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How can I Get More Customers?

No matter what you're selling or how much time or money you spent designing your store, you won't sell anything until you get the word out that you're there. There are many different strategies for drawing customers to your store, and ShopSite includes tools to help you. Some of the best business you get will be repeat customers, and ShopSite includes some tools to help you bring customers back again and again.

Getting New Customers

Drawing new customers to your store starts with basic advertising — letting people know you exist. If you have a brick and mortar store, you probably already do some advertising and you can add your domain name or a short mention of your online store in the next ad. Traditional advertising on TV, printed media, and billboards, is definitely one way to advertise your store, but it can be expensive.

One of the best ways to get customers to a Web store is by getting your name out on the Web. There are several ways to do this, and ShopSite includes the following tools to help you:

• Search Engine Listings - Most online shoppers start with a search engine, and the higher you rank, the more people will see and visit your online store. ShopSite gives you the ability to easily update the information used by the major search engines when you edit Store Pages and products. In addition, ShopSite can automatically generate a Google XML Sitemap, which you can submit to Google and some other search engines to tell them what pages you think matter most on your site. Although you don't have ultimate control over the search engines, an XML Sitemap and good keyword usage can have a dramatic effect on your search engine ranking.
• Online Advertising - Web based advertising can be very effective because the ads can be targeted at very specific audiences. It's also usually relatively inexpensive to buy Web based advertising. The nature of online advertising doesn't lend to a direct integration with ShopSite, but ShopSite is integrated with Google Analytics and Google Checkout, which you can use in conjunction with Google's AdWords online advertising service. You can also use Google Analytics or ShopSite's built-in Associates feature to track click-throughs and order revenue from advertising campaigns.
• Aggregate Listing Services - One very popular way to draw customers to your site is to include your products in a shopping-specific listing service. These can be grouped into two different types: aggregate sales sites, such as eBay, and aggregate listing sites, such as Google Product Search (formerly called Froogle). Aggregate listing sites allow you to list your products alongside other merchants, but the customer is ultimately directed to your site when they decide to purchase from you. Aggregate sales sites handle the entire purchase process for the listed items, but many customers who buy on these sites often want to know what else you have for sale, and often will purchase items directly from your store in the future. In either case, you're using the aggregate site to make your customers aware of your store and your products. ShopSite has integrated support for listing your products on Google Product Search.
• E-mail Advertising - This can be a very touchy subject, and you're probably quite familiar with the unwanted e-mail advertising or spam that floods your inbox. The reason you get so much spam, though, is that e-mail advertising is very inexpensive, so even a handful of orders can quickly pay off. Sending unsolicited e-mail advertising can be extremely bad for your reputation, but there are several opt-in e-mail advertising services that only send messages to people who've asked to get advertising e-mails. ShopSite has a built in feature that lets you ask your customers if they want to get e-mail messages from your store, and there are several add-on tools and services that work with ShopSite to help you manage opt-in e-mail advertising campaigns.

As part of your advertising campaign, it never hurts to offer coupons, special offers, and other discounts to help motivate customers to buy from you. ShopSite has a variety of tools to help you provide this motivation. From your ShopSite back office, go to the Merchandising section to view and configure coupons, customer rewards, and discounts, as well as other advertising tools available to you.

Return Customers

One of the very best ways to get customers is through customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer is likely to return to you the next time they need something, and they're also likely to refer others to your site. Customer satisfaction starts with service. By making it easy for potential customers to find and learn about your products, and by creating an environment of trust, you're more likely to get people to buy from you once. After the sale, be sure to provide prompt, accurate, and courteous service in your correspondence and order fulfillment. A customer who feels like you value their opinions, feedback, and patronage is much more likely to come back.

ShopSite will automatically send an order confirmation e-mail to your customers. You should also let your customers know when an order ships, and it never hurts to follow up after the expected delivery date to make sure the customer received their order and is satisfied.

In addition to basic customer satisfaction, ShopSite's customer registration feature makes it easy to create loyalty programs to keep your customers coming back. Customer registration also provides other convenient tools for frequent customers, such as editing payment information or ship to addresses, and viewing previous orders. You can manage customer registration by going to the Commerce Setup section of your back office and clicking on Customer Registration. From there, you can create customer groups and associate specific coupons to that group, or you can even create reward programs that are tracked over multiple orders for registered customers.

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