How to use email marketing to run a successful eCommerce website

 

So you have a passion for diving and you decided to make a business out of that. You decided to have an online store to sell diving equipment.

You found some suppliers, setup the website and after a few days got some customers (family or friends).
That felt so great, right. Problem is that besides your friends and family, no one knew your store was out there.

 

Now you feel frustrated because people don’t go to your site to buy your products. It’s not that they don’t like them. The problem is that they don’t know your online store exists.

[WANT TO GET 10.000 UNIQUE TARGETED VISITORS EVERY MONTH? JUST CONTACT ME]

* 50.000 or 100.000 it’s also possible just ask me how.
If you want to have a serious online business you have to treat it like that: like a real business not like a hobby. So let’s take a quick look at what successful e-commerce sites do to have an increasing base of paying customers.
It all comes to this: know as much as you can about your customer.

 

So this is what you have to do:

 

1. Define your target group. E.g. Men between 25 and 45 years old who live in Europe and are passionate about diving.
2. Look for blogs and online publications about diving.
3. Get in touch with them and let them know you about your online diving store.
4. Engage in every conversation about diving on the web. Answer every question about diving in forums and in social media.
5. Select the social media platforms you’ll use to promote your business (start with Twitter, FB and Youtube).
6. Start a blog on your website.
7. Create great content. E.g. inspiring diving videos, a starter guide, a free e-book on diving, etc.
8. Share that content with your target audience.

These first 8 steps will bring traffic to your site.

 

Traffic is great but it’s not enough if you want to get A LOT of customers. From now on you’ll have to focus on how to capitalize that traffic.
What you have now is the equivalent of a physical store where people come in, check a few stuff and leave without buying. So what are you doing wrong? What you’re doing wrong is that you are not retaining any information about your visitors.
You got already some information (name, last name and email) when they downloaded your e-book or when they subscribed to your newsletter. That’s a good starting point but it’s not enough.

You need to know how they behave every time they go to your site.
For instance: Bob is an avid diver. He found your web store after checking one of your diving product reviews on Youtube.

While being on your site he finds a diving watch he likes and he adds it to the shopping cart. But after that he leaves your site without buying anything.
Why is that? You’ll never now. He might have forgotten his credit card number or maybe he got a phone call and he forgot about the purchase afterwards. It could be anything. Maybe he just wasn’t ready to buy at that moment.
The good news is that you don’t have to consider him a lost client. Nowadays there are online marketing tools that allow you to follow up and remind Bob that the watch he was about to buy 3 days ago is now available with a 15% discount (only for 4 days). He goes now to the web store and makes the purchase.
The most successful eCommerce sites are the ones that are able to not only get new customers but also to retain existing customers and sell them their different products over and over again. That’s where you want to be.