As ecommerce, by its very nature, takes place online, one of the unifying aspects of all successful ecommerce is a wieldy and successful website. There are two things you need to do to get an ecommerce site off the ground. You need to attract visitors to the site, and you need to keep them there long enough (or coming back regularly enough) for them to turn into customers.
Azola Creative, a company specializing in web design services, say that the best ecommerce sites are those that have three elements to them: ease of use, attractiveness, and SEO optimization.
The first two of these involves the website itself, and it is the job of the web developer (or perhaps you yourself, if your company is small and recently founded) and it involves, well, creating a good website! SEO optimization is all about how people find your site and, along with effective marketing, involves your company’s fortunes off your website.
One of the major jobs of effective SEO is to foster lead generation. This is actually a discipline in and of itself, and there are several lead generation services out there which can help an ecommerce company grow.
However, it is also wise for those running small ecommerce companies to learn all about lead generation themselves, simply because resources are limited at this stage and the more you can do yourself, the lesser your costs. But what is lead generation? And how can you optimize it?
What is a Lead?
Before going to some top lead generation strategies, it is important to understand just what a lead is. A lead is nothing more than an internet user who has shown interest in your site. This interest could be a link click or any action which leads to your site. As you can no doubt tell, lead generation is a very wide topic, going far beyond more specific SEO strategies.
Lead generation, therefore, is anything you do to get more leads. As a lead can be any type of interest in your company expressed online, it follows that lead generation is similarly diverse.
Top Lead Generation Strategies
The best way to find out in more detail what lead generation involves is simply to look at how it can be achieved.
Create Opt-in Opportunities
An opt-in opportunity is anything connected to your website that users can decide to take part in. This could be a webinar you host, a product guide you give away for free, a comments thread you respond on, or a demo video of your products. It is all about engagement other than the actual purchase of your products.
Effective SEO
SEO is a topic for another article but, suffice it to say, SEO that creates leads towards your website on google searches is sure to boost traffic to your site. Good SEO is good lead generation.
Effective Marketing
Marketing for ecommerce can be anything from social media posts to shared videos. Marketing becomes lead generation when there is some way for this marketing to lead people to your site. Normally, that takes the form of a link that can be clicked.
Simple Landing Pages
If an internet user arrives at your landing page, then there has already been some lead generation at work. Nevertheless, if the page is very simple, doesn’t include too much information and, above all, is very attractive, it could lead visitors to explore the site further and generate leads towards the pages where they can become customers.
Lead generation is something that every ecommerce site needs to engage in, and it can be as diverse as ecommerce itself.
