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Did you know that the cost per acquisition in the eCommerce industry can be anywhere between $20 and $180? It can even be more or less, depending on what products you are selling. So how much are you spending? More importantly, after spending money, resources, and long hours to acquire new customers, are your sales increasing, and is your eCommerce brand growing?
Attracting any customer may seem like a success, but if you are not acquiring the right customers, then all your effort is in vain. Through eCommerce customer acquisition strategies, your business can acquire the most relevant customers who will stay with your business for years!
To help you grow and stay ahead of the competition, in this blog,, we will go over the top 12 eCommerce customer acquisition strategies.
Top 12 eCommerce Customer Acquisition Strategies
- Study your existing customers
- Create paid advertisements for the right audience
- Improve store performance
- Boost SEO
- Offer outstanding customer support
- Showcase social proof with user-generated content
- Create referral programs
- Personalize customers’ shopping experience
- Localize your content
- Create contests
- Use influencers marketing
- Automate your marketing campaigns
Finding the right customer that you can retain for years is no easy task. But with the following eCommerce customer acquisition strategies, you can rest assured it’s only sunshine, rainbows, and loyal customers from now on!
1- Study your existing customers
Before you start working on acquiring new customers, you have to learn everything you can about your existing customers. Through the data you gather, you can learn who you should target and your customer base behavior in general.
This will drastically decrease the amount of testing you need in other acquisition strategies and,, as a result, will save you tons of money, effort, and time.
2- Create paid advertisements
Many eCommerce businesses think that acquiring customers can only be through throwing some money into random ads. That strategy might get you some instant results, but if you are just creating random ads with no concrete plan, it will only work in the short run.
Your ads have to target the right people at the right place and at the right time. You have to optimize your ads on each platform to get the best results. Remember it's not enough to acquire a new customer; you have to acquire the right customer.
3- Improve website/app
This might seem like common sense, but there are thousands of customers each day that stop shopping from websites or apps because of bad user experience. As an eCommerce business, your main focus should be on providing an easy shopping experience. This includes fast loading time, easy navigation, and easy communication tools (like chatbots),
4- Boost organic traffic
Optimizing your website for google and other search engines is a great long-term plan for acquiring customers. It will boost sales and cost you less than any of the paid eCommerce customer acquisition strategies.
To boost organic traffic, you should optimize website pages and create blogs, infographics, or any other content that target keywords relevant to your eCommerce business.
5- Offer outstanding customer support
Customers like to feel that they are always heard, especially when they are frustrated or have a problem. So, it's in your eCommerce brand's best interest to provide an easy channel for communication. For instance, you can have live chat support on your website and app, a hotline, or an email that you fastly reply to.
6- Showcase social proof
You can have a customer on your platform and lose him. To decrease that possibility, you should showcase social proof of your products. This could be any form of user-generated content, including reviews, ratings, or videos.
7- Create referral programs
Who would you trust more, a friend or a random brand online? Everyone will take the word of someone they know over an ad or anything a brand says online. Therefore referral programs that encourage word of mouth are one of the best eCommerce customer acquisition strategies.
8- Personalize customers’ experience
This may seem like a retention strategy more than an acquisition strategy. However, businesses can utilize personalization in every stage of the funnel. Personalization is a great way to help give potential customers that final push for conversion.
Maybe someone visited your website but didn’t make a purchase. If the next time they open the website, they will find the products they casually browsed waiting for them on the home page, it might encourage them to get them! You can also use email personalization to send welcome emails with a personal touch that encourages potential customers to convert.
9- Localize your content
If you are operating on a global scale, it's crucial to localize all your content for each market you are in. Just translating your website pages or having different social media accounts for each country is not enough. Your content should be relevant to each country or region. By offering the same experience as a local brand, you will easily acquire new customers and establish better relationships with existing customers.
10- Create buzz
Having a buzz around your brand is one of the best eCommerce customer acquisition strategies. How to create a buzz? That’s easy, just create a contest with some lucrative prizes, and people will pool in. Bearing in mind that if your contest is too hard or the prizes are not with it, people won’t bother to join. In simpler terms, ensure that your contest is worth their while!
11- Work with influencers
Influencers have become the new celebrities; every brand is racing to get its products endorsed by influencers on different platforms. For eCommerce businesses, the competition is high, so to stand out using influencer marketing, you can work with micro-influencers (10k to 100k followers).
Although you reach more people with big influencers, micro-influencers are more trusted. In other words, if you are using influencer marketing as one of your eCommerce customer acquisition strategies, then you should use micro-influencers. Whereas, if you are using it for brand awareness, then big names are a better choice.
12- Employ marketing automation
The age of manually doing everything is long gone, and if you are not automating marketing campaigns to improve lead generation and acquire new customers, then you will be left behind. In fact, over 75% of eCommerce businesses are already using automation in many aspects of their marketing plans.
Final Thoughts
There are numerous tools that can help you automate most of these eCommerce customer acquisition strategies. For instance, ConvertedIn can help you automate ads on Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. As well as automate and personalize email campaigns and SMS. Request a demo now to acquire loyal customers and grow your eCommerce business!
