While customer retention is key to achieving consistent sales, attracting new customers is the other half of the ecommerce business puzzle.

As a marketer, you need to constantly consider how to bring in new customers and nurture them into lifetime partners.

In this post, we’ve put together seven top tips to attract the right customers to your ecommerce store.

Let’s get started.

1 | Create a strong social media presence

Social media has become a massive part of our lives. Whether you’re targeting millennials or new parents, you need a social media marketing strategy.

Depending on what you sell, you can choose 2-3 platforms, then based on the data you gather, focus more on the one that brings the highest ROI. Another benefit is you’ll be able to collect reviews that you can use on your website and social media pages. User-generated content, or UGC (customer images, reviews etc.), is one of the strongest forms of peer endorsement and acts as an effective mechanism for word-of-mouth recommendations.

You can also take advantage of social media features available exclusively for social commerce, such as Instagram Shopping which allows businesses to add a product tag to a post so that customers can “tap to purchase”.

2 | Harness the power of influencer marketing

The influencer industry is projected to grow to $16.4 billion according to Influencer Marketing Hub – a huge opportunity you can tap into.

Influencer marketing works mainly because building a community takes time and trust. People following an influencer tend to take their recommendations seriously. You can use free tools such as upfluence and HypeAuditor to find relevant influencers quickly.

3 | Invest in SEO and content marketing

While social media and influencer marketing bring in the quickest results when trying to get customers, what’s equally powerful is attracting organic website traffic through powerful content creation. People are already searching for similar products, so why not try SEO?

There’s no right or wrong way to create content. It depends on what you are selling. You may use video marketing to get the word out about your brand or publish blog posts about your popular products.

4 | Mobile-optimise your store

54.25% of web traffic generated is from mobile phones, compared to 42.9% from desktop searches according to techjury. This signals why it’s important to optimise your site for mobile.

Here are tips on how you can optimise your site for mobile search:

• Select a web-responsive design
• Take advantage of tools that help you track mobile behaviour
• Avoid pop-ups from your website because they disrupt the visitors’ browsing experience
• Prioritise site speed to decrease bounce rates

5 | Use scroll-stopping photos

First-time impressions matter and that includes your online presence too.

You may have the best product in the world, but if you have poor quality images, people will probably not stay on your site for long. When it comes to how you present your site, photography is crucial.

If resources allow, hire a professional photographer to take product photos; if not, phone photography is still effective and impressive.

Tips on product photography:

• Use a white background
• Ensure you have appropriate lighting
• Keep in mind your brand colours when editing
• Avoid using filters

6 | Include email marketing in your marketing strategy

In an age where Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms have all the attention, you may be tempted to ignore email marketing.

The best marketers use social media as a tool to attract customers and email to build a relationship.

Types of ecommerce emails journeys include:

• Welcome sequence emails
• Abandon cart emails
• Promotional and sales campaign emails
• Customer loyalty and re-engagement emails

7 | Gather data about your customer and competitor

Understanding your customers makes it easier to attract them because you’re able to serve them in the best way possible. One of the most effective ways to do this is to conduct research and then pivot to their needs. You might carry out interviews, surveys or polls online, and in exchange for honest opinions, you can give discounts for their next purchase.

Where people are talking about your brand is also key because it allows you to be super-focussed in your advertising to target the areas where people are already warm to your message.

Online, there are several reputation and social media community management tools that can track this word-of-mouth…

Offline, Herdify can help to detect and harness those word-of-mouth hotspots.