How to attract customers to your store: the best ways to expand your audience

How do I attract customers to my business? Every webstore owner asks this question at least once. Before figuring out the best methods to do this effortlessly you should learn why you actually need more clients.

Content:

• Ads: types and effectiveness
• How to attract more customers using email marketing and feedback
• Ten tips to make your store attractive for new clients
• Two main aspects you should note

Many merchants believe that their main aim is to retain current customers rather than finding new ones. This seems reasonable at first: instead of wasting money on strategies to attract customers that can be risky, you can spend much less on holding on to your audience.

Nevertheless, this approach can be devastating for an online-store. If you make no effort to search for new customers, your faster-acting competitors are likely to poach your regulars. No need to explain what this will lead to. That’s why eCommerce merchants should think about how to attract new customers if they want to prosper.

Let’s learn which ways to attract new customers are the best and cheapest for a small online business.

Ads: types and effectiveness

Your potential customers won’t search for your store for no reason. Perhaps positive reviews of their friends or colleagues will help, but the scale of that is too low. A nice tool to attract customers is advertising. There are several types of ads that work in different ways.

Banner advertisements

A banner ad is a bright and dynamic way to attract new clients. Banners are based on visual effect. Customers can click on banners to switch to your website or simply observe them frequently, which increases your brand popularity.

Contextual banners are a mix of pure banner and context ads. This type of advertisement is placed on Google partner sites. This method is not really expensive: you can pay per click, for instance.

Contextual advertisements

Contextual ads can be a powerful tool for a webstore owner. Their working principle make them universal, and more frequently and relevantly displayed. Another important thing is the ability to configure these ads based on geolocation so that you can target customers more precisely.

Social media or messengers ads

Today it would be absolutely stupid to ignore the socials as a way of how to attract customers online.These ads are cheap and easy to create. The main rule in creating ads of this type is to make them brief and informative, otherwise they can be ignored.

How to attract more customers using email marketing and feedback

Nearly every person now has an email that can be connected to various accounts and used for communication as well. That’s why among the other marketing techniques to attract customers e-mail is considered to be a must have.

There are several spheres where email marketing will be successful.

• Chain letters

These letters tend to be a way to attract customers who have already come across your webstore. To get them back you can send emails of several types: abandoned cart notes, order left unpaid, pre-order items back in stock, and much more. If your clients get irritated by the letters they can easily block or delete them. Anyway, try not to be too persistent.

• Letters containing offers

There is nothing more attractive than a coupon, a discount or a small prize in exchange for a review or sharing your link. You won’t lose much if you launch a campaign like that.

E-mail marketing has certain drawbacks. First of all, it needs time if you don’t want to spend money on a specific utility that will send notes out. Besides, letters can remain unread or immediately go into spam, so they need to be thoroughly worked out.

Ten tips to make your store attractive for new clients

Apart from tools and services that will draw more visitors to your business you can use simple tricks that are rather effective. If you are still unsure how to attract customers to your business and don’t want to invest much in it, try the following advice. Note! Some of them might seem minor, but these tips can be very effective.

1. Font size

You can’t even imagine how many clients you can lose due to inadequate font size. If your website is painful to read few people won’t remain there for more than five minutes. Fourteen pixels is considered to be the optimal size, which is true not only for webpages, but for e-mails, blog articles, etc.

2. Focus on your website heading

In all that fuss we often don’t have enough time to scroll up and down searching for information. Place the main talking points there to draw the most attention at once.

3. Write beautifully

Methods on how to attract customers’ attention will be completely useless without well-structured informative text. Think over a good information presentation of your content. Don’t write too much and overload customers with details. A good way to interest customers is eye-catching article headings that cause a desire to know what lies below them.

4. Make offers to bloggers

A successful cooperation is profitable for both sides. To enlarge your audience engage popular bloggers who specialize in your store’s sphere. Thus your store will become familiar to lots of people who would have never heard of you otherwise. This is more than just an ad: you involve a real person whose opinion counts to many people. They are not obliged to promote your business intensely – that would look unnatural – but to mention it somehow will be enough for many followers to pay attention to you.

5. Less obligatory fields

It’s always off-putting when a visitor comes across an obligatory registration form with a lot of fields in it. Some find it too suspicious that you need their date of birth and other personal details and others simply have no time to fill in all those lines and enter a captcha. If you want users to register offer it as a pleasant benefit for customers and don’t ask for too much information.

6. Third party services

You can own your store but place your products at other partner sites that are bigger than yours. Today lots of people prefer to shop on large platforms that they trust. In this case your brand will become more popular and you’ll be able to get orders right from the third party platforms. This service is not free, but it usually pays off well.

7. Introduce yourself

Place a small “about us” section on your website. Let your visitors know who you are, how much you have achieved as a merchant, and what your goals are. This will build trust between you and your potential buyers. Customers will be happier to purchase from a real person rather than from a faceless shop. Photos of you and your team will strengthen the effect.

8. Visualization matters

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Use more photos in your website that demonstrate your store advantages, describe your products or services. Pictures highlight your store sections and let visitors rest from continuous lines of text.

9. The power of reviews

Your potential customers need some other opinions to refer to. Positive customer experience is the key factor that will motivate your visitors to make an order. Use real reviews from customers, ask them to share photos of their purchases, offer them bonuses for doing that, and place the results on your webstore.

10. Personal approach

We all perceive information more positively if we are appealed to directly. Try to develop a system of notifications that will address each customer. Talk to them like you talk to friends.

Two main aspects you should note

There can be hundreds of small techniques that will bring new buyers to your small business. Before trying them all, pay attention to the following factors.

• Your target audience

First of all, figure out to whom you wish to sell your products. Your marketing strategies should be different depending on whether you sell women’s clothes or rubber boats. This will influence your store design, campaigns and much more, so try to define your potential clients’ characteristics in advance.

• It’s all about the client

Profit is the main aim of any business. Profit is inseparably linked to your customers’ happiness. Use this simple rule while building on a sales strategy. Create favourable conditions for a purchase and list the possible benefits for your customers on your website.

If you’re reading this you’re possibly racking your brain about how to how to attract new customers. Don’t be afraid of implementing new methods, but be reasonable – it’s better to concentrate on a couple of techniques than try to do them all at once.