquisition.
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Final words
So, we’ve listed the 7 best tips to help you improve customer acquisitions of an ecommerce store. In order to implement and make the most out of these strategies, you need to put yourself in the shoes of buyers and understand their behavior. You have to indulge in the buyer’s journey and make data-driven decisions with a thorough analysis.
Most of the time, you cannot expect quick results, because it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And therefore, it takes significant time and you will see a gradual increase in customer acquisition after proper implementation of these strategies.
Author bio
Raaquib Pathan is a content marketing specialist with expertise in providing insights into the latest sales and marketing paradigms. He works closely with the Salesmate CRM team to help businesses prevail in growing their brand presence and produce a spike in their sales curve.
