It is certainly no secret that success in eCommerce means making sales. And that is only possible if you attract customers. There are countless strategies for doing this but none of them are easy. Business has never been easy, and while the democratization of retail that has been ushered in by the internet age may have made it easier than ever to start a business, making it successful is another matter.
To make sales to new customers, what you need is effective lead generation. Azola Creative, a website design company that also specializes in lead generation services, says that this is something very frequently outsourced by smaller eCommerce businesses. This is simply because doing this in-house means bringing a professional onto your staff, which is not something the smallest eCommerce sites have the budget for.
What is Ecommerce Lead Generation?
To understand what lead generation is and what it means for e-commerce, the first thing is knowing what a lead is. In eCommerce, a lead is simply defined as anyone who is interested in your brand or product – and it does not necessarily mean a sale. A lead is identified when that person does some action that is evidence of interest. This could include:
- clicking on one of your ads or engaging with your marketing
- signing up for your mailing list
- following your brand on another site (usually social media)
- downloading your content or sharing it
- signing up for a free trial.
The important thing to remember is that every lead is not a customer, but a potential customer. However, you cannot get customers without them first being potential customers, which is why lead generation is important.
What Type of Leads Do You Want?
Working out your ideal lead is the first step to maximizing lead generation. This part is down to you, and there is such a thing as bad leads. Bad leads are those engaging with your brand through one of the actions listed above, but who really are not the type of person who would ever purchase from you.
Bad leads can sometimes come from marketing that is attractive and effective, but which doesn’t really convey what you’re selling. For example, if you manage to get a celebrity to endorse your product and feature them in your marketing, you might get leads from fans of the celebrity who nevertheless have zero interest in your product.
Accordingly, the first tip for effective lead generation is to work out who your ideal leads are.
Some Tips
With these fundamentals covered, here follows a couple of practical tips for lead generation:
Use SEO
This is all but essential. One of the best ways to attract leads is to optimize your content for SEOso that you appear high on search engines. However, be sure that your keywords are relevant asthere is no point coming up in searches for products or services which you do not offer.
Offer More Than Your Product
In practice, this means great web content that people will be interested in, with blogs and videos being the two most common examples. This is an example of attracting people for reasons other than your products but, if the content is relevant to your products, these people will be potential customers.
Build Social Media Followers
It is not difficult to see why you can potentially reach many more people on social media than anywhere else on the web. Nevertheless, remember again to keep it relevant to ultimately attract people to your site.
Lead generation is essential for success in ecommerce, and it is probably the most effective form of online marketing.