If you just ventured into ecommerce, all you want to do is find how to make your first sale. You’ve done everything they told you; set up your store, found the perfect theme and hot-selling products, and perhaps driven traffic to it. The best thing that is yet to happen is to get a sale notification.
As an entrepreneur, the first game-changer is when you get your first sale online. When this doesn’t happen so fast, especially during this Coronavirus era, you might want to have a rethink about the testimonials and screenshots you’ve seen.
Sometimes, you get into the endless circle of tweaking your store designs and themes, believing that’s why you’ve never made a sale. It might not be your store design; other loads of factors exist.
Here’s the fact; it’s not very easy to make your first sale. But when you have the right information and approach, your first sale becomes easier to achieve.
Remember to keep your head up and never shut down your store because you haven’t made your first eCommerce sale.
Guess what? We’re going to hold you by hand and walk you through the process of making your first sale in this post.
Check out these proven ideas below:
- 1. Get a Blog and Start Posting
- 2. Try Out Free Traffic Sources
- 3. Build a Pretty and Responsive Store
- 4. Get Your First Sale Online With Targeted Traffic
- 5. Relevant Influencers can help you make your First Ecommerce Sale
- 6. Set Up Interview Sessions with Influencers on Your Blog
- 7. Collect Emails for Follow-ups
- 8. Discount and Promo Codes can be How to make your First Sale
- 9. Create Engaging product Videos
- 10. Go for Strategic partnerships
- 11. Bloggers can promote your Brand
- 12. SEO is Key
- 13. Paid Adverts
- 14. Check Your Success Rate
1. Get a Blog and Start Posting
Despite your niche and the items you’ve put up on your store, you need a blog for quality posts and traffic generation. The aim is to pull in traffic to your site while some of them buy from you.
The reason?
When you post quality and engaging blog posts on your blog, you open doors for people to visit your store, read, and possibly buy.
With the invention of SEO, you can have your blog posts ranked on search engines like Google. This will pull in organic traffic to your blog, and they can buy from you. More quality traffic to your blog means more possible sales.
If you’re intentional about how to get your first eCommerce sale, then you don’t have to post just anything. Create blog content that engages your audience, inform, and assist them. Perhaps, you could create content around the best products to buy for a given season, buying guides, among others.
2. Try Out Free Traffic Sources
As a new entrepreneur looking to make your first eCommerce sale during this Coronavirus pandemic, you might not have the most budget. That’s understandable and calls for trying out free traffic sources.While this might bring low conversion, it can pull in the first sale for you.
Share your store with relevant online communities and your network. You might want to offer a discount code as this will make more people want to check out your store.
Add your store URL to your bio sections on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social networks you use. But then, don’t spam any audience with poor-quality promotional messages or repetitive messages.
If you have a large number of personal or brand followers online, you can get traffic from your personal networks. If you have a store that sells products to a specific interest, then you can join online communities and forums. Join groups where your target audience abounds and become an active member. Don’t spam the group. Take time out to become relevant somewhat while connecting with other members. With a good reputation, you can share your store link with promo or discount code and have people buy.
3. Build a Pretty and Responsive Store
You might be ready to make your first eCommerce sale as an entrepreneur this period, but your store doesn’t show it.
When you check out some of the success stories of many dropshipping entrepreneurs, you’ll find something familiar with them. Building a responsive and pretty store is a significant way to get started.
If your store looks non-engaging, then you’ll make little or no sales even with the best-targeted traffic. When your prospects visit, they bounce off. Your website visitors want to see something that pleases them aesthetically. They want something that will make them believe your brand and trust your offerings.
4. Get Your First Sale Online With Targeted Traffic
Often, many new entrepreneurs take action and think they are growing. You don’t just need backend actions. Get your business out there and put it right before your prospects. This way, you can make your debut sale online.
