3 Tried and Tested Customer Acquisition Strategies for Your Ecommerce Site

It’s easy to make money online, or so we thought.

Just because you can start running an e-commerce website in minutes doesn’t mean your journey to making money online is a walk in the park.

Remember, if it’s THAT easy to set up shop online, then the chances are good that countless people have already started running their online stores — and they have.

To succeed at growing your e-commerce site, you need to have a solid marketing strategy to bring traffic to your website, convert them into paying customers, and get more mileage out of your relationships with them by getting them to purchase from you again.

In fact, according to Matt Janaway, CEO of Marketing Labs, “All the traffic in the world is no good for you if your website can’t convert your visitors into paying customers, and then keep them coming back as repeat customers.”

If that’s what you’re trying to learn right now, then put your learning caps on and sit tight — that’s precisely what we’re going to cover in this guide.

1. Use Facebook Audience Insights to Find Your Customers

Facebook Audience Insights gives you access to a treasure trove of data about your prospective customers.

I typed in “Personal Trainer” in Facebook Audience Insights’ search box, and this is what I saw under the “Page Likes” category.

The tool shows you the pages relevant to your search, their audience size, and so much more.

If you go to the “Activity” tab, you’ll get more data about your prospective audience.

With the help of Facebook Audience Insights’ data, you’ll have a better understanding of who your audience is, and which Facebook pages they frequent on.

With that, you can either start running Facebook paid ads so you can target them, or you can connect and strike a partnership with the Facebook page administrator so you can promote your product.

Bonus Tip: When reaching out to the administrator, be sure to ask the question, “What’s in it for me?” when asking them to promote your product.

You need to think about what’s of value to them so that you can come up with a suitable offer to the administrator.

2. Build Strategic Partnerships With Influencers

This method of acquiring customers is quite straightforward:

Step 1: Find an influencer that your target buyers are following.

Step 2: Reach out to them with a proposal or a benefit that you can offer.

Step 3: Ask them to promote your store (or a specific product you’re selling).

That’s about it.

As you can imagine, despite how simple the concept might seem, the strategy looks sound.

That’s the reason why a good number of ecommerce store owners take the time to run this marketing method — it hands down works.

There are several methods you can use to find influencers in your niche.

You can do a straight-up search on the platform you’re thinking of using to promote your products, like Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

What I’d like to share with you, however, is finding influencers using Buzzsumo.

Just by entering your niche in Buzzsumo’s search box, the platform will bring you the relevant posts that are published in your niche, with their total number of engagements and other metrics.

I entered the keyword “personal coaching” in the search box, and this is what Buzzsumo came up with.

The idea is, if the author’s post garnered truckloads of engagements, chances are, there are several people following him (or the site where he published his post).

That gives us a hint that the author is an influencer that has truckloads of followers.

To validate this, you can click the article, click the author’s social media profile, and do a bit of digging.

When you’ve validated that the author has, in fact, truckloads of followers, you can reach out to them with an offer in exchange for them promoting your products or your ecommerce site.

3. Guest Blog

You can never go wrong with guest blogging.

Here’s a scenario: What if you found a website that thousands of your target audience frequent?

Not only that, but your audience trusts this website, and their content is shared bajillion times by their online readers.

Can you imagine what would happen if you get the chance to publish an article on that website, sharing tips and tricks that their readers will find helpful, and add a link to your online store?

Chances are, you’ll get truckloads of referral traffic from the site. A piece of even better news is the traffic you’ll get are those that are likely to buy from your store.

#SlowClap

That’s the power of guest posting.

Not only will this method of marketing help you rank your e-commerce site on the search engines — helping you get thousands of organic traffic, but you’ll even be able to get referral traffic from highly relevant sites.

And so, the question becomes, how exactly do you find the sites that accept guest posts?

Also, how do you know how much monthly traffic the site gets?

Here’s a quick guide on how to do just that.

Use Google’s advanced search queries.

Here are some of them.

- “Guest post” + “your niche”

- “Become a contributor” + “your niche”

When you add these search queries in Google, most of the results the search engine will get you are sites in your niche that have published a guest post or are accepting guest posts.

Once you open these sites, you’ll be able to determine whether they’re an excellent place to publish a guest post.

To view their monthly traffic, you can use a free tool like Similarweb.

Remember. When using this strategy, webmasters often do not like promotional posts.

That being said, be sure to offer articles that are informational, one that gives TONS of value to the readers.

Given enough guest posts, you’ll be able to get truckloads of relevant referral traffic and rank your pages on the search engines, especially if you put effort into encouraging engagement within the content.

Bonus Tip: You need to have a clearly defined buyer persona before you start running your marketing campaigns. Without one, you might very well spend wads of cash on trying to pursue certain demographics — ones that aren’t really interested in buying your products.

What’s Next?

The method of acquiring customers for your e-commerce store can be as straightforward or as complex as you’d like it to be — of course, both approaches can be just as effective as the other, of course.

You have only to choose which customer acquisition method you’ll use, then fine-tune the approach to make it a perfect fit for your eCommerce store (and your buyers’) dynamics.

If you have customer acquisition strategies that you’d like to share with our readers, please feel free to add them in the comments section below. Cheers!

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