Getting your first customers

Finally your Online Store has been completed, uploaded and you are now sitting back waiting for your first online payments. One problem… you don’t appear to have any customers.

Getting customers to your site is arguably the most important factor in the success of your Online Store. After all, even the best store in the world won’t make any money if no-one visits it. So what can a fresh-faced new online merchant do to start getting the online sales rolling?

The basics of promoting your online shop are in fact quite simple. All that is required is some basic knowledge and a willingness to commit sufficient time to the job. The process can be slow and is more than a little tedious, but there are plenty of companies and individuals around who will take on the job if you haven’t blown your budget getting the site working.

With the virtual doors of your Online Store wide open and waiting for your first customers, you will probably want to start with an approach that brings results quickly such as Pay Per Click advertising.

Pay Per Click advertising

Whether you are familiar with the terms PPC or Pay Per Click, you will almost certainly have seen this type of advert at some time. The most common implementation is that you “bid” on search terms in order to have your advert appear when these terms are used on a search engine. Results from this type of advertising can be seen down the right hand side of Google.

PPC ads are a great choice for your post launch advertising, as they are very immediate and very controllable. In the case of Google Adwords you can usually set up a new account and start receiving traffic from it on the same day. You can also control exactly how much you are spending on a day to day basis, making it an ideal choice for the new store owner.

Shopping directories

Online shopping directories, such as shopsafe.co.uk will already have customers, so getting listed on these is another fast way to start bringing people into your store. There are literally hundreds of sites like this, many of which either charge a small fee to list your store or will include it for free if you provide a reciprocal link. This makes them a useful way to stretch your launch budget and get more customers through the door.

Submitting to directories also has the knock on effect of helping you in the longer term through search engine positioning as well, but more about that in a later article.

Submitting to a lot of directories can be very laborious if not planned properly. I would suggest using MerchantSites own free shop submission tool Submit Your Shop to speed up the process and manage it for you.

Getting listed in shopping directories is not immediate, as most manually check all listings, but some will list you within a few days of submission.

Sponsor a newsletter

Whilst you are looking at shopping directories, also keep an eye out for those that have their own newsletter. Busy sites often also have popular email newsletters and many shopping directory owners will be happy to give some space over to a new advertiser.

Newsletter sponsorship is usually relatively cheap, and can be very effective as it is such a targeted medium. Prices and results do though vary greatly so be prepared to contact a few sites and haggle on price.

Run a competition

There is something about the internet that makes everyone giddy at the thought of a freebie, so why not run a free draw?

For the price of a reasonable prize (which you probably have available in stock anyway), a free draw can bring people to your store and start you off with an email marketing list to contact next month. Just make sure that your entry form includes the option to receive news and offers by email so that you know who you can and cannot mail on an on going basis.

Also, why not include in the terms that all entrants will be informed by email of the winner after the closing date? This will give you one last shot at reaching those who opted out of your regular newsletter.

Be sure to promote your free draw as much as possible so that enough people enter to make it worth your while. There are plenty of websites, like Loquax that specialise in telling their users about competitions and freebies, so be sure to dig them out on Google and get in touch.

Also consider how your other marketing efforts could be boosted by combining them with the prize draw. Would it be worth promoting the draw via PPC? Could you mention it in a newsletter?

Reciprocal linking

Start working on reciprocal linking (AKA link exchanging) with related sites. This will again help longer term with search engine positioning, but may also bring visitors your way more directly.

Offline methods

You may now be an online trader, but don’t forget that your customers have offline lives too. Traditional advertising, press releases and shameless self promotion can aid an online shop just as much as an offline one.

Get in the habit of promoting your website address everywhere you can. At the very least make sure that it appears in your email signature and signature of any online forums that you use, as well as your physical stationary. Better still look at everything that you send out or that people regularly see and consider whether you can include the address on it. Vehicles, work clothing, building fronts and sales packaging can all be good adverts in their own right.

Also, never forget to include your website address in any other advertising that you are running. URLs are usually far more memorable than phone numbers.

To conclude

The above methods are just a start to promoting your new shop, but should be enough to break any initial drought in orders. So, all that remains to be said is “Good luck in your new venture”.

- 27th August 2004

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