How to Get More Customers to Your Store and Boost Your Revenue

Excellent products are not enough. For an e-commerce store to be successful, it requires numerous ingredients to cook up an irresistible dish for customers – and marketing is like the haddock for fish and chips. That is how important it is to promote your brand and what it has to offer.

Think of it this way: if a product is released and no one is around to see it, does it create an impression? The answer is no, meaning you will fail to rack up any sales and bring in revenue. That is not good.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get the word out about your business and its offerings. This guide will discuss how to attract more customers to your store and give those revenue figures a healthy bump.

Get Google’s approval

Search engine optimisation (or SEO, for short). If you have never heard about SEO before, there is no better time to get acquainted with it than right now. As for what it is, the clue is in the name. It is about optimising your website for search engines.

Side note: when we say “search engines”, that generally means Google. Sure, the likes of Bing and Yahoo! have value, but Google accounts for 92.57% of the worldwide search engine market share (as of December 2022). Due to this, your SEO efforts should be based on Google’s rules and recom­men­dations.

Now, try not to be too worried that Google uses over 200 ranking factors when deciding where to place website pages in its search results. Most are common sense and will come naturally when crafting a high-quality, valuable e-commerce platform.

Still, these are the main points you need to focus on if you want to please Google and earn a higher spot on its search pages:

• Produce high-quality, on-brand content that answers your customers’ question
• Keyword research and implementation (while avoiding “keyword stuffing”)
• Acquire backlinks from other relevant, authoritative websites
• Seamless, easy-to-navigate website structure with fast loading speeds
• Mobile-friendly site as well as desktop friendliness

In terms of high-quality content, the main focus for an e-commerce store is informative product descriptions – although blog posts (like this one!) also offer plenty of value from an SEO perspective. Regarding keywords, these are search terms your audience will type into Google’s search bar to find your store.

Say your business sells video game-themed t-shirts. Keywords to target could be “video game t-shirt designs” and “where to buy video game t-shirts”. These key terms should be incorporated into your content in a natural way that does not detract from the flow of your product descriptions, pages, and blog posts.

Backlinks are tricky to gain. Essentially, a backlink is a link to your website; it is when an external website links back to your content. Other sites may link to your content if they see value in what you offer, although there are plenty of methods to stir up backlink numbers. Generally, the more valuable your products and content are, the more likely they will receive linkable attention from other websites.

Speed up

As mentioned in the previous section, a fast website is one of the critical components of SEO. Yet it is not just SEO where it matters – site speed is essential for getting those all-important conversions. After all, you do not want people to visit merely your store; you want them to land on your “Thank you for your purchase!” page.

How important is speed? Well, consider the following statistics from Kissmetrics:

• 47% of customers expect every webpage to load within at least two seconds.
• If a website takes longer than three seconds to load, 40% will leave.
• Just a single-second delay drops customer satisfaction levels by approximately 16%.
• Subpar website performance causes 79% of customers to be less likely to purchase from the same store again.

These sobering statistics mean your website must be quick and load within two seconds at most. If not, wave goodbye to potential customers as they buy from your competitors with faster websites instead.

There are various tools available to test your store’s page speed. The most popular is Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply put your website’s URL into the “Analyse” box, and the application will tell you a lot of valuable data – including page speed.

Various tactics can help reduce page loading times. Image optimisation, limiting redirects, choosing the right web host – all of these will contribute to faster pages and, ultimately, more conversions.

Use Pingdom, and test your page speed. And if your page takes longer that 2 seconds to load, you might want to make some changes.

Boost visibility and sales with product videos

It is true: product videos generally take more effort, time, and resources to create than a product description or blog post. However, there is an excellent reason for making them: video content offers various benefits.

First of all, they are proven to enhance sales numbers. Wyzowl’s research reveals that, according to marketing professionals, videos positively influenced 81% of sales in 2022. This is due to the content’s nature. It is information-rich yet concise, and a viewer can simply sit back after pressing “play”.

However, a product video does not necessarily have to be limited to just your product pages. These videos are effective marketing tools. Whether you upload the full video to YouTube or chop up small snippets for Twitter and TikTok, they are fantastic for expanding your brand’s reach.

Of course, you do not have to only stick with product videos. You can go down various avenues to create content your audience wants to watch. This can include behind-the-scenes footage of your business, such as how you create designs, your time at a trade show, and so on.

Use reviews to enhance social proof

Social proof has always been an essential element when influencing potential customers. People want to see that what you sell is legit and matches the standards they expect. Reviews are how they discover these aspects. It is said that online reviews influence 90% of consumer buying decisions. As a result, you need to gather a healthy collection of positive reviews from past customers.

You might find it difficult to extract customer reviews, but it is not too challenging. Some customers will leave feedback without any request, of course, but a little call-to-action will help to entice reviews. This message could range from a post-purchase email to a card included in their order.

You can also garner more reviews by offering your customers something in return for their feedback; providing a small discount code for use on their next purchase or a competition/­giveaway entry for one of your products are superb ways of getting more testimonials from your buyers.

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