Friday 16 November 2012

7 Ways of Attracting New Customers to Your Online Store

7 Ways of Attracting New Customers to Your Online Store

By Razibul Hassan

Returning and regular customers ensure a steady business for an online e-commerce merchant. Yet attracting new customers is equally important in terms of business growth and profit. The trend of online shopping is ever-increasing and to tap into this expanding customer base it is important for all the online store owners to increase the number of new customers. New customers mean new business and more profit. In the huge competitive online market, all the merchants are trying to acquire new customers and then turning them into returning and permanent customers.

Attracting new customers is really tough as all your competitors are trying to do the same with the flashy advertisement, price reduction, discount and so on and on. Yet to continue your business growth you need to be focused on gaining new customers.

Following are 7 handy tips for attracting more customers:

1. Get Email Subscription:

Email subscription and email marketing is a powerful tool for acquiring new customer base as well as tracking the potential customers. Do not use your email marketing strategy only for the existing customers but based on you possible customer base, run successful email campaign and let visitors subscribe for your newsletters. Once a new visitor subscribe to your newsletter, you have greater chance to convert her as your regular customer.

But there is one pit fall! Getting subscribers is comparative easier than retaining them. Be very choosy and professional about your email marketing. Otherwise you'll find most of your subscribers would happily un-subscribe from your e-store.

2. Enlist your Products to Shopping Comparison Sites and eBay:

You have quality products with competitive prices and they are not found anywhere except in your store! That would be a sad story. Your loyal customers pick you up every time they buy your products and that bring good business for you. Yet, the other world is unaware of your good products and ends up by selling someone else products. Reach to this other world customers (and believe me there are millions of these customers) and let them find your products offering. Enlisting in Shopping Comparison sites, eBay, Amazon will increase your product visibility to the world and would bring more new customers.

3. Pay per Click Advertising:

Search engine like Google is dominating the search world! Whenever a customer searches for something, the pay-per-click advertising is shown to them as recommendation. Thus lots of new customers are clicking those ads to actually buy products. Moreover, advertising are shown based on your preferences and relevancy of the searchers' search key words. Thus you can run a goal oriented advertising campaign in search engines like Google, and in social networking platform like Facebook.

Have clear goal and vivid execution in mind after the advertisement is initiated. Track the advertising results and adjust or fine tune the campaign as required.

4. Social Media Marketing:

Social Media Marketing is an effective tool for the small and medium business owners despite the recent controversy and success rate of the social media stores. Millions of people are using social networking sites and updating them about your product offering is important. With the social media marketing you can grow a completely new customer group and promote your business. Give special prices, special holiday shopping offering and create pages, conversations on your products.

Social Media can take many forms and you should accept every opportunity offered from creating a Business page on Facebook, promoting products on Google +, updating twitter and blogs.

5. Special Offer:

Virtually all the customers are attracted to the discount, SALE free offering for the products they are buying. A special discount or a Sale allure customers to purchase products more than they initially plan to purchase. However your offering should be highlighted both in the store front as well as the other places you have access.

6. Promote in YouTube:

YouTube is the second largest search engine that has far more search volumes than the Bing & Yahoo. People are prone to explore the products visually and promoting your products in YouTube would definitely add more customers to your customer list.

7. Wish List, Gift coupon and Gift Registry:

Offer your customers to create Wish List, Coupon and Gift Registry from your site that they should be able to share with their friends, family members and co-workers. Thus a single customer can share your products to many others. The shared persons then visit your store and some of them loves your products offerings and become returning customers.

The author is an web enthusiast and works for a major eCommerce CMS development. He maintains his blog about the web resources at http://creativewebresources.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Razibul_Hassan
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