Okay, so you have created your Yokaboo store, your Paypal is set up, your products are uploaded, your business is ready to start making money but no one is placing an order!
Well, the truth is that nobody is going to place an order if they don’t know about your store and your products. Creating your store is one task, but getting visitors and more importantly customers to your online shop is another one.
There are many ways to promote your e-commerce website that are proven methods for small businesses. Below are some simple but essential tips we have put together to help you promote your Yokaboo store.
So, let’s put our marketing hat on and work on it.
10 Inexpensive Ways to Market your Yokaboo store and Keep Customers Coming Back
1. Improve your Content
No matter what kind of products you are selling, remember to keep your website simple, clear, functional and informative.
Keep the design clean and your colour palettes balanced. Make sure your header is not too long and your users don’t have to scroll down every time to see your products. Add new pages to your menu and let people know about you and your products. Be open and honest about your products and answer all the questions someone could ask if it was in a physical store. No matter how good your products are in reality, your audience only sees the pictures. Use good quality large pictures of the product and always show more than one picture per product. Don’t let your potential customers be confused or doubtful, otherwise they won’t buy.
2. Put your URL Everywhere
This may sound obvious but it is very important and worth mentioning.
Make sure the website address of your store appears prominently on every piece of paper your business generates including adverts, letterheads, envelopes, flyers, shipping cartons and labels, invoices, compliment slips, brochures, literature, publications, products, etc. Also, put your website address in your outgoing email signature, your social media websites profile and in any media you are mentioned such as blogs and magazines. Finally, tell all your friends and customers about your website – word of mouth is very powerful.
3. Use Social Media
Social media sites are great!
They have made it possible for smaller business to reach an infinitely expanding audience. Use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to expand your audience, increase fans and keep them informed about your brand, new products, promotions, events and activities. Be open, create a dialogue with your audience and engage them with your brand.
We have now added ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons on your Yokaboo product pages and we are currently working on developing the social media part further to help your stores grow and sell more.
4. Submit your Site
All Yokaboo stores have a great ranking in search engines. However, there is still a little bit of PR work for you to do. Look for specialised link directories, niche sites and blogs to submit and talk about your website. Inbound links from other sites will always be better than anything you can do to your site markup. The more inbound links the better. Finally, remember linking from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites.
5. Send a Newsletter
Newsletter and email marketing is key to keeping in touch and building a relationship with your audience.
Send a regular newsletter to the people on your mailing list. This newsletter does not need to be particularly sales orientated, although it should give good value to the reader in terms of the information passed on. A good newsletter should contain any recent company news, highlights from the company blog, top level information about any new products and details of any special offers currently in effect. Finally, remember never to resort to spamming potential customers. There is no surer way of ruining the prospects for your online store.
6. Create a Blog
A blog allows you to add rich content and provide information about your products to your customers.
A good blog can pull in exceptional amounts of organic traffic as the major search engines have entire systems in place to index and aggregate blogs. Traditionally a blog post is fairly short, being around 350 words long. This means it is quite easy to spend 10 minutes putting together a short blog post which can be done regularly. Consistency and having something to say is key. Try to keep your blog interesting and informative, update it regularly and find good reasons to link to your online store.
7. Write a Press Release
Although it is becoming more difficult to get journalists interested in new websites or products, a well-crafted press release should still generate good results, especially if your site has something new to offer. Write a press release and email it to as many related online and offline media as possible. This could be one of the fastest ways to spread the word about your store.
8. Set Up Discount Codes
Don’t be afraid of offering discounts. People just love to think they are getting something for nothing, so why not give it to them by setting up discount codes? Try and highlight products that have had many people view them, yet few have actually purchased. This situation is a certain indication that the product is desirable but the price is too high. Offering a discount on these types of products often results in an overwhelming response.
Discount codes are available to all paid (Steady and Go!) Yokaboo stores, and they’re a great way to promote your products, attract new customers and reward loyal ones. (To access, login and go to Settings > Marketing > Discount Codes)
9. Sign up for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great analytics tool that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It gathers all kinds of useful statistics about your website visitors’ activities so you can use it to improve your sales. You can find out more about Google Analytics here.
Yokaboo has Google Analytics built in for all its paid (Steady and Go!) stores. To add Google Analytics to your Yokaboo store, you will need to sign up for a free Google account (if you don’t have one already). Then Google will generate a code and you will need to add the UA part of that code in your Yokaboo store. To do this go to Settings > Marketing > Google Analytics.
10. Use Pay Per Click Ads
Well, Pay Per Click advertising is not free, but it can be very inexpensive and very effective. Signing up with Google Adwords is free. When people search for the products you sell, your PPC business ad will appear on the search engine report. With PPC, you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad and comes to your website. Each customer who comes to your website costs you only a few pennies. You can set your advertising budget as low as £1 per day, and turn your ad campaign off and on whenever you wish. Your Google Analytics will help you track easily your Pay Per Click customers to see if your investment brings you more sales. More info about Google AdWords can be found here.
Conclusion
Building traffic and marketing your store is not easy and it takes time and effort.
Make a decision to work on the above between 5 and 8 hours a week. Three months should be enough for these strategies to start showing results.
Good Luck from all at Yokaboo!
