If you built a beautiful online store, but you aren’t getting any sales, trust me, you aren’t alone.
Our agency has built hundreds of websites, many of them being e-commerce stores. But why aren’t they successful?
Most people believe the words “if you build it, they will come to their website.” In many cases, that is true, but you must think about the value you provide to your customers.
Let me break it down…
Let’s think about it from a customer’s point of view. Let’s go one step further and say you’re the customer.
If you want the hottest pair of sandals for the upcoming summer, where do you go?
Amazon, Google, your favorite boutique?
Why?
Because you know you can get all your answers from all those locations. Everything from reviews to additional information, and you can see an image of them. But if you think about it, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of sandal manufacturers.
So why do you go to the three above?
You already know about them, you’re comfortable shopping with them and already have a relationship with them.
Let People Find You
One mistake people make is obsessing about what they are offering without having a way to get people to the store.
I use this example a lot when it comes to websites. Imagine your new website is a physical store with a mailing address and all. But it was somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Would anyone find it? Eventually, but would a lot of people stop in? Probably not.
Why? Because it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Now let’s use that same scenario and move your store to time square.
Do you think you will get visitors? Yes!
Will they buy? Maybe.
So why does all that matter, and how does it relate to your store getting business?
From a digital marketing agency, we care about numbers.
What are those numbers, you may ask?
Number Of Visitors And Percentage Of Buyers
You might be thinking, why do we care about those numbers?
If we know a website has a .5% conversion rate, we know that if we can get 200 people to the website, we will be making at least one sale.
So, if your new website gets two people to visit it per day, you must wait 100 days for your first sale! The worst part is what if that sale is only for 10 dollars! That is pennies a day, and believe it or not; a .5% conversion rate is pretty good.
The statistics range from website to website, but more often than not, an excited new business owner launching their first website may be distrusted over those numbers.
So how do you make them better?
Remember when I said think about you as the customer. There are a couple of things you need to be even to buy.
You need to be looking for a new pair of sandals, you need to have the finances to purchase those sandals, and you need to have the right weather to buy those sandals.
Finally, when the stars align, you can then go out and make a purchase.
Before we continue, let’s think about everything I just covered. First, you need to get 200 people to visit your site to make one purchase, and that person has to be ready and able to buy for you to make a sale.
It seems crazy when you think about it.
So how do you get people who are eager to buy to your website so you can get a better conversion rate and make more sales?
Typically, there are two main ways.
Run Ads To Your Website
I know this may come as a shock to most, but you guessed it. It’s a great way to drive traffic, but the answer may not surprise you. With ads you can run them towards your ideal client.
So, if your ideal client was a 25–35-year-old woman who loves summer sandals, the hottest trends, and frequent trips to the beach, believe it or not, it’s not that hard to target that person.
Why?
Sources like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and many other platforms allow you to target exactly who you want to go after.
There are two main catches though, that you should know about.
Ads can be expensive and to get them dialed in takes a while.
In other words, you need to obsess over your ads and your conversation rate. When you do, it will cost money upfront.
However, once they become self-fulfilling, you can essentially put a dollar in and get 2+ dollars out. If you’re good, you might be able to get that to significantly more like 1 dollar in and 10 dollars out.
It may take time and many iterations and lots of finances to get there, but it’s incredible when the system you build works.
Create Content Your Ideal Client Will Engage With
What does that mean?
People obtain information in three main ways. Those being visual, audio, or a combination of both meaning video. I fully understand that not everyone is going to be able to produce a blog, a podcast, and videos for YouTube channels.
Why those and not Instagram or Facebook?
Predominantly blogs and YouTube videos are evergreens. They work for you 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The platforms are search engines, and with billions of searches being made, their job is to pair the best answers to the best questions.
So, if someone types in the best flip-flops for long walks around town but are safe to bring to the beach and get wet could result in your content showing up.
If it answers their question and gives them the confidence that your product is the one they need to resolve their issue, you now have a buyer.
One thing I would recommend staying away from is podcasting. Why?
Searching for shows is much more complicated and isn’t as refined. There is significantly less data you can put in there into helping you get found, and it’s touch to skip around and keep the gist of everything going on in them.
There is a catch you need to know about when it comes to content creation. It’s a long-term game.
Creating content can be free if you have a cell phone to record videos or a computer, and you can type. Can’t afford Microsoft word or Grammarly? Open office is a great free resource to write articles where you get almost the same benefits of office.
Sadly, that’s not the catch. Those are solutions to problems or excuses many people come up with.
The catch is content takes time. Like your website, it will take a while for Google to even think about sending you traffic. Why?
Because Google doesn’t know you. Content needs time to mature online and allow search engines to trust it. Several independent studies take on average nine months for blog articles to reach their peak traffic.
So, if you launch your website in January first, you can expect to get some traffic going to your content in August or September. To get the most out of this content check out this post to learn about evergreen content in your blog.
Without going into extreme detail about why that is, I will give you the cliff notes version of it.
Google during this time will test with users to see how they like your content. If they stay and read and visit more pages, Google know it’s good. Suppose they leave and go to another website because you didn’t have the answers. You know it’s bad.
After testing for a while, Google will figure out where you belong on the SERP or search engine results page, and that’s where your home will be until someone writes a better article or optimizes their existing article.
Building An Audience
This can be 100% free when you’re going the content route, but it will take time.
The easiest way for me to paint the picture for you is to say… ads are essentially steroids. They are great, and you can get results very quickly and keep doing it repeatedly. But when you stop, so does everything. If something changes, your ads stop working or a variety of other things can happen, essentially halting your business.
Content marketing is like going to the gym every day.
You can go for a week or two, and you might see a slight improvement, but when you go for a year or so, the results keep getting better and better. The best part is when you stop going, you can still reap the rewards for a very long time after, just like this blog.
It was written over a few hours, but it will continue to get traffic for years to come, even when we haven’t worked on it.
But why would we write it?
It adds tremendous value to new e-commerce stores and can paint a realistic picture of what you can expect and how you can grow your e-commerce website. However, there may be someone who reads the article, and they may think to themselves they want to reap the rewards of the content approach, but they aren’t good writers.
That is where Growth Generators comes in. If you need help with your content marketing, let us know we offer packages to help businesses grow over time, and even though the results may not be instant, they can last for years to come.