How To Attract More Customers To Your Store in 2020

How to Attract customers to your store is the first struggle for a new store owner. You have done all the hard work to create your store but it doesn’t matter if your product don’t reach the potential customers. Getting first 10 to 100 customers for store is not an easy task.

Creating an online store is very easy, thanks to open-source e-commerce solutions like Shopify, Big-Commerce, PrestaShop, Magento etc. But running an e-commerce site is never easy, it involves sales to make, order to fulfill, payments, shipping etc.

If you don’t have a store yet, read our tips How To Start An Online Store That Makes Money.

There are many strategies that can be used by new online store owners to attract customers and get targeted traffic to your store.

The Importance of Targeted Traffic

Even if you have hundreds of visitor visiting you store daily but none of them ever turns into leads or sales.Then all these traffic to your site are worthless that don’t do any good to your business. Generating traffic is main goal of every online store, but as an online store owner you should ensure that your digital marketing effort should generate targeted traffic.

In simple words, targeted traffic means visitors to your online store who are interested in your product or service. Targeted traffic is quality traffic i.e those visitors coming to your store or landing page are more likely to looking for  products, services or other information that you have in your store.

For example, you run a furniture online store and sale brand new furnitures in your store. An internet user can type furniture in the search bar for various reasons. Some may want to know different types of furniture, some may want to rent furniture, some  may want to buy furniture etc.

In your case, the targeted traffic for your store would be people searching to buy furniture. You can read more about targeted traffic at highly targeted traffic.

How to Attract Customers to Your Store

There are some strategies you can use to attract more customers to your store and in turn do more sales

1. Design of Your Store

The design of your store matters a lot in attracting customers to your store, as it is the representation of your store. Your website design must be clean, good and organized to attract  your visitors to click more, view products and make a purchase.

Your store design is the first impression to your visitors so you must create an eye-caching, good, modern and professional looking store. You must hire a good designer, if you can afford, to create your online store.

Here are some resources to help you improving your online store design

• If you would like to get real-time feedback about your store design and products check out usertesting.com.
• You can hire developer from freelancer.com for designing of your online store. Do remember to check developers profile before hiring them.
• To check examples of good store design please check 40 Amazing Examples of Ecommerce Website Design.
• To learn about the design strategies please check 8 Design Strategies for Your New E-Commerce Website.

2. Speed of Your Store

The load time of your online store is crucial and deciding factor between a sale or not. According to experts 25% of your visitors will leave your online store if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. So your website must have less load time to attract them buy your products.

Here are some resources to help you improving the speed of your online store

• You can check your website speed on gtmetrix and use their suggestions to improve it.
• To know how page speed affect your sales I recommend reading Does Page Speed Affect Sales On Your Online Store?
• To know how to speed up your online store read How to improved the speed of your Ecommerce store.

3. Encourage Customers to Register an Account

Allowing guest checkout on your online store is important as it avoids loosing a potential customer – 23% of vistors abandon their cart due to mandatory account creation. Some customers are not comfortable providing their personal info and other might think its worthless to fill a long form just to purchase a single item.

But you must encourage new customers to register an account on your store for improved shopping experience and faster checkout next time they purchase with you. You should send them a mail offering some perks for registering like a small free gift, priority access to sales and exclusive members only offers etc.

You can also offer your customer to register account after the checkout process without having to enter the details again as it has better conversion rate than offering it in the starting.  A registered user can give you repeat business and it also build trust of your brand.

4. Email Your Customers Regularly

You should regularly engage your customers with periodic sales emails and newsletters, provided you have permission from them to do so. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive more sales to your store.

The customers who have already purchased some products from your store may have interest in your other products also, so its good to send them sales emails to encourage them for repeat orders. Also remember, the frequency of sending promotional emails should be max once or twice a month, as more emails can ruin your relationship with the customers.

Here are some resources to help you on email marketing

• How Often Should You Email Your Customers?
• 6 Ways To Send Emails Your Customers
• Help Your Customers Avoid Email Fatigue
• The Email Campaigns You Should Send Your Customers

5.  Offer Discounts and Loyalty Programs

Everyone loves discounts and voucher codes. The word free can do wonders for attracting new customers and increasing your online store’s sales. It is because this word provoke them and stimulate a positive feeling for making purchase. So, offer your visitors discounts and offers on the products they are interested in buying on your store.

Sending a special discount or voucher code after your customer makes first order is an effective way of motivating them to place a second order. Even offering free shipping on products can increase your online sales.

Another way is to offer discount or voucher coupons. You can give them to new clients, so they can be motivated to make their first purchase. It is also recommended to offer your loyal customers special discounts such – Buy two, get third for free” or „second item at 30% off”. This will make your customers feel special and inspire them to shop from your online store.

Here are some resources to help you on customer loyalty programs

• 7 Proven Customer Loyalty Programs That Work
• Customer Loyalty: The Ultimate Guide
• Most Important Pros And Cons Of Loyalty Programs
• 10 Examples of Innovative Customer Loyalty Programs

6. Social Media Activity

If you have a new online store, some of your first customers can be gained through social media activities. Social media is one of the best channels that enables you to promote your products for free.

Most of the times, customers are not aware of the new products you have on your store because of the tough competition. In this case you can take the help of top social media platforms for the promotion of your new products.

You can post the images and videos of your products along with the links of that product on your e-commerce website. It will definitely lead to the enhanced traffic and more sales on your store.

The key to success on social media platform is providing great content to your followers. You have to be consistent and interesting, so that people follows you and your business. If you manage to provide content of customer’s interest, you can get lots traffic from these social marketing channel for free. You must do following to attract customers using social media platform:

• post regularly – at least on a daily basis, so customers don’t forget about you.
• engage your users: ask them questions, reply to their comments and try to catch their attention
• choose the best channels for you business, always focus on Facebook,Pinterest and Instagram, because these platforms will drive the most traffic to your online stores.
• use graphics – posts with images gets more engagement than other posts.

7. Promote your Brands on Multiple Marketplaces

Online marketplaces dominate the eCommerce markets but only few online stores have made a brand for themselves as well. As a result most online retailers are confused whether or not they should join the online marketplace or go solo.

Being a seller on an online marketplace like Amazon and eBay is not easy these days. The number of sellers online keeps increasing and marketplaces are looking to gather more sellers. Despite this competition, marketplaces seems to be a great place to promote your brand as they have millions of ready customers on board.

You can sell something unique on these marketplaces and acquire good ratings to promote your brands. Once your brand is popular, you will get more visitors and customers to you online store.

8. Ensure good support to your customers

There is no better way of promotion than satisfied customers. An outstanding customer care can help you attract many customers to your online store and thus increases your sales.

If you respond quickly to your customer’s queries and deal with any issues in an effective way, you will increase their trust and make them more likely to shop with you again on your eCommerce store.

I recommend using Freshdesk Helpdesk for your eCommerce store, they are best in customer service, and they also have a free version for small businesses.

One more thing to remember that buyers are more eager for sharing the negative responses as compared to the positive ones. It takes almost 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative one. So you must ensure that your customers are satisfied with the service you provide.

• 9 Tips for Providing Excellent Customer Service
• Ways to Enhance Customer Support for Your Clients
• 8 Rules for Good Customer Service
• Improve Customer Service and Ensure Customer Satisfaction