Lead generation for e-commerce comes from the same species as lead gen for automotive, finance, and …
But e-commerce evolves faster, and it is more agile than any other industry.
When we imagine a traditional sales funnel, we come across a salesperson emailing, making phone calls, and setting up meetings with each lead they get. For the e-commerce lead generation, in general, the process is less labor-intensive than you may imagine.
Furthermore, e-commerce stores will often bend over backward to avoid getting prospects on a long sales funnel. The truth is that your products, prices, the entire store, and even mindset is designed to get you sales right now.
This article will help you have a better understanding of the reason why lead generation for e-commerce is unique, and you will get ten tips to help you generate leads and end in sales numbers, for your online dropshipping store.
What is Ecommerce Lead Generation?
In e-commerce, which is not traditional selling, lead generation is not conventional either. For beginners, the „e” in the e-commerce domain means you got in the electronic, virtual environment, and there’s no physical store to enter to buy things. You search online, but products in your basket, and place your order. More important, buying online makes the decision process way less complicated and quicker than if you go into a physical store.
Some customers prefer buying essential things like a car by going there and test-driving it, but smaller, less expensive, or important things can easily be ordered online. You buy clothes, makeup, books, or electronic devices online too. It’s easy and fast. The shipping cost is low, and returning or exchanging the items has become easier than ever.
Often, you enter a sales funnel by clicking a Facebook ad, and 90 seconds later, you are at the checkout page.
What is a Lead?
Before we talk about lead tips, we must first know what the word lead is all about.
No matter the industry, a lead is one person that has an interest in the specified brand, product, or service. Many actions transform one person into a lead depending on the domain:
- In the automotive industry, a lead may be a person that has played around in a virtual showroom while designing their dream vehicle.
- In the financial sector, a lead may be a person that has interacted with an online loan calculator.
- More traditionally, a lead is someone who visited a car dealership or a bank branch.
Traditional business and e-commerce have something in common when it comes to lead generation. Here’s what it is:
- Awareness is the first step: it doesn’t matter the industry you are in, a lead must know who you are before he can be a lead. Brand awareness it’s all that matters. This process means search engines, advertisements, and last, word of mouth.
- Secondly, a lead must be convinced: from a customer and a lead; there’s a thin line that you must cross before actually selling something. This transition sometimes happens in seconds because the customer saw a discount code, but other times it can take weeks of negotiation and offer. A mathematical scheme is this one: lead+ eureka moment=customer.
- Thirdly, content is what can catalyze the process: lead love content because it’s informative, funny, and useful. When you want to generate more traffic to your store or website, all you have to do is to offer high-quality content everywhere: blog posts, social media, Youtube videoes, anything else that crosses your mind. Content will help unaware people get aware of your business. What better way to convince leads to become customers than translating your knowledge into an easily readable consumable format?
In conclusion, there are a couple of similarities between the two separate industries, but it all ends here.
What it works fine in digital marketing, it will not work on traditional marketing. A discount code got in the newsletter will not help close a deal in a car dealership, but in the online world, it is highly possible. eCommerce is all about digital speed and the best offers.
Who is Your Lead?
Leads are different as individuals, but in general, they are interested in the same things: they want to buy something in the industry you activate. For example, if 10 ten get the same newsletter in the same day and eight of them are people between 30-40 years of age who want to do home renovations, one is a student researching for a school project, and one is merely inspiring for the house of his dreams, then you got yourself eight leads.
These eight people may purchase on a short term from your company because they need what you are offering. The student has zero interest in buying something, and the dreamy person might never end up with the house of his dreams, so he is out of the equation.
So who is your lead? Your lead is someone highly likely to buy from you at that moment because he has an urgent need. You can quickly identify your leads if you can create a user persona that will include all the customers’ common traits such as average age, reasons to buy the product from you, their general demographics.
Let’s talk about the ten tips for e-commerce lead generation and find out how you can turn your leads into customers.
7 Lead Generation Tips for Ecommerce
Write Valuable Content
One of the biggest reasons people surf the internet is they seek information to read easily and then use. You can use this information in your benefit by offering people what they find and also making them aware of your brand or company. Simply creating content can help you do it.
How can you find out what customers seek and need? You can look at forums, competitor websites, or use tools like Answer the Public. Once you know their questions, you can simply create a FAQ page and answer them. Also, you can start a blog and create articles that will provide them with the info they need. Answer The Public is a free SEO tool.
You may ask yourself, what is the absolute value in creating content? Creating high-quality content that your potential customers want to access and read makes people more likely to get on your website and finally buy from you. Offering trustable information, using trustable sources, will make customers trust you, and that’s an essential thing in any industry.
Content is more than articles. Content includes a various number of formats like ebooks, infographics, videos, or podcasts. Here the opportunities are endless, and when the people search for that info, you can share your piece of content on various platforms to get to as many people as possible.
Further, you could create a compelling new study using your findings, but hide the actual piece behind a paywall or simply summarize a podcast in a short video that will require the lead’s email address to send them the link. All these ideas are great if you want to create lead generation and also retention.
1. Write content
The Internet is the place where people look for information and find it quickly and for free. You can use to your advantage what people are searching online and create content to fit their needs. How can you see what customers look for?
Can look on forums, competitor websites, and use tools like Answer the Public. Once you know what the public wants, you go and offer them the content they need in the form of the FAQ page. You can even start a blog and create an article to answer all their questions.
