The customer acquisition process plays the most crucial role in growing your business. With the availability of multiple options, choosing the right and most sustainable acquisition channel can prove to be a challenging task. Here’re some tried and tested customer acquisition tactics that are most sustainable in 2018.
1. Affiliate program involving business development partnerships
Sharing a unique referral link with bloggers and then paying them for signups redirected through their link is an old school trick. It is still relevant. However, these days, companies use advanced affiliate partnerships that involve integrating one company’s product with another seller’s item and paying the integration partner whenever a customer signs up for a product as a result of integration.
Before setting up an affiliate program, your organization must be sure about the maximum payout that you wish to offer to your affiliates. Plus, you need to choose a system to track referrals coming from affiliate partners. Another essential task is to decide if you wish to pay your partners per the number of activations and signups, or according to the number of clicks registered on your link.
Affiliates not only help you in reaching your conversion goals, but they also help in creating positivity about your products whenever they speak about your business.
To roll out your affiliate programs, you can also use platforms like CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, ShareASale, OmniStar, Post Affiliate Pro, etc.
2. Using someone else’s email subscribers list
Sending your emails to a targeted list of subscribers can yield excellent results. You can either send a dedicated email or opt for one that offers a substantial mention.
The campaign cost depends on how prominently you want your company to be mentioned in the emails. Depending on your budget and the statistics from your previous email campaigns, you can decide what works best for you.
You can find a partner using the local marketplace or simply choose a hyper-relevant publication. While selecting the publication, ask them about the total number of subscribers, open/click rates for their existing campaigns, and of course, their charges per email. If you are willing to outsource email marketing, there are several companies that can do all the hard work, while you directly see results.
3. Content marketing with a different approach
As most of the custom ecommerce development firms suggest, content is the king!
Unfortunately, these days, the reputation of guest blogging is ruined because of low-value blogs full of links that are released with the sole intention of building links.
The crappy content mostly ends up on low-quality sites. Getting returns from such sites is almost impossible. On the other hand, web properties with good traffic demand a massive fee for publishing anything with links on their website or blog. Plus, you need to waste your time and send hundreds of outreach emails to check if such sites are willing to accept your guest posts in the first place.
Thus, it has become essential to publish content only on blogs that cater to a hyper-relevant audience and can refer some legitimate traffic to you.
Before you reach out to any blogger or website to get your article or guest post published, you should check to see if there is a significant amount of engagement in the form of comments on the site’s content. You should also check the number of shares that each article triggers. And of course, you need to make sure that the selected website’s audiences would be interested in your products.
These days, experts suggest small and large companies develop their platform to release editorial content. Publishing content on your site will save time as well as money spent on paying hefty fees to other sites. Editorial content, written by professional and experienced bloggers, has the potential to increase e-commerce activity.
4. Quora can prove to be a rich source of traffic
Believe it or not, but forums, where people discuss products, can prove to be a rich source for new customers. The question and answer based social networking site, Quora, attracts a lot of traffic these days. So, if you are looking for good traffic, your marketing team should dedicate a resource to participate in the discussions on the forum on a daily basis.
For those who have never used Quora, the social networking site is used by people to get answers for all sorts of questions from a variety of categories.
Some precautions need to be taken by marketing team members while answering questions. Never post direct links on the forum because the site’s admin will remove those quickly.
It’s not necessary to share a link with every answer or question. Users can answer some questions without adding any links to earn goodwill.
5. Serving exclusive content and offers to email subscribers
Email subscribers stay subscribed as long as emails are relevant and add value.
Emails can be used for keeping customers happy and engaged. One of the best ways to offer unique value via emails is sending email exclusive blog posts, discount offers, and other goodies which the customers cannot get anywhere else. Using this technique can ensure you get high open and click rates for your email campaigns.
During the campaign, email content needs to be segmented according to the topics and products that the subscribers have shown interest toward in the past.
Mining out the large unstructured, messy data and finding the right set of customers to send retention offers to can prove to be a daunting task. To make things simple, you can opt for eCommerce Development Solutions offered by vendors like Smart Sight Innovations
6. Website acquisition
If you are planning to start your e-commerce business with a brand new domain, website acquisition is probably one of the best solutions.
First, find websites that have a good ranking for long tail keywords which are related to your products or service. Then, contact the site owners and shortlist those who are willing to sell their website.
After signing the agreement and taking over the web property, you need to start diverting the site’s content to your website. Set up canonical tags wherever required and then set 301 redirects. Buying such property will help you get hundreds of backlinks and a SEO boost for your site.
Before buying the website, you need to check the site’s current revenue, keyword rankings for relevant keywords, organic traffic stats, and backlinks as well as the overall web traffic.
Digital marketing companies often recommend new startups buy such web properties because they come with significant traffic which ultimately results in client acquisition.
