How to Gain New Customers to With Social Media
Conversation Counts!
Once you've established your expertise within your chosen market segment using social media, and you have opened your ecommerce store site, you can start to subtly guide your followers towards your site expressly to make sales. As always with social media, it's important find that line between letting customers know about great buying opportunities and straight-up hard selling. A stronger tactic is to keep the conversation going, direct it toward your market, products, and site, and to increase buyer apprehension and excitement.
Given the huge numbers of people on Facebook and the high percentage of them who log on every day, Facebook can be one of the best ways to drive people to your ecommerce site. Keep a calendar on your e-store's Facebook page with all your upcoming events. If you are planning to sell your entire stock of green purses at 30 percent off for St. Patrick's day, then March 16th is not the day to let everyone know about it. One month to two weeks of lead time is just long enough to start getting people excited about events, without them getting lost in the crush of people's lives (the Internet seems to have given people slightly shorter attention spans).
Be sure to update your status regularly as the date approaches. If you are having a clearance sale on a specific item, you can encourage people to buy by posting things like "Less than 10 of [insert item type] left at our special clearance price!" Be sure to include a link directly to the item. The fewer clicks a person needs to buy something, the better the chance that they will do it.
Blog
Your blog can be a great way to explain promotions or reasons for buying to potential customers. Product reviews and live field testing results are great opportunities to give your readers genuine information about products that you are selling, but woven into a more palatable narrative (also a great use for YouTube). Sometimes a promotion has a more complex explanation or a story that you can impart to your readers that might incite them to buy: For instance, offering a discount on all pink merchandise for breast cancer awareness for a limited time and donating a portion of every sale to a specific cancer charity.
If you are raising money for charity or any other related activity, your blog can be a really great place for inspirational stories about people related to the charity and for free publicity for the charity you are supporting (be sure to link to them). You can also use your Facebook link to publicize the promotion as sales are made. Ex: "We've sold over 100 of our special items to support [charity] and we're still going strong!" Link to the page for people to support the sale and link to the charity.
When it's all over, be sure to write a blog post thanking all your customers for their business (whether it's a charity drive or just a sale). It's also a good place to blow your own horn a little about how well your business is doing.
If you're having a sale of some kind, definitely let your Twitter followers know. With all the other social media you'll probably have linked to Twitter, it's unlikely that you'll have any trouble at all using Twitter to get people to visit your ecommerce site. Just be careful to avoid direct selling via Twitter. Nudge, don't push.