7 Inbound Lead Generation Tips For Your Online Store

eCommerce businesses across the World Wide Web are looking to unlock the enigma of the continually increasing ROI and conversions. However, there are no particular secrets behind this success but a wise inbound marketing strategy oriented at customer satisfaction.

In this article, we will share the classic tactics of such marketing that turn a web store into a revenue-generating machine.

Let's get started!

The role of inbound marketing for eCommerce

Let’s start with what inbound marketing really means.

It is a business approach that aims to attract new customers by creating valuable content and online experiences customized for them.

In the modern digital world, inbound marketing has paramount significance for eCommerce, since people aren’t interested in only shopping anymore.

Instead, they tend to turn to brands for exciting stories, memorable experiences, and a feeling of appreciation. A comprehensive inbound marketing strategy can helps to achieve it by building more “personal” connections with customers through relevant content and personalized online experiences.

So what are the steps to implementing this in practice?

1. Research online customer behavior

Before you start optimizing an eCommerce website, it is vital to research on-site customer behavior first. You can achieve that by using many of the available tools on the market, such as session replay software. Tools like this can record videos of website visitor sessions anonymously and create a heatmap of user interactions on a website as a result.

Such heatmaps can then allow you to explore how users behave on your eCommerce store: where they click, how they scroll the content, what attracts their attention, and how they navigate web pages. In other words, you can watch an entire online customer journey — from the moment the customer lands on a website, and until he or she completes a purchase or abandons a web page. 

Once you have that information, you can use it to optimize your online store catalog and navigation, find out what discourages users from buying from you or detect bugs that go unnoticed by traditional analytics tools.

2. Use a proactive live chat 

Another helpful practice to increase eCommerce conversions is using a proactive live chat. It appears as a popup which offers the visitors help and assistance throughout their session.

A live chat like this can offer many opportunities: it improves customer service through timely assistance and provides a round-the-clock availability.

It also allows to re-engage returning users, offer them helpful content, update them about discounts, and navigate them in their checkout process.

3. Create a quality blog

Blogging has become a cornerstone for both B2B and B2C eCommerce content marketing strategies. You can establish your brand as a thought leader by engaging customers through high-quality content on the company’s blog. 

You can also use it to build your brand's uniqueness by finding a market niche that you can fill and establish yourself as an authority in that field.

To get started, consider doing research about your topic niche as well as your potential readers and their tastes. Once you know what they like to read and the content types matching their needs, you can start off writing relevant content for them and building your brand.

4. Leverage user-generated content

User-generated content refers to photos, videos, and reviews about the brand which are made by the customers. It works as a form social proof, since by sharing,  their experiences with the brand, the customers help to spread the word about it products on social media.

This is especially true considering that what other people say about a brand is often perceived as more credible than what a company says about itself. Therefore, including different types of user-generated content into your social media marketing strategy can help you build a stronger brand image and encourage other people to buy from it.

5. Upload video content on YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google? This makes the platform one of the biggest sources of marketing benefits, even for small business marketing. For example, you can use it to share videos of your brand story, manufacturing processes, interviews, how-tos, and plenty of other amazing video-forms. 

If you do decide to get started with the platform but don't know where to begin, the SEO expert behind Backlinko blog Brian Dean has shared several helpful tips on how to grow on this social platform.

First of all, he recommends using YouTube’s search suggest features, as it helps choose keywords that people are using to find similar content. Another great tip is to analyze popular video in your niche and optimize your content for the same keywords. The third practice is to select low-competition keywords, which you can check such as by entering a keyword in the search bar and checking the number of search results. 

6. Grow your email list

Many people may think that email marketing is an old-fashioned practice. Yet in practice, it’s still highly effective and relevant. You may as well have a great YouTube channel, amazing blog, engaging social media content, but your most important and cost-effective asset will still be your email list, here is how to find email addresses.

You can use email marketing to inform your customers about discounts and holidays, keep them engaged and encourage them to visit your store.

So, to make sure that you have your email marketing channel set, check out these best email testing practices and the list of common mistakes that will help you increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

7. Start a podcast

Podcasts have become an integral part of modern human life. We can listen to them when going to a job every day, when working out in a gym or doing any other work.

They are a great way to build a broad audience around your brand, and step by step, turn them into returning customers. They also allow you to introduce a brand and its offering unobtrusively, as you provide the listeners with interesting and engaging content first.

With a loyal following created via podcasts, you can further encourage people to sign-up for your newsletter, follow you on other social media, and visit your eCommerce website. Together, these steps will help you create a robust community of like-minded people around your company, lead generation strategies, and more sales for your business. 

Conclusion

In the current market conditions, inbound marketing has become the necessary strategy for eCommerce business success. It allows you to build more “personal” connections with customers, reveal your brand’s care about them, and grow their satisfaction.

This approach is oriented not only at selling products but also at earning customer loyalty and trust. Thus, inbound marketing will help you gather a community of loyal customers that will want to come back to your brand again and again. Hopefully, this list of tips will inspire you to rethink your customer experience from the inbound marketing perspective and help you skyrocket your sales.

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Author’s bio:

Lidia is an outreach specialist at HelpCrunch, an all-in-one customer communication platform. Her professional experience encompasses customer service improvement, social media marketing, and SEO. Her free time she spends searching for new marketing trends and tv shows, and practicing yoga. Follow her on Twitter @Liya_Bondarenko.