When it comes to e-commerce, a robust lead generation strategy is crucial. In a crowded marketplace, new sales don’t come easily—and when you do manage to convert a consumer into a customer, it’s important to ensure they remain loyal over time. Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 7 times more than retaining an existing one, and loyal customers spend nearly 70% more on products than people who are new to your brand.
All of this means that to stay competitive and continue to grow your e-commerce business, your leads must be consistent and qualified.
The solution? Move beyond conventional methods of lead generation and adapt to new opportunities. This tried-and-true approach will allow you to stand out among your competitors.
In this guide, we’ll help you reimagine lead generation for better, more sustainable results. From harnessing SEO, pay-per-click, and personalization to mobile e-commerce and conversion rate optimization, we’ll show you how to revamp your e-commerce lead generation strategy, better navigate the digital landscape, and capitalize on e-commerce trends.
Rethinking E-commerce Lead Generation
Let’s kick things off with the basics: what is an e-commerce lead, anyway? A lead is just a person who’s interested in your brand, products, or services and takes an action to demonstrate that interest. That action might be:
- Clicking on your ad campaign
- Signing up for your email list
- Following your brand on social media
- Downloading a piece of content
- Signing up for a free trial
Think of each lead as a potential customer, and every action as an opportunity to gather valuable data on that customer’s interests and needs. It’s this data that can help you secure a sale. Your next question is probably: How do I increase lead generation on my website? If so, we have your answer: to ensure optimal e-commerce outcomes, you simply need to set the stage for enhanced lead generation by leveraging the tools available to brands like yours. Here’s how.
Defining Lead Generation in E-commerce: Unveiling the Essence
At its core, lead generation is the process of using digital marketing strategies and tactics to identify and attract the people potentially interested in your products or services. The essence of effective e-commerce lead generation is visibility, relevance, credibility, and trust. Your brand needs to convey all of these things to potential customers in order to secure those coveted sales.
Precision Targeting
The first step toward reaching that goal is understanding your ideal leads, and knowing where to find them. You may have a general idea about your target customers’ characteristics, behaviors, motivations, and pain points. Along with customer interviews, that information can be used to develop buyer personas. Instead of making assumptions about your target customers, you’ll have quantitative research at your fingertips.
With all of that data in hand, you can focus on precision targeting. That means targeting ads to different segments of consumers based on demographic and geographic information, along with their interests. You might even discover opportunities to upsell your customers, or introduce them to other inventory that might meet their needs. If you sell each customer three items instead of one, you’re well on your way to skyrocketing profits.
Next step: Unleash the power of marketing with these e-commerce strategies with these and promotion ideas.
Strategic E-commerce Lead Generation
Creating a bullet-proof lead generation machine that fuels business growth by attracting high-value leads all comes down to building a strong e-commerce promotion strategy. A well-executed strategy will help you attract leads and drive qualified traffic to your site.
Harnessing SEO for Prime Visibility
When your goal is to increase visibility and generate more site traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is a great place to begin.
SEO can have a huge impact on lead generation. That’s largely because e-commerce companies have many digital assets—think websites, online magazines, and blogs—all of which provide an opportunity for you to associate your brand with keywords and phrases related to your business.
Powerful SEO impact encompasses all of that content. This three-step approach will get you started.
- Conduct keyword research. Google processes about 5.6 billion searches per day and around 63,000 searches per second, so ensuring that your brand comes up when users search for terms related to your products is a must. Google has a range of online tools to help you pick the right search terms.
- Incorporate your top keywords and phrases into your digital content. From articles to product descriptions, mentioning the keywords you’ve identified as important to your brand (and popular among search engine users) in your content is vital. Make sure to incorporate them in a way that sounds natural to readers.
- Work your keywords into your metadata. Your metadata (author names on articles, dates those articles were posted, descriptions of the images you use on your site, file names, and so on) presents another opportunity to mention your top keywords and optimize search results. Together, all of these strategies can dramatically increase your chances of landing on page one when a user visits a search engine to look up those relevant search terms.
In other words, when you optimize product descriptions, blog content, and metadata, you turn your e-commerce content into a lead magnet.
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Next steps: Check out this handy guide to optimizing your site for search.
Mastering Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns
Paid advertising empowers you to use the behaviors and characteristics you identified in your customer personas to target relevant users across platforms. Compared to PPC display ads (more on display advertising below), Taboola reports that native ads deliver better results for brands, including a CTR 8.8 times higher, a 9% increase in brand affinity, and an 18% lift for purchase intent.
Before you invest in PPC, make sure you understand the difference between native and display ads, and the unique value native advertising can deliver for your brand.
Display advertising
Display advertising, or banner advertising, is the original digital advertising format. While display ads can vary in shape and size, it’s clear that they’re promoting something. They tend to stand out on the site page and incorporate logos and taglines, putting brands front and center.
But in today’s digital ecosystem, site pages are often too cluttered with ads, which can reduce banner effectiveness. Ad blockers are increasingly common, getting in the way of campaigns, and consumer tolerance for display ads is low. Because of all that, banners can’t always deliver the results brands are looking for.
Native advertising
By contrast, native ads are ads created to mirror the page content and site design of the platform on which they appear. They’re so consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ad belongs there. Rather than disrupting the ad experience, they blend seamlessly with the site environment to support performance marketing and generate real results.
Native ads and native video ads can run across search, social, or the open web. Best of all, they offer unparalleled engagement and can be purchased on a pay-per-click (PPC) model for cost-effective campaigns.
