By Rohit Prasanna
Lead generation for eCommerce, like any other domain, is crucial for growth. eCommerce businesses look for innovative lead generation ideas all the time due to the highly competitive nature of business.
As an eCommerce business owner, you may have often pondered on most effective lead generation strategies. The truth is that lead generation for the eCommerce domain is different from lead generation for other traditional businesses.
In the near future, the eCommerce sector is expected to generate more than $600 billion in revenue in the United States alone. To grab a piece of the pie, businesses are leveraging new strategies to generate more leads and maximize revenue.
In this post, let us understand seven excellent lead generation strategies for eCommerce business.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is known to be a highly effective lead generation strategy. Various social media platforms allow you to attract leads and redirect them to your landing pages when you share high-quality content. Sharing content with enticing offers encourages your audience to share your content in their network, which extends the reach of your brand.
Add social media icons to your emails and deploy purchase/abandonment popups in addition to consistently sharing your content to bring users to your social media space.
Most B2B businesses leverage LinkedIn, as it is the best social media platform to generate qualified leads. This is because most B2B companies prefer to look at LinkedIn over other channels for information before making a purchase.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an efficient way to generate better and more qualified leads for your eCommerce business. Personalized email marketing is considered as the most effective method of lead generation by 42% of businesses. Moreover, according to an eMarketer survey, 81% of consumers are more likely to purchase products presented to them through emails.
Personalized email marketing based on consumer’s purchase history or specific interests helps drive revenue growth. You can use state-of-the-art marketing automation tools to automate your email marketing.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation tools help automate time-consuming tasks and increase productivity. They help you send bulk emails and create landing pages and web forms to generate new leads.
In addition, marketing automation software can provide insights into the web activities of your leads. You can track activities like which emails they open, the web pages they visited, the content they viewed, their purchase history, etc. Marketing automation tools also provide key insight to drive enhanced personalized email marketing campaigns.
Using a CRM that integrates automation tools, customer service and sales enablement features will help streamline all business operations.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that helps your website appear higher in organic search results. Appearing in the first fold of results enhances your chances of generating more leads. That’s why SEO is one of the best ways to bring organic traffic to your website.
It is crucial to follow an appropriate SEO process such as using high-volume, long tail keywords in the meta-data and heading of the website, avoiding keyword stuffing, adding keywords in the content you are publishing on your website, etc. to strengthen the health of your website.
Web pop-ups
Web pop-ups, as the name suggests, are small pop-ups, which appear on your screen while browsing the web. They display personalized alerts for discounts, promotions and more. With exit intent pop-ups, you are able to persuade those about to leave your website to stick around and continue browsing/shopping.
Web pop-ups are a great tactic to build your email lists as you can ask for visitor’s email address in exchange for offering a discount. Web pop-ups present a new way of attracting and interacting with your visitors.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is the process of awarding a certain number of points to leads for completing actions such as visiting web-pages, clicking or opening your emails, etc. Once the lead crosses a pre-decided benchmark, the lead can be considered marketing qualified, (i.e., someone who is showing interest in your brand and is sales-ready).
However, you need a marketing automation software solution to score leads as it’s difficult to do it manually. It helps you to communicate better with your most qualified leads. Lead scoring is a great strategy for quality lead generation and conversion.
PPC advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising involves paying search engines to advertise your products and service on relevant pages of the web. Search engines such as Google only charge you when someone clicks on your ad. The more popular a keyword the more expensive bid it carries.
PPC enables you to bring more visitors to your landing pages through search engines by publishing your ad at the relevant websites. When people search for the keyword you have bid for, your ad will be displayed for the search query, which enhances the chances that someone will click your ad.
As an eCommerce business, you can display ads for your popular products and lure visitors to your website so they can browse and hopefully make a purchase.
Conclusion
Leads are essential for every eCommerce business and the strategies discussed above help you generate those leads. But, it’s important to note that these strategies take time to work effectively.
The key is to remain persistent and committed to your efforts to drive better results. With the help of relevant data and continuous improvement, effective lead generation can be achieved and maintained in a sustainable way.
Rohit Prasanna brings in about 14 years of digital marketing experience and has been an advisor to software start-ups in the mobile and SaaS areas. Before getting into startups, Rohit worked in various marketing, and product management roles at Unisys, Dell, and IBM. Specialties: Digital marketing, building and growing companies, marketing, business development, M&A.
Marketing stock photo by Profit_Image/Shutterstock
