Best Marketing Strategies for an Online Store

We have completed our online store and launched our site. Being a technical person I was able to get the store up and running with ease but advertising is not one of my strong points. I am now seeking help from the Salehoo community to assist us in getting traffic to our site.

I have checked out the Cheap and Free Effective Advertising thread.
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I would like to know the best strategies to get traffic to our store. Strategies that will not only bring in traffic but also return customers. Please take a look at our site. Feel free to be brutally honest, this will be the only way I will learn. Tell me what works or doesn't on our site.

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Thanks
Copperfrog

Hi Copperfrog, congrats on getting the site live. Feel free to post a link, we would love to see it.

In regards to the best marketing option, that comes down to a few factors really. What audience are you targeting, local, national or international and what sort of budget do you have to spend.

Anyone can drive traffic to a website, but not everyone has the money to do it over night, so it does quite often come down to dollars as to how effective your marketing is.

Hi Copperfrog,

Good question! This just shows how serious you are about succeeding with your SaleHoo Stores :)

I have replied recently to a couple of posts with a relatively similar concern as yours, kindly refer to the following posts -

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Hope this helps :)

posted by Copperfrog:

I would like to know the best strategies to get traffic to our store. Strategies that will not only bring in traffic but also return customers.

Getting traffic is one task; converting it to customers is another, and retaining those customers for repeat business yet another.

There really isn't a panacea for traffic generation -- different products and services lend themselves to different kinds of promotion. I'm a big fan of social media traffic, but I tend to stick to markets where social media is effective -- stuff people like to talk about. If you're selling plumbing fittings, then setting up the most popular plumbing-related Twitter feed in the world probably isn't going to do much for your bottom line.

Having looked at Bella's Glitter Box, I'd suggest adding a blurb to all of your packing slips offering customers x% off their next order of $y or more in exchange for mentioning their purchase on their favourite social network, and sending you a link to the post so you can verify it. ie. "10% off of $25 if you Tweet about your new bracelet; 15% if you add a picture to the Tweet."

If customers seem to be going for it, any network where you're getting the bulk of mentions, set up an account and make your presence known via the website, customer newsletter, packing slips, etc.

This would, in my opinion, be a very effective way to capture and utilise social traffic. The problem with trying to "promote socially" is that it is a ton of work, and there are of course a bazillion people promoting affordable jewelry, largely to blind eyes and deaf ears due to the volume, on Twitter, Facebook, et al. By giving customers an incentive to promote to their own friends on your behalf, you're saving the work of endlessly building and testing your social presence, and only investing real effort into those channels which are already showing you some level of potential (ie. if 20 customers take you up on your offer, and 15 of those use Twitter to mention you, 4 use Facebook and 1 uses MySpace, why bother working on anything but Twitter for the time being?)


Frank

Thanks for your quick replies and the great suggestions.

Marc,
Our site is www.bellasglitterbox.com, take a look and let me know what you think. For the audience we’ll be targeting North America. As for budget, it’s like all start-ups, not much there but I can invest a few hundred to marketing. I would expect to a return on investment for this marketing and then reinvest the profits from my sales. But I may be dreaming in color if I expect some sort of revenue from my first marketing campaign. I’m not sure what to expect.

Richelle,
So the two methods to get traffic are SEO and PPC. From the looks of my budget I am aiming for a 5% PPC and 95% SEO. Once, if lol, I generate a revenue I can increase the investment to PPC.

Frank,
It looks like I have a 3 phase approach to get this working.
Phase 1 – Get Traffic
Phase 2 – Turn the Traffic in customers
Phase 3 – Get those customers to return

My focus will be on phase 1 and 2 for the time being. I know that getting traffic to the site does not happen overnight.

Well thank you all for your help and feedback. Looks like I got a few months of getting traffic using SEO and a bit of PPC but I will have to look into this as it’s easy to waste your money on the wrong keywords. I have submitted the sitemap.xml to Bing and Google web tools. With a bit of luck maybe I could get a few thousand visits to the site next month.

Thanks,
Copperfrog

Site looks clean, and it looks finished, but there's just something missing for me. Nothing is really grabbing my attention straight off, and that's dangerous from a marketing stand point.

Research shows that if you don't grab the attention of a customer quickly after they open your door, they can very quickly leave through that same door without exploring very much at all.

Just an idea, but perhaps some super specials on the home page, something to not only grab the customer's attention, but encourage them to look a little further.

One thing I would suggest is upgrading the logo. Visual marketing is a very important aspect to any business model, but especially for an online business, and a logo speaks volumes about the type of image your business presents. It's an area where so many think it's not worth spending much time or cash on, but it's the face of your business, and as such is very important.

Your current logo is quite uninspiring and flat, and that's a dangerous image for any customer to get. It's an area where you can improve on easily enough and I have no doubt would add some extra value to your overall site image.

In regards to marketing outside of that, you seem to be chasing a national audience, and on a limited budget online marketing, especially social media marketing would be my suggestion as your best option.

Frank's an excellent man to talk over ideas with in that area.

We've had a ton of success running giveaways for products or gift certificates to our site. There is obviously a cost associated with this but it can have a tremendous social media impact.

There is a huge network of mom blogs that you can tap into to promote products and your store. This can give you a good link from a high PR site as well as Facebook fans, Twitter followers and YouTube views in addition to the traffic it generates.

Google "running a giveaway" to learn more.

NOTE: You're main homepage image says "Jewerly" not "Jewelry." That needs to be fixed pronto.

Welcome to the forums, Rob!

Nice way to start your first post, very helpful indeed :) Great to have you on board, hope to see more of you on the forum.

Cheers

Hi Rob, you could for a start, set up a Facebook page and Twitter account. You can ask your friends and family members to like you.

Hope this is helpful to you.

Regards
Murphy

Hi Copperfrog,

Great tips above from the SaleHoo community, I especially agree with Murphy's suggestion. Social media is really powerful in driving traffic and increasing awareness about your products.

I checked out your site and think that Pinterest is something you might also want to look at. Pin photos of your beautiful necklaces and write short interesting copies about them. For example, you can talk about the stones used - the story behind them, their birthstone months, etc :)

Lace