Traffic numbers, visitors, and customers are very unique e-commerce terms.
You need the traffic to build your customer base. In the same breath, you need to keep your customers consistent to have loyal customers who increase your customer retention rate and customer lifetime value.
As a Shopify merchant, converting leads into regular and paying customers is essential for driving growth and sales.
How then can you achieve this in the saturated e-commerce industry? Where you have hundreds if not thousands of competitors. To grow your sales and convert your leads into buying customers, you need to be able to get customers’ attention and trust to nudge them to make a purchase.
In this article, I’ll be sharing some practical e-commerce tactics that can help you convert leads into customers. With these same marketing strategies, you would be able to drive sales conversion to the peak and boost revenue as well.
Tactic To Help You Convert Leads Into Customers
1. Storytelling
The trick of sales is hidden in how captivating your product story can captivate your customers and influence them to want to try the product and make a purchase.
Using humor and attractive storytelling can bring your target audience into your space where you can then convert them to leads and then to sales.
In this case, you need to know what kind of stories or humor will make sense to your customers. That implies that you need to study the kind of people within your target audience and their social preferences. This will help you know how to penetrate into their hearts.
Death Wish Coffee a Shopify coffee store uses storytelling to show the savor and adventurous nature of their coffee packs. They also offer unique packaging that tells the story of each coffee in the pack.
You can also pick the kind of story you want your products to tell when customers see them. This will be a signature to your brand and also help you nudge customers to make a purchase.
2. Social Proof
Nothing works faster for e-commerce stores than having social proof for customers to see, especially for first-time visitors with no prior sales encounter with your store.
The way to gain such customers is to show them that you are real and authentic. One way online buyers certify online stores is to check their review history from customers who have already made a purchase. That is the golden rule for online buyers.
Showing social proof like reviews, social media engagements, and feedback from customers on your website can help you increase the trust of visitors and convert them to sales. This strategy is used by most Shopify merchants by linking their social media pages to their store using tools like Instagram feeds, Facebook feeds, etc.
This way, they are able to direct customers to see how customers engage with them on their social pages. Here is a good example of instances where store owners share social proof on their store;
3. Dive into abandoned carts
When potential customer visits a store for the first time, they might be interested in some of your products and have them added to their cart without checking out for a while.
There are several reasons why customers do this which can include shipping costs, no readiness to buy, and checkout issues, amongst others. A study by Baymard has it that about 70% of online buyers abandon their carts on average.
6 Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment And Gain More Sales
Imagine, if you are able to convert a portion of these customers into sales. Your sales record and revenue are definitely going to skyrocket. To convert customers who abandon their carts, you can consider some measures that are discussed in this blog post on how to reduce cart abandonment.
Personalized emails, retargeting ads, offers, and incentives are practical measures you can engage to help you convert these leads into sales.
How To Increase Conversion Rate For Retail Shopify Stores
4. Offer deals
E-commerce stores and discounts are two siblings that never separate. Always going hand-in-hand.
To attract some leads and nudge them to make a purchase, you might need to offer a discount or deal that is interesting to them. Something as minimal as a test product can be the point of gaining a customer.
Other strategies in this tactic include giving free shipping on orders. Talking about free shipping, when offered that means the store owner has to bear the cost of delivery. Some customers have abandoned their purchase because they feel the shipping cost is too much.
You can, however, factor in part of the shipping cost in the product price if you feel you can’t bear all the shipping costs. The offer can also be that the customer pays a certain amount of the shipping fee.
5. Optimize your sales funnel
A sales funnel is a marketing strategy that describes how a customer is guided through a shopping process. Basically, it is the journey that a lead follows from awareness about the store to visiting the homepage, checking product pages, adding items to cart, and finally making payment for the products.
There are three major sales funnel stages which are the top funnel, middle funnel, and bottom funnel. A typical example of the top funnel can be your social media pages or Shopify store homepage. The middle funnel is your product pages while the bottom funnel includes the payment procedures and the thank you page (also known as order status page).
Optimizing these sales funnel stages can help retain customers at every stage. Your top funnel should be able to convert leads into buying customers as much as your middle and bottom sales funnel.
Every sales funnel point is valuable to your sales growth. It might be convenient to miss out on the bottom funnel page because you feel you’ve gotten what you wanted from the customer.
That will be a wrong idea. The thank you page can help you nudge customers to spend more money by reordering. You can also upsell and cross-sell on this bottom-funnel page to boost customers’ average order value.
Shopify Thank You Page Optimization: A Guide On How To Drive Sales
Final Note
Running a successful e-commerce store begins with knowing the right marketing strategies that can help you penetrate your target audience.
To attract your target audience, you need to be smart about what tactics to use to grab customers’ attention and trust. After implementation, you need to monitor and analyze the results that you get so that you know where and how to amplify your game.