Even though it seems like a fancy idea to have your eCommerce store look like ''Tajmahal" before launch, the truth is, nothing happens until a sale is made. You can get perfection, only if you get feedback from your customers. If you are drooling over every single small detail instead of starting your online store, you are not going to get the necessary feedback.
Whether you’re a complete newbie or an old soul in new waters, the goal of this article is to guide you to make your quick first online sales with KitCart.
1. Identify Your Audience
Before even thinking about how to sell your skincare product, wigs, shapewear, luxury clothes, jewelry, or whatever it is, you have to understand where the consumer is.
Where do people spend their time? Is it Instagram? Email? Twitter? Is it at an event? On YouTube? A sports game? Their office in midtown? Figure out where they actually are and more importantly, where do their eyes and ears go?
Having these figured out goes a long way to determine how you target and convert the audience to make your first sale. It will determine which channel is the most effective way of reaching them.
2. Freebies/ Incentive marketing
- Offer Free Shipping
Offering free shipping is an underrated way to motivate customers to make purchases. This can be done by offering completely free shipping, free above a certain minimum, or free ground shipping (pay extra to get it there faster). Free shipping seems to be one of those golden tickets to getting customers to commit, and when you make it free above a certain minimum, it can have the bonus of making that first sale a sale of multiple products.
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Consider offering a coupon /discount code to entice people to check your store out.
You can reach out to potential customers, offering ₦1000 gift cards in exchange to get them to click through, check out your store and possibly make a buying decision
- Run a contest with your product as a prize.
This helps you generate momentum. Start TikTok challenges, Instagram contests that people can participate in to win your product as a prize. For example, you can run a selfie contest for your skincare brand, and reward contestants with the highest reach and interaction with your product as a prize. This could generate a lot of buzz around your brand, and you get people to discover your brand and increase the chance of buying from you.
4. Seek Out Strategic Partnerships
Partnerships can be a great way to get your products in front of someone else's customers. The key here is to look for non-competitive and like-minded brands that already attract the kinds of people you're looking for. It can take some time and luck to find and create these opportunities, but the trade-off is you can get creative with the nature of the partnership: Here are ways to make that happen
- Send Free Samples to Influencers
The internet is packed with influential bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and vloggers from a wide range of industries and niches. You just need to find the right ones. Many of them have large followings on social media and loyal audiences on their websites. Sending a free sample of your product to influencers within your industry or related to it in some way allows you to let them know you appreciate their work with a small gift.
Hopefully, you will get a mention on one of their sites or social media pages. This can result in a spike in traffic and social media followers, you’ll also have a seal of approval from industry experts, qualified leads rush at you, and your chance of having the leads make a purchase is as high as heaven. Logocify grew to a 100 million naira revenue in a few months applying this technique.
A useful resource regarding influencers is Josh Tracy's free guide to influencer marketing, which explores everything you need to know about getting your brand under relevant, important noses.
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Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a reward-based system that encourages partners (could be remote sales teams, digital evangelists, or even existing customers) to promote your products in exchange for a commission, free products, or access to exclusive features of your products.
For most eCommerce businesses, here’s how it runs: a customer, advocate, or industry marketer signs up for your affiliate program and sends visitors to your store through their special referral link, and any sales that you make as a result of their promotion earns the marketer a percentage reward for sales made through those links.
Typically, the end goal is a sale. If you want to make good sales online. Affiliate marketing remains one of your best bets
5. Social media Ads
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Instagram advertising
Instagram's visual format and predominantly millennial audience aren't the only appeals of the platform. It also has one of the most engaged user bases among social networks, according to data from Smart Insights. It’s not only a great platform for influencer marketing but also your regular unpaid posts to reach a good number of people if you use relevant hashtags. With Instagram advertising, you can display your visual ad in others' feeds to drive traffic.
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Facebook advertising
According to Pew Research, Facebook is one of the most popular social networks with the most diverse user base in terms of age, income, gender, and ethnicity. That's why a wide range of brands can leverage Facebook’s targeting options that include age, gender, job title, location, and interest to reach their ideal customers. That last one—interests—is especially useful. You can use the pages that people have liked on Facebook as the basis to build ideal buyer profiles that determine who your ads reach.
Also, with Instagram and Facebook advertising you will be able to integrate pixels, Show up right in front of yearning shoppers and retarget them with amazing campaigns across all social channels right from Droppa.
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Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google’s hugely popular pay-per-click advertising network that allows online retailers to place advertisements on nearly every Google search results page, YouTube video, and partner website. Who wouldn’t want to rank in the top three of a search query that drives sales? Here’s what shows up when you type “Droppa” into Google's search bar. Note that the first results are paid ads from Droppa.
The beauty of Google Ads lies in its speed and massive reach. In just a few minutes, you can set up and launch an advertising campaign that gets your text, image, or even video ads seen by browsers all over the web.
Using the AdWords campaign options, you can create targeted ads that are triggered and displayed alongside Google searches when Internet browsers search for predefined keywords. Additionally, your ads also will appear on websites and articles which contain similar keywords.
5. Content Marketing
- Start a blog
Running a blog for your e-commerce business helps you produce free, valuable content, create trust in your brand and keep people informed. Blogging also gives you content to share on social media and helps you rank top on search engines.
To get started, think of all the frequently asked questions people have about your products and industry. Use your blog to answer these questions as individual articles.
For example, visitors to the fashion brand blog might be interested in learning about the latest fashion trends, celebrity styles, etc. So, you create content that ranks for terms like “Top 10 hot fashion trends for 2022, " best dress for date nights'' etc.
Bonus Point
6. Leverage your Network
This doesn't you a dime in 90% of the case. So share your store on your personal Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts to announce it to your entire network. Consider also emailing your closest connections directly to get the word out about your store's launch. Explicitly ask them to donate a share—they don't need to buy from you to show you their support. While any sales you get this way aren’t going to be as satisfying as when you earn a stranger’s trust as a customer, this is a good way to solicit early feedback.
Conclusion
Setting up your e-commerce store is no easy task, but there are plenty of online shoppers ready to spend cash online. The 5 strategies listed above are stellar ways to kick-start sales for your online store. With the right approach, you will need only a handful of the strategies listed above to make the first of many sales. If you have any questions or need clarification feel free to comment below.
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