Generating leads for your eCommerce business is a constant process.
“Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.”
You can use innovative methods to attract more of your target audience to share their details such as their email address, contact number and business requirements so they can be contacted at a later date.
Understanding the Buyer Persona
You need to create a buyer persona for your business to understand user preferences and create targeted messaging. The goal here is to get insights about who your customer is, their location and profession. These details help you create an image of the person; your communication messages are going to target. Here is an interesting example that shows the required details:
The more accurate your persona, higher the chances of getting relevant leads for your business. Here are some key strategies for achieving the desired number of leads for your eCommerce business:
- Optimize For Search Engines and User Experience
You need to ensure that your eCommerce website has a user-friendly interface and helps the user find the information they are looking for.
44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine.
The website should have a consistent design and flow of information. The more your target user engages with your website, the higher its chances of ranking on search engines.
This would help you get more relevant traffic and improve the probability of getting leads on your site.The speed of your site should be optimized and it should be usable across devices and browsers. You need to create a website strategy that is combination of technology, business requirements and aesthetics.
- Social Media Promotions
Having a social media presence is a must for every eCommerce business. Adding useful and engaging content on social channels is a good way to generate leads for your business. You can use automation tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to manage your social media campaigns.
Many prospective customers would engage with your brand on social channels and then contact you for your services.
Create a strategy for each of the social channels such as Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn. You need to get the users to visit your website from these channels.
You can build your own communities on these platforms, related your business expertise. This would help you get your target audience engage in informative conversations, thereby helping you to drive traffic to your website.
Here is an example of a LinkedIn community around travel technology:
- Content Upgrades
This is a useful technique to generate leads for your eCommerce business. You can provide the option for the users to fill in their details to access the detailed version of a useful content piece. Your users will be more than happy to share their details with you.
“83% of B2B marketers use content marketing for lead generation.”
You need to consistently create interesting and useful pieces of content that can become lead magnets for your business:
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Video Tutorials
- Tips and Tricks
Here is an example of how you can showcase your eBook and offer it for a free download:
- Optimize Call To Action Buttons
You need to place the appropriate call to action buttons on your website, to get the users to fill in their details. Highlight the product or the service benefit in the copy of the CTA’s to get the maximum conversions. You can do A/B tests to understand which CTA copies are doing the best.
- Pay Per Click Campaigns
Paid form of marketing with Google Adwords and social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is very helpful in getting relevant leads quickly. You need to create a number of ads on these platforms and optimize your campaigns depending on the number of leads being generated from each. Multiple landing pages are used to ensure better results.
- Referral Program
You can get your existing users to refer your products and services to their friends and acquaintances to get more prospective clients. You can offer cash rewards to everyone who refers your services.
“The Life Time Value of a new referral customer is 16% higher.” – Wharton School of Business
This is a useful technique to get more leads for your business.
- Popups
Another useful way to generate leads is to add popups on your website pages. You can use popups to promote an event or an ebook or simply the benefits of the products and services you are providing. A Call-To-Action button is used on the popup to get the users to fill in their information.
10. Events and Trade-shows
Industry events are a useful way to get leads for your business. By participating in events, you can showcase your products and services and network with prospective clients. You can capture their details with online or onsite registration forms. Events are helpful in gathering data of relevant prospects.
- Guest Blogging
Writing interesting and expert blog posts for web blogs in your niche can help you showcase your expertise while helping you earn qualified leads for your business. Pitch for sites which have a high readership with relevant blog topics and create informative articles according to their respective guidelines. This would surely help you reach out to more prospects and get more leads at the same time.
- Offer a Product Trial
This is an interesting way to get qualified leads for your business. You can offer a trial of the product for free. A trial helps the prospects to know more about the product and its features, while providing the business an opportunity to capture their details and engage with them through targeted campaigns.
- Participate in Q & A Sites
Sites like Quora and Yahoo answers help you showcase your business expertise. Create a profile on these channels and participate regularly to get more visibility for your business. Once you have built a reputation on these sites, you will start getting qualified leads.
- Business Blog
A business blog is an essential for adding useful content on your website. You can use various techniques to generate leads from your blog.
“Companies with over 200 blog articles have >5x the leads than those with 10 or fewer.”
Adding banners and CTA’s are useful to get the users to fill in web forms. Besides that, you can also add links to your services pages in blog posts to get more traffic on these pages. Offering newsletter subscriptions is a useful technique to generate relevant leads.
- Marketing Automation
Automating your marketing campaigns is a useful way to generate leads for your business. Automation helps in making your campaigns more efficient and make the lead generation process quicker.
“37% of B2B marketers are using marketing automation to generate leads.”
You need to set up a system where the user behavior and activity details of your prospects are tracked. This information is used to define the criteria for automated campaigns.
Analyze and test the lead generation activities on a periodic basis. Focus on the activities that are performing the best and filter out the ones that are not giving good results for your business.
