Generate Leads Strategies for e-commerce Business

For your e-commerce store to be described as successful, you need steady patronage from your customers. This is why lead generation is highly important for all e-commerce entrepreneurs. For e-commerce business owners, lead generation can be very competitive, but highly rewarding. For businesses to stand out, there needs to be a smart strategy.

The Importance of a Competitive Strategy for e-commerce Business

E-commerce businesses need a competitive strategy to get more customers. This strategy involves attracting the right type of traffic to the website and guiding them through the sales funnel stage until they purchase something. With this post, we will highlight 15 easy e-commerce lead generation tips that will help make your online store profitable and attractive.

How to Create an Ideal Lead for e-commerce Platforms

In the e-commerce industry, lead generation strategies usually vary because the nature of each business is different. This means that the ideal lead generation strategy for one business may differ from that of another. The most important thing for an e-commerce platform is that it must be able to determine or define its ideal lead. To create your ideal lead, it is important to consider factors such as:

15 Proven Strategies for Generate Leads for e-commerce Business

If you need effective lead-generation tips for your e-commerce business, then consider applying these 15 proven tips for lead generation:

1. SEO (Search engine optimization) 

You need a great SEO strategy to help improve your site visibility in online search results. This way, your potential customers can easily find your e-commerce platform and buy your products/services. SEO is used to target the purchasing habits of potential customers.

2. PPC (pay-per-click) advertising

PPC is an effective e-commerce lead-generation strategy that works alongside your SEO campaigns. With PPC campaigns, you can reach potential customers through the creation of Google Ads. This strategy allows you to display your ads when consumers use keywords to search for products/services.

3. Content Marketing

With content marketing, you help potential customers with the information they need about certain products and services. This helps keep them informed about the products that offer the best cost-effectiveness and value. With content marketing, you can publish web articles, blog posts, and other such content.

4. Social Media

Social media is another great way to generate leads for your e-commerce business. B2C (Business-to-customer) e-commerce platforms can utilize social media to show their brand’s personality and interact with their customers. Your social media followers are already interested in your services or products. This means that you can easily convert them into leads.

You will need to advertise directly to this type of customer if you are looking for great leads for your e-commerce platform. You can also run social media ads that take customers directly to a page on your e-commerce website.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to generate e-commerce leads. This involves collecting the email and contact information of your visitors. Once collected, you can follow up with visitors who fail to purchase your service/product on their first visit, and/or maintain contact thereafter.

Additionally, with email marketing you can easily create automated campaigns that allow you to send custom messages to subscribers about completing their purchases on the e-commerce platform, future product launches, sales, or the like.

6. Personalization

Each customer is unique and will only buy based on personal reasons. This means that you need to customize the marketing messages you send. Personalized marketing is utilized to tailor adverts and offers to the desires of different customers. With personalized campaigns, you can reach each customer based on their activities and preferences.

7. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

Each time that somebody visits your website, you always want to convert them. This conversion can mean anything from buying your products/services, signing up for more information, or performing other actions that convert them from simply being a lead. With CRO, you test the elements of your website to see which items are most effective in converting your visitors. For example, CRO tests the web elements of the e-commerce product page, the CTAs, and so on. The information that you get from this strategy is usually used to improve your web store. And this will help increase the number of possible conversions. 

8. Get Referrals from Customers

As an e-commerce platform, you can also generate leads by getting referrals from your existing customers. You can easily get new customers from old buyers when they refer their friends or family to you. Both parties can be rewarded with reward points, free guides, discount coupons, and so on.

9. Offer Purchasing Incentives

Frequently, leads do not convert into buyers because we lose them at various stages during the sales funnel. The best way to ensure the conversion of leads to buyers is to offer them incentives. By incentives, we mean that you could offer to reward them with giveaways, loyalty points, free shipping, deals, discounts, and gifts. This strategy is usually highly sought out and effective with first-time buyers/shoppers.

10. Offer Limited-time Sales Deals

You can use FOMO (the fear of missing out) to your advantage to generate leads. The secret to this lead-generation technique is utilizing the increased attractiveness of deals that are about to expire. This can be done in the form of product discounts or coupon codes.

For e-commerce platforms, they can simply create popups with timers that indicate how much time interested users have left. Besides the timer, you could create compelling website copy to instantly grab the viewer’s attention.

11. Attract Leads Using a CTA (Call To Action)

One of the most essential elements of a marketing campaign is the CTA. With CTA, you can compel visitors to take the next step. 

How to use a CTA in e-commerce platform:

• Make it clear what benefits customers will be receiving when they take action
• Use action words
• Use scarcity or urgency as a way to motivate buyers 

Great lead generation CTAs for e-commerce platform will urge consumers to:

• Get instant access to products
• Download free ebooks
• Try out a demo for free

12. Offer Free Trials

For e-commerce platforms that specialize in selling IT-related products/services, they can generate leads by offering users free trials. According to market watchers, 62% of e-commerce platforms generated about 10% of their revenue from giving out free trials. In addition, 16% of e-commerce platforms got about 50% of businesses from giving out free trials. This is proof that free trials can be quite as effective as any lead-generating techniques. When activated, there are several ways that you can promote the free trial.

13. Optimize your e-commerce Platform for Mobile

There are several reports that m-commerce (e-commerce on mobile devices) will generate over 70% of total sales for all retail e-commerce. One way that e-commerce platforms can increase the lead-generating capabilities of their platforms is to optimize their web store for the mobile experience. This means that the web store has to be tested and optimized for all types of devices.

Owners of online retail stores should check various features for full functionality and performance. There is a mobile-friendly testing tool from Google that helps users evaluate their web performances on mobile devices. This tool alerts owners to possible areas of improvement.

14. Get Positive Reviews from Past Customers

If you are looking to generate leads for your e-commerce platform, one great way to do this is to get positive reviews. You may have had past customers who have enjoyed your products or services. You can tell them to review your e-commerce platform on a third-party review website.

This way, other potential leads will be able to approach your website confidently to make a purchase. When your online store has positive reviews from past customers, your business becomes easily visible to many potential customers. This is one way to create leads and instill them with trust for possible purchases.

15. Try Remarketing

Another name for remarketing is retargeting. This means advertising to users who used your platform previously but did not make any purchases. The idea behind this strategy is to re-engage the prospect and make them a lead once more. This is a great technique for boosting sales as the customer may need just a little time or convincing to make the purchase. 

Conclusion

If you run an e-commerce business, you may be considering getting more leads to your online shop. Leads are potential customers who’ve shown interest in your goods or services. After setting up the website, you’ll want to focus on getting leads for your business.

You can easily attract more customers to your e-commerce platform using the strategies outlined above. These strategies have been proven to help many e-commerce businesses grow their brands and quickly scale up their businesses.