The Ultimate Ecommerce Guide To Acquiring New Customers
Acquiring new customer for your business continues to become more expensive. As a result, us as business owners need to become smarter about our marketing strategies. Today, you’ll learn the basics of customer acquisition strategies for e-commerce and subscription box businesses and how to leverage your loyal ones with customer retention strategies.
Acquiring new customers is something that all businesses need and should be trying to do. Whether you're a service business, or a product business, you need to think about implementing multiple channels of customer acquisition.
Customer Acquisition Strategies
Customer acquisition methods can be broken up into a variety of different types: paid and free, inbound and outbound, etc. The best options for your business, depend on your audience, resources, and overall strategy
No matter what you do, always BE OBSESSED with your customers and making them happy and making them feel appreciated and "part of the fam." This strategy (Hello Amazon) works like a charm, and I attribute this to be one of the aids in growing my multi 6 figure business, The Dapper Dog Box. I'll talk more about this in the customer retention section below.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is something all businesses need. To continue to stay connected and engaged with your customers and followers, you need to be giving them content. The content should continue to be relevant to your customer, what they like, what they care about.
There are a lot of options for content, and we are focusing more on product based businesses in this post. Here are a few of the most popular options of content to create on going for your e-commerce and subscription box business.
Blogging
Blogging is a highly recommended acquisition method for businesses of all sizes, industries, and audience types. Running a blog allows you to explore different topics, flex your knowledge in your industry, and build authority among your readers. Blogging also continually gives you new opportunities to engage with your audience, whether through a graphic they can bookmark for later, a question they can answer in the comments, or an enticing call-to-action they can click.
Let's look at an ecommerce company that has great blog content using a variety of topics.
Patchwork Pet is a dog toy company that sells plush dog toys to consumers. They have a blog for the "dog obsessed people." They have a variety of categories from Gift-guides for dog parents, travel guides for dogs, tips and tricks within the pet space, how to grow your dogs instagram account, planning for pet birthday parties. They blog about a variety of content that their ideal customer CARES ABOUT!
If you aren't sure what to write about, just think of a few categories that your ideal customer cares about, and boom- you have topics to write about.
Blogging is not only incredible for pushing out content but its a gem for building organic traffic to your website + it helps your SEO. See how I got #1 rankings on google from blogging + SEO initiatives for The Dapper Dog Box, the subscription box and e-commerce business I founded.
Video
Content marketing is all about connecting with your followers + customers. Video is the most effective way to do this. Wether you use Shopify, Cratejoy or other web platforms, adding videos to your website, product pages will be the most effective way to connect and showcase your products. This link offers free video editing software for businesses. You also use websites like upwork to find someone who can make video clips for you at any price point.
Podcast
Podcasts are on the absolute rise for all and any business. While they work really well for service based businesses, I believe that product based businesses can use podcasting to reach customers the same way blogging can. Consumers are getting less interested in reading content and more interested in watching and listening to it, so you gotta stay on the trends and pivot your strategy to align with what consumers are doing.
2.Social Media
Social media marketing is comprised of two methods: organic and paid. Organic social media is most useful for boosting brand awareness, connecting with followers and customers, and sharing content you’ve published elsewhere (like from your blog or videos).
Think about who your customer is and which platforms is most effective. Fo example if your targeting primarily women, then Pinterest is a great platform as it has almost an exclusive women demographic. Instagram should also always be part of your marketing strategy for all ecommerce businesses. Rule of thumb - go where your customers go.
Paid is something you can implement into your social strategy. Building an organic social following absolutely takes time, so incorporating ads to get followers + sales is always a good idea if/where your budget allows.
3.SEO
Search engine optimization is a complex topic. I could write 40 pages on it, so for this post we will keep it concise. SEO- you can think of it as 1. Efforts to show up on google for specific keywords and search terms and 2. Optimizing your content so it’s more easily found by your target audience online. When you hop onto google to search for something, you might look page 1, maybe page 2 and 3, but you likely dont scroll past page 3. SEO efforts and strategy help you to get ranked on page 1.
Here are the SEO strategies I used to rank #1 on google and implement in all my client work.
- Website: Make sure your website is filled with keywords you want to rank for/what keywords your customers use to find you on google.
- Page titles and met descriptions
- Images: TITLE THEM with descriptive words that describe the image/your business
- Images: ALT TEXT.descriptive words that describe the image/your business. Use keywords you want to rank for here. Most platforms you can add the Alt Text in the " edit photo" section.
- Blog: Blogging is gold for SEO. Like we discussed easier, blog about different categories of content and use keywords in titles and topics.
- Use the same strategy with saving images and alt text here.
SEO is pretty complex, but those are a few ways to get you started. People often don't realize the importance of titling images and adding alt text and those two easy fixes make a huge difference in your SEO.
4.Customer Retention
This is literally the new form of customer acquisition. Retaining your existing customers has one of the highest ROI's of any strategy you implement. You already got them, now make them happy and keep them happy. How you can keep your existing customers happy:
Stay Connected + Encourage User Generated Content: Encourage them to post photos of your product on social media. Use a branded hashtag and promote it and keep promoting it. When your customers post photos of your product, COMMENT, SHARE, REPOST. Make a point to connect with them, say thank you, make them feel special.
Welcome Emails: If you aren't using an automated welcome email that gets pushed out when a customer orders from you, please be sure to incorporate this. On Shopify and Cratejoy, you can use the notifications to do this.
In your welcome email include: Your social channels and tell the to post a photo of their new product on Insagram/Facebook/Snapchat, whatever it is and to tag the business with the #brandedhashtag.
Customer Service: DO what Amazon does, be obsessed with your customers, aka treat your customers like queens and kings. One of Amazons leadership principles is Customer Obsession. They have a series of leadership principles that they live and breathe by and this is a big one.
When your customers are happy, they not only keep buying from you but they will shout your business from the rooftops and tell everyone they know how amazing your business is. Here are a few things you can do to be obsessed with your customers.
Make it easy for them to get in touch if they have a problem. Make it crystal clear to get in touch with you. Put your email or phone number plastered in all eails, your website, etc. Dont hide it. Nothing pisses off a customer more than when they have an issue and can't figure out how to get in touch.
Have a fantastic refund and return policy: If your customer has an issue, fix it, solve it, make it go away and thank them over the moon for buying from you.
As a summary, customer acquisition strategies that will work best for you and your business, depend entirely on what your business is and who your customers are. Always get new customers but keep your existing customers happy and you have a winning customer acquisition strategy for your e-commerce and subscription box businesses.
