In today’s post, I want to share with you some tips that you can implement right now that will help you grow your ecom store. These are inexpensive ways in which you can grow your brand’s awareness, following, engagement and customer base.
I’ve come across many brands in the past who have an amazing product, but needed help with growing their store organically. Some of the points mentioned below will need a little investment, but it’s well worth it!
Let’s dive right in…
Start Implementing Email Marketing
This is one of the best marketing channels for producing an ROI. In fact, email generates €/$42 for every €/$1 spent. That’s an impressive 4,200% ROI. Running email campaigns is inexpensive and it’s a fantastic channel to indoctrinate your audience into the value you offer, educate them on problems and pain points they are experiencing as well as showcasing the desired outcomes that’s possible for your target market.
Create an enticing offer for those visitors who visit your website and over time you’ll begin to collect subscribers. The more visitors you acquire on a monthly basis, the quicker you’ll grow your email list. Create a welcome series, post purchase flows and abandon cart sequences to get started. You can always add more complexity over time, but they are good flows to start with.
Offer educational content, how to’s, tips, things to avoid, benefits of doing X, news you have as a brand, exclusive offers, gamification in the form of giveaways, contests etc etc. Emailing a combination of all those things will develop stronger ties with your audience and increase your sales.
Facebook Messenger Marketing
Similar to email marketing, Messenger marketing is another inexpensive way to acquire leads, communicate with your audience and build communication flows that will welcome, nurture and retain the attention of your target audience. What I love about messenger marketing is the high open rates it delivers on (at the time of writing this).
I also love the way that you can build out chat bots that direct your audience to the desires they have using automation. Chat bots can be great for helping your target audience to visit certain sections of your store and entice them into making a purchase.
Acquire Customers Through a Quiz
If you have multiple products to offer on your website, it can be a good idea to engage prospects into a quiz, helping you to personalise their experience with your brand and learn more about what their specific desires are.
How it works is that they answer a few questions which segment them into the type of product they would be most interested in checking out on your store (with the hopes of eventually making a purchase).
Whether the customer has an interest for X, Y or Z… the quiz will learn about a customer’s preferences in each area. These preferences can then be saved and be used for personalised Facebook messenger or email marketing campaigns.
Using a quiz like this will help to improve the customer experience as well as purchase conversions on your website. If you use Shopify as your shopping platform, a good application to use is something like this.
Build a Facebook Community
Building a Facebook community is a fantastic way to develop brand awareness, create new customers and build customer retention. Create your own Facebook community via a group. If you have an email list of prospects & customers (you should), email them and promote your new group.
Explain that you’ll be offering value in the form of product demonstrations, educational content, customer feedback and requests, news about your brand etc. Create content that’s engaging and make them feel special. Think of ways in which you can offer value and how you can publish it using video, audio, text and imagery. We have so many options these days to produce and publish content that helps us to nurture relationships with our followers and customers.
You can also do polls, ask questions and get conversations going amongst your community to find out what their needs, wants and desires are. This can give you fantastic insight into product development, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of customers, prospects and brand advocates want what you have to offer based on their own feedback.
I look at it as a great feedback loop. You ask what they want, you go away and have a think about it, produce a prototype version of what they have asked for and you present it to them.
They in turn give you more feedback that helps you cut the fat. As you keep going through the feedback loop, you develop a product and offer that’s got demand with a ready made set of people wanting what you’ve created.
That’s a very valuable position to be in!
Perhaps the most important part of growing a community is by having a good connection with your members. Be active on your Facebook group, create relevant and interesting content, ask questions, host giveaways etc. All these things help to build deeper connections with your most loyal customers.
The more people you have involved in the group, the more engagement you get from it, provided your content is relevant and interesting.