You can hardly say you’re improving unless you set a benchmark based on numbers. A product that interests you might not have the same perception out there. In fact, it might attract little or no interest from the people you think are your prospects. Your pricing might seem okay to you, but too costly for your average audience.
Here’s a way to go!
Take time and resources out to drive targeted traffic to your store for the next 30 days and see what happens. If you truly target the right audience with an amazing offer, you should make your first sale and more. With Google Analytics set up, you can monitor your traffic while implementing different marketing tactics, one after the other.
Remember that it might not be magical. Tweak your offer gently if there’s a need, while you alter your marketing method and learn.
5. Relevant Influencers can help you make your First Ecommerce Sale
It can be quite a tensed period for any entrepreneur trying to make their first sale online during this Coronavirus period. However, influencers with a good command of followers can be a way to go.
All influencers are not celebrities, and you don’t really need a celebrity to get your store or products out there. Anyone with a reputable influence in your particular industry can help you make your debut sale.
Influencers with 20,000 or more active followers can help. Reach out to them, give them a free sample and let them try it out. Urge them to mention your product and store in their contents – tweets, images, videos, and updates.
It’s not a herculean task. Send emails to reputable influencers in your niche and offer them free samples for a shout out in return. It’s normal to get turned down from some of them. But hey! Some of them will give it a try.
6. Set Up Interview Sessions with Influencers on Your Blog
Sometimes, it might not be very easy to get influencers who will agree to take samples of your product in exchange for shout outs. You can try interviewing influencers in your industry. Yes, it’s one of the fantasies of virtually every influencer. They get to share their ideas, lifestyle, and give your store and products shout outs.
When you furnish your blog with interview sessions with influential persons in your niche, you build a better reputation and connect with other influencers who can help you with brand awareness.
7. Collect Emails for Follow-ups
It’s normal if a prospect visits your site but doesn’t buy. But it’s not so good if all your website visitors leave without anyone buying. How about you collect their emails and follow them up afterward with juicier offers?
When you drive traffic to your store through paid advertising of any sort, free sources, or organic SEO ranking, it’s good to know that some of them will not buy immediately. Set a pop up that demands their emails in exchange for a freebie, maybe ebook, or with a promise of sending them juicier offers. While some will not fill in their email address, others would do.
Set up a campaign to target them. You can also send them swipes notifying them of new discount codes, promo codes, latest arrivals, and many more. Many of them might revisit your store, fill their cart, and check out.
8. Discount and Promo Codes can be How to make your First Sale
No buyer would cheerfully reject discounts and mouthwatering offers. People love coupon codes and discounts. So, if you’re looking to get the first sales alert, then you might want to consider giving discounts. But then, you don’t want to lose much money giving out discounts to your customers.
Here’s one of the best ways to offer discounts. Set a benchmark amount for which any buyer who reaches that gets a certain discount. You can also offer free shipping for orders totaling a certain amount and above.
9. Create Engaging product Videos
Videos are one way to keep your prospects excited and buy from you. If you’re looking to make your first ecommerce sale online, then you shouldn’t undermine the power of exciting videos. Create some catchy videos of your products; it should display the catchy features of the product, how to use it, and a clear call-to-action.
You can post these videos in target groups where some prospects can buy. Do well to create a custom audience of those who viewed your video. With this, you can retarget this audience or create a lookalike audience and run a campaign to them.
10. Go for Strategic partnerships
The effects of partnerships can never be overemphasized when it comes to making your debut sales and more online. With strategic partnerships, you can put your products right before your partner’s audience and have them buy from you.
For entrepreneurs who have connections with others that are not their competitors, running a contest with your product as the prize for the winner is a way to go. You can package your product with your partner’s as a complementary product, sponsor an event organized by your partner, or even create and promote a product together.
Building this type of partnership or relationship can take a long time. It entails finding brands, people, or organizations with similar goals but not quite a competitor.
11. Bloggers can promote your Brand
One of the effective ways to make your first eCommerce sale is reaching out to bloggers. But then, not all bloggers are a good fit to help promote your business.
