New eCommerce businesses often struggle with achieving first orders and acquiring new customers at the beginning period. More seriously, if business owners can’t deal with the challenge within their existing resources, they will be at risk of failure. Therefore, to help you have a good customer acquisition strategy from the very first step, we’ll bring you some helpful suggestions of channels for acquiring customers.
Which channels work well for your business depends on the types of products and channels your customers use. However, here are the 5 most effective channels of customer acquisition that you can consider.
01. Friends and family
Friends and family is a channel that new eCommerce beginners often start with to buy their products. If they don’t buy from you, they will still purchase from others. Moreover, your friends and family members are always willing to support you. Thus, there is no reason to wonder or worry about this. Remember that your eCommerce business will not get a sale easily in the beginning to cover your various costs. So, try to take advantage of every sales generation resource as much as possible.
You can share your products with them so that they will buy or otherwise, share your products with their friends or colleagues. In this way, you can extend your customer base eventually.
02. Advertisements
Advertisement can be one of the essential channels to reach new customers. It includes online ads and offline ads. Online ads are usually paid advertisements. Offline ads are billboards, banners, etc.
There are various types of online advertising channels, such as:
- Display ads: This is effective for growing brand awareness.
- Facebook and Instagram ads: You can display ads contents, get them approached by many audiences, and pay for it.
- Adwords (also referred to as PPC): You only pay when someone clicks on an ad to visit your website. It is a great way to get in front of customers when they’re searching for products that you can offer.
You can use both online and offline advertising for your business. Because although your business is online, offline advertising is still helpful.
03. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate is a channel where merchants achieve new customers by working with one or many publishers like bloggers, influencers and other small businesses. These publishers will share the company’s products with their audience so that they will make a purchase, or click to your website, etc. The merchant will pay publishers a commission, depending on the number of orders they bring back.
The benefit of affiliate is that you can acquire many new customers with a high ROI. Affiliates send a large number of leads to the merchant’s website and the merchant only pays for the sales generated.
To make sure you carry an affiliate program successfully, use an automation tool like Atom8. Atom8 app will help you follow and measure your affiliate program easily. It allows tracking discount codes or coupons relating to affiliates, sending internal emails notifying of a new order having those discount codes or coupons, or generating these orders onto a spreadsheet for more analysis and report, etc. All are automatic without executing manually.
04. Social media
Another way to acquire customers is through social media. Social media is a quickly growing landscape of networks and platforms that change the way people interact with brands online. There are some popular social networks nowadays like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest.
People spend an average of 2 hours and 33 minutes per day on social media. Social media networks are not only a place where billions of people spend their time, but they also provide a multitude of ads format and targeting options. Thus, it’s no wonder why they become an indispensable channel to acquire customers for eCommerce businesses.
On social media, you can create a social media page, then publish content, live-stream, send messages, whatever relating to your products to attract new customers and encourage purchasing. Note that if your customers spend a lot of time on Instagram but not Facebook, you’ll need to focus your spending on Instagram.
05. SEO
SEO is the marketing channel that drives potential customers to your website who want your products but don’t know how to find you. It is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when shoppers search for products related to your business in search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.
Shoppers conduct trillions of searches every year to find information about products and services they need. Additionally, they tend to click to websites that have a higher rank in the search results. Hence, making your website appear on the top of the search will enhance the possibility of getting customers to visit your store and buy your products.
You can use SEO to acquire customers at any stage of the customer acquisition funnel. Additionally, it’s essential to create useful content for your customers whether it’s SEO or social media. Customers today are looking for solutions, not simply a product. Finally, remember that this channel will not give you customers immediately, but it takes time and effort. So this is good to be a long-term strategy.
Sum up
Customer acquisition is the first step to get sales for your online store. Because of its spending cost, you need to find the best channels of customer acquisition to generate the maximum ROI. Also, don’t forget that there is no cheaper method of customer acquisition than customer retention. Therefore, try to improve the lifetime value of the customer and take opportunities from it.