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Next steps: Learn more about native advertising and why it works.
Social Media: Your Lead Generation Goldmine
Another way to generate leads online is through social media. With 4.8 billion social media users worldwide who average 151 minutes per day on social sites, this channel is a goldmine for e-commerce lead generation, and a surefire way to reach your buyers where they spend most of their time.
As a brand, you can use your social media feeds to showcase your products, brand values, content, and promotions, and collect user-generated content (UGC). Most platforms know e-commerce companies rely on them, so leverage social media’s vast potential and capitalize on integrated shopping features, like shoppable posts on Instagram and shoppable pins on Pinterest.
With posts like those, you can boost your chances of making a sale by encouraging clicks to the shoppable posts and showing users additional products they may be interested in buying—all without requiring them to leave the social site.
Ready to learn more about social media marketing in e-commerce? Watch this video:
Email Marketing: The ROI-Driven Lead Magnet
According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing is a relatively inexpensive e-commerce lead-generation technique that can deliver an ROI (return on investment) of up to 4400%, or $44 for every $1 spent on a campaign. Since it’s so affordable, the power of email marketing can be leveraged by just about everyone.
At the same time, consumers have become more protective of their email addresses over the past few years, which means they may need some encouragement in order to hand them over. Entice them by crafting irresistible offers and discounts sent straight to their inboxes. You’ll see leads convert to customers and sales roll in.
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Next steps: Calculate your ROI to ensure you’re maximizing your budget. Just like SEO, email can be a lead magnet if you measure and optimize your results.
Personalization: Tailoring Journeys for Impact
We all know that personalization has become a big part of the digital world. Today’s consumers expect online content to be tailored to their interests and needs, and doing so can have a big impact on your e-commerce revenue. By customizing your content in this way, you can attract users who are already on the path to purchase, and turn those leads into loyal customers.
An eMarketer survey revealed that 50% of people prefer personalization in the form of products related to their interests, so make sure your site triggers that functionality. After a purchase, follow up with an email highlighting additional related products or a discount on items in the same category. Post-purchase follow-ups like these can turn upselling opportunities into additional sales.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Sealing the Deal
Despite your best efforts to make your e-commerce site engaging, there will always be customers who initiate a purchase and don’t follow through. Such drop-offs are missed opportunities to convert those site visits into sales.
Conversion rate optimization starts with analyzing customer drop-offs and determining what could be getting in the way of a transaction. Do your site pages load quickly? Are your images high-quality? Are your buttons visible and easy to click? Ask yourself these questions, and implement iterative CRO techniques like giving product reviews, pride of place and inviting consumers to “keep shopping” after they’ve added an item to their cart. These kinds of strategies can help you seal the deal.
Next steps: Take a look at our CRO guide for additional tips.
Retargeting with Cookies: Nurturing Second Chances
As we move toward a cookieless world, where third-party cookies (those created by domains other than the one you’re visiting) are blocked for good, retargeting is more important than ever.
Cookies collect and store information from a visitor’s session, including the items they clicked on or added to their cart, even if they didn’t check out. That means brands can use cookie data to retarget past visitors, and show them personalized ads featuring the products they viewed to create more effective campaigns.
The remarkable retargeting impact that comes from this approach can generate ultra-qualified leads, because the users you’re targeting have already made a purchase or taken steps toward buying. You can launch remarketing campaigns on social media channels or other sites using Google AdWords.
Next steps: Read more about third-party and first-party cookies, and how to navigate a cookieless world.
Discounts and Deals: The Conversion Catalysts
One of the fastest ways to convert leads into paying customers is by tempting consumers with a discount or deal. The incentive to buy doesn’t need to be enormous; it can be as simple as 15% off or free shipping on their first purchase.
That said, you can really capture a consumer’s attention by crafting a unique discount based on your products and pricing and your specific goals. For example, you can drive up average order value (AOV) with an offer like “Get $15 off a purchase of $75 or more,” or create a “spin the wheel for discounts” feature that makes saving even more fun.
These strategies keep shoppers coming back to get even more savings, becoming an effective catalyst for conversion.
Mobile Optimization: Catering to the Mobile-First Audience
Statista projects that by 2025, more than 10% of all US retail sales will be generated via mobile commerce. Optimizing your site for mobile users, who average 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone each day, not only generates more leads but can improve the overall e-commerce and brand experience by providing customers with more channels through which to make their purchase.
To seize the mobile e-commerce revolution, test your site on devices of all sizes to ensure it’s both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Check that your buttons, menus, search bars, and forms are easy to use, that your content is right-sized, and that scrolling is a cinch.
Next steps: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to see how your website performs on mobile devices, which areas need improvement, and which pages don’t load properly. Then make the necessary adjustments to create seamless user experiences on mobile.
Elevating Your E-commerce Lead Generation Efforts
Why is it so important to refine your e-commerce lead generation strategy? It’s all about unlocking your brand’s potential online. By coupling a deep understanding of your target audience with cutting-edge techniques like shoppable social media posts, retargeting, and personalized content, you can transform your approach to lead generation and future-proof your business, charting a path to ongoing success.
In-Depth Insights for Lead Generation Experts
Whether you’re new to e-commerce optimization or this is all old hat, look for ways to optimize your approach and make the most of the tools and technology available to you.
With the help of the e-commerce sales strategies in this guide you can position yourself for success in the bustling and evolving digital landscape, and maximize revenue for years to come.