If you sell goods or products online, you know that attracting the right customers to your store is crucial. However, it can be difficult to know exactly what steps to take in order to achieve your goals.
The simple truth is this: an online store that doesn’t do anything to attract the right customers (and retain the ones it has) won’t last for long. Even if your store has taken off, it’s important to keep actively attracting customers and improving the relationships you have with your current ones. Only in this way can you ensure the future well-being of your business.
In this post, we’ll talk more about the importance of continually working to attract customers to your online store. Then we’ll share three smart ways to achieve this and how you can effectively implement each technique, some with the help of our Popup Maker WordPress plugin. Let’s get started!
The Importance of Attracting More Customers to Your Online Store
One of your first priorities is to attract customers. This is known as customer acquisition, and it’s closely related to retention (which is the act of keeping the customers you acquire).
Ensuring you have an active strategy for attracting (and retaining) customers is important. In fact, your store may fail without one in place. Such a strategy can ensure:
- A steady flow of customers. With only 43% of your revenue likely to come from repeat customers, it’s crucial to bring new ones to your site regularly. This will help to keep your revenue consistent, and it may even improve sales as your efforts take off.
- A continuance of customer satisfaction. The more satisfied your customers, the more likely they are to purchase from you again. In fact, 97% of customers say the customer experience affects their brand loyalty. This means keeping them satisfied is vital for your business’ well being.
- A boost in sales. As a result of increased satisfaction, your business can see a boost in sales as you actively recruit new customers and work to keep the ones you have.
With customers as the bread and butter of any e-commerce store, it’s easy to see why attraction and retention are important. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when creating a strategy.
3 Smart Ways to Attract More Customers and Boost Your Online Sales
There are plenty of ways you can attract more customers to your site, although we think the three outlined below are some of the easiest to implement and the most effective. Let’s take a look!
1. Create a Detailed Buyer Persona
As you build your store, you’ll want to create a snapshot of your ideal customer. This is known as a buyer persona, and it will guide you in all the business decisions you make. This will go a long way in enabling you to better target your customers. The more targeted traffic you have coming to your site, the more conversions you’ll see.
A buyer persona can be as simple or detailed as you’d like – although we believe it’s best to get as in-depth as possible. You should really take the time to sit down and think about your ideal customer. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Use social media monitoring: You will become better acquainted with your buyer’s needs and wants, and this will enable you to more accurately picture your ideal customer.
- Use Google Analytics to collect information on current customers: With Google Analytics’ various tools, including Demographics and Interests, you can learn more about your current customers in order to recruit others like them.
With your buyer persona in place, you can now take further steps to align it to your offerings – knowing what types of products and services your ideal customer likes and using them as upsells, for example.
2. Upsell Your Related Products and Services
An upsell is just as it sounds: it’s a product or service related to the one your customer is buying, that would supplement their purchase. As an online store owner, upsells can be an easy way to add additional income to your business.
However, the benefits aren’t simply one way. The customer gets additional value (which helps you to build a more positive relationship with them), and could lead to increased customer retention and sales. In addition, your happy customers may go off and recommend you to everyone they know!
When it comes to implementing upsells, striking the right balance is key. Here are a few tips to help:
- Use a Call To Action (CTA) that highlights customer benefits. Your customers will only want to purchase products that benefit them. When you use customer-focused CTAs, you’re using an effective sales tactic but also addressing customers’ needs. This will drive satisfaction and increase retention.
- Use personalized recommendations based on other customers’ purchases. You can do this with plugins and e-commerce platform extensions, such as Recommendation Engine offered by WooCommerce. Of course, your e-commerce solution will determine the options available to you.
Upsells are one way to enhance your customers’ experience positively. However, there are things you can do on a smaller scale with similar results – for example, ‘microinteractions’.
3. Use Popups to Add Microinteractions to Your Site
In a nutshell, microinteractions are the small actions that take place when you interact with an on-site element. While they have many purposes, they’re ideal for attracting attention to your CTAs, and other specific elements you’d like to highlight.
The main reason to use popups for this purpose is to personalize the customer’s experience. This can enhance your reputation with them, leading to potential recommendations to friends, family, and social media followers – and encouraging them to shop with you again.
While the process of creating microinterations may seem complex, our Popup Maker plugin (and its extensions) makes it very simple. Here are just a few extensions you can use to create beneficial microinteractions across your site:
- Advanced Targeting Conditions. You can use different parameters (such as mobile web viewing or traffic from Google) to create specific and highly-targeted microinteractions. For example, you can offer a special discount based on where users came from, or greet them by name when signed into your store.
- Scroll Triggered Popups. This extension enables you to display content or interact with site visitors based on the page they’re looking at. For example, you could have a popup that includes related products when a customer reaches the bottom of a particular page.
- Exit Intent Popups. While you won’t convert every customer, this extension enables you to interact with those leaving your website for just a bit longer. When a user starts to leave the page, a targeted popup will appear. At this point, you can ask questions such as “How can we help you find what you need?”, or even invite them to sign up for your email newsletter.
Essentially, your goal is to keep potential customers interacting with your website for as long as possible. The longer your visitors interact, the more time you have to turn them into paying customers.
Conclusion
The effort you put into attracting and retaining customers will have a huge impact on your store’s success. While the process itself may seem overwhelming, it’s actually quite easy to get going once you know what steps to take.
In this post, we’ve outlined three techniques you can use to attract more customers and boost your online sales. To recap, they are:
- Create a detailed buyer persona.
- Upsell related products and services.
- Use popups to add microinteractions to your site.
Do you have any questions about how to attract more customers and boost online sales? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image Credit: Pexels.
by Ahoy
1 comment
CapKings
Hi John,
This is an absolutely helpful post. I’m actually looking for ways to attract more customers and boost my online sales. I’m glad to have landed here. Finally found the answers to my questions.