Brings value in creating content, may you ask? When your content makes readers happy that they found you, you build trust, and they will be more eager to buy from you. Being the best in your niche will influence your content and readers will notice it.
is more than articles, and it includes videos, podcasts, infographics, ebooks. If your content is successful, you can share it across all social media platforms and spread the news. Readers will follow.
Than that, you can put your information in an article, but hide it behind a paywall or create a short video that’s useful to get new email addresses in your subscribers’ list. These two are good ways to create lead generation and retention.
2. Use cookies
This tip may be the essential thing in the e-commerce industry because you need to know all about your visitors’ wishes and needs.
It would help if you thought of your visitors as a potential lead. Therefore, you can retarget visitors on AdWords, Facebook, Instagram using nothing but the cookies they receive when visitors land on your website. If you want to use cookies, you must own a privacy or cookie policy according to worldwide regulations.
Using cookies will bring you information on the people who visited your website and who are interested in your products or services. Once you retarget them on Facebook, you may be a few clicks away from a sale.
It would help if you considered than cookies aren’t always perfect because many people will dislike them and block them. Also, they eventually expire. Lastly, they are something useful that you can use in any e-commerce business you may have.
3. Build your social media empire
When people are interested in what you have to sell, then your social media followers’ number will increase. In this situation, the distance between a lead and a sale is almost insignificant, and social media is the tool you can use in your e-commerce business, but not in the traditional industries.
People who follow you on social media are a few clicks away from a purchase. When it comes to traditional lead generation, visitors will have to fill out a form, download content, and so on. The current lead generation means less more trouble for the visitor. All they have to do is to click the button “Follow,” and the process has already started. This is how businesses get more followers. Also, it would help if you kept in mind that there are a lot of Shopify plugins to help you increase social media visibility.
You may find out that your business is not on social media platforms, and you are not the only one. Large companies don’t own many social media accounts. This is the best moment to play it smart and only get on those social media platforms that your audience uses daily.
Also, in your newsletter, you should add your social media buttons for readers to easily access them. You can gain more followers this way, and it will help you grow your online popularity.
While we are still talking about social media, people need to return to your online store to buy something quickly. It’s platforms like Facebook and Twitter who help you do that.
Keep in mind that all the followers you got are one step away from a conversion. Social media makes it easier to engage and create a connexion with them, so use it wisely! It’s your direct line of communication with them.
4. Use discounts and deals
Each lead is essential for your business because it indirectly invests in your industry. From this point of view, you need to give them something back. It would help if you offered them value, and they will appreciate that. The best way to do it is to provide them with discounts if they are willing to provide you with their email address. Their email address is something you exchange for a percentage discount, free shipping, or even a free addon on their future purchase.
People don’t like pop-ups, but free stuff truly is. Offering your visitors a freebie is a great way to create leads. Many Shopify apps will help you trigger those sorts of email-for-discount lead generation activities, which include Product Upsell, Pop-Up Window, and Justuno Conversion Suite.
5. Get the email
In the previous example, the main goal was getting the email address. This is another difference between the traditional lead generation and e-commerce lead generation.
Unlike other industries, when it comes to e-commerce lead generation, you don’t have to require a life essay from your visitors; the email address is enough. This way, you can send them your best deals, products, or content straight in their inbox.
When a visitor abandons his basket, the best idea is to shoot him an email asking what’s wrong. You can consider as lead, all your basket abandoners because they already liked your product. If you have the email address, you can convince them to get back online and finish the purchase. One thing you need to do is to make sure your email campaigns comply with the guidelines of GDPR.
Email marketing has become something cheap, and sometimes free due to various premium email marketing software. People who receive your email must engage with your brand, at least with a click, then you and your suppliers will make things happen.
Some email marketers will fear that the email will end up in the Gmail “Promotions” folder. Don’t worry about that. The email that ends up there will not annoy the leads.
6. Use the SEO force
During the e-commerce lead generation process, you don’t have to worry about the point, but you need to make them come into your store. You will have to use all your lead generation tactics to bring some visitors over. What can you do for that? SEO is the main answer. This is the magic word that will generate traffic that will turn into leads, and finally, drop ship and sales.
Other industries may require complicated things like writing white papers or holding webinars, but in e-commerce, things are more comfortable. All you have to do is to take care of SEO for your website, which means product descriptions, metadata, blog posts should be treated like lead generation magnets. You will find a lot of info online for optimizing your store for SEO.
7. Optimize for Mobile
We use our mobiles every day, and you should be aware that the best way to attract visitors is to show up on their mobile pages. Everywhere they go, you should go and try meeting them. If you want to have a more significant impact on your visitors’ online life, you should optimize your website for mobile, both Android and iOS.
This will mean that all your buttons will be clickable on various screen sizes, content is easily readable, scrolling is quick and accurate. If you want to optimize it correctly, you should first take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and then grant real visitors access to your user test. You can invite five-ten people from the office to check the website on their phones, and see if there are any bugs or malfunctions. Also, it would be best if you made sure that the purchasing process is smoothly working on both mobile and desktop.
There are some steps to take for every online business, and every entrepreneur should be aware that when it comes to starting to sell online, there are things to learn every day. The world is changing, and so are us. Dropshipping has become more popular than ever, and people are making a living out of it.