Publishers are often looking for new stories and fresh content to publish for their audience to consume. Now, here’s what to do. Find publications that are within your niche, look for the content creators, and try to let them know about your brand.
You might want to craft and submit a guest post to the publishers and link back to your store or brand. When these contents are published, their audience who already has an interest in your industry might click through to see and buy your offerings.
Likewise, you may want to ask for product reviews. Find a blogger with a large audience, give them your product and ask them to review it for you. With this, they have found content to create and post, as well as redirect traffic to your store. This could be the source of your very first sale in ecommerce during this Coronavirus pandemic.
12. SEO is Key
Every successful dropshipping entrepreneur must have made one or more investments in search engine optimization. With a good knowledge of SEO and keyword optimizations, you can have your site up on search engine result pages.
Search for longtail keywords with high search volume and low competition and use them in your product descriptions, titles, subtitles, and other webpages. With this and other SEO approaches, people who search for keywords featured in your store will find your store and possibly buy. Proper SEO works will make your site discoverable by new people who you can turn to loyal customers.
Local SEO is also key to making sales in ecommerce. When you target keywords that are unique to your local business and where it is based, you can generate organic traffic from local buyers.
13. Paid Adverts
A rule of thumb that still holds for those in the ecommerce industry is spending money to make money. Paid advertising offers more targeted and quality traffic. If you’re looking to make your first sale online, you shouldn’t neglect paid adverts.
With a somewhat little budget, you can generate traffic that converts to loyal customers. However, if you’re going to set up campaigns yourself, you need to master how to do this, and how each platform’s algorithm works.
Before you jump on paid advertising, you need to populate your brand profile, set up your funnel, and ensure your offers are good.
Here are some of the social media platforms you can tap into for beneficial paid adverts:
Facebook Ads – if you have clear vision of your customers and who are likely your audience, you can leverage on Facebook paid adverts to make your first ecommerce sale. With a huge number of active users on Facebook, you can target your audience by their location, age, interests, behaviours, job titles, and even gender.
You can determine who sees your ads. So, when you do proper targeting, you get the most of your adverts and possibly record sales.
Instagram Advertising – If you’re into fitness, food, or fashion niche, you need a platform that lets you engage your audience with more photos and videos than posts. With highly engaging videos and photos, you can tap into the wide Instagram audience.
Instagram has one of the biggest engagements from the audience and stands out a platform where you can reach out to your prospects with videos and photos mainly. With a good mastery of Instagram ads, you can generate your first sale even during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Google Ads – it’s common to see people quickly check for things on Google whether they are looking to buy a product or hire a local service. Formerly known as Google AdWords, Google Ads helps your store or products to be ranked on top of search results. When users type relevant keywords on Google to search for what you sell, they get to see your adverts.
With Google Ads, you can choose how Google displays your ad. It could be Shopping Ads or Text Ads. The former displays your product price and photo in an ecommerce-focused format.
Basically, you’ll need to search for keywords to be used. Otherwise, you may want to hire a Google Ads expert to help set up and manage your campaigns.
14. Check Your Success Rate
Having tried many or all of the methods discusses, you should observe a significant increase in the traffic that comes to your site. With this, you must have made one or even more sales.
Now, you need to set a traffic benchmark and strive to improve it.
Check your analytics and the feedback you get from the promotions you’ve done already. Those who don’t buy might have some reasons and issues you’ll need to address.If your store gets a high bounce rate, then you might have received low traffic, or your store takes long to load. You can get a very responsive dropshipping store from Ali2Woo.If you observe a lot of abandoned carts on your store, you might want to revisit your shipping terms and prices.
Undoubtedly, your biggest quest as a dropshipping entrepreneur during this Coronavirus Pandemic is how to get your first sale and even more sales.
Guess this guide helped you? Feel free to drop your comments and check other informative marketing ideas on our blog section.
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