Many fashion outlets, restaurants, and other physical stores sales have dropped by more than 40%.
The solution many businesses think of is to switch and build their online presence, either on Facebook or have a website with the hope that this might quickly pivot and reach their customers to drive more sales online. But the sad news is the sales are still the same.
Here are three principles that work and make your business stay resilient in this dynamic environment.
1. Evolve with your customers or make your customers evolve with your business
Customers are changing how they connect with businesses. In fact, customers can no longer connect with businesses they have to connect with a person. Businesses don’t have emotion. This means more of a human touch to your online presence brand or store.
Few questions to ask yourself?
- Is your website design reflecting your brand?
Your website doesn’t have to look like a boring eCommerce store, but it should provide them a UX that will help them to connect with your brand. By UX I not only mean user experience but unique experience.
- Do your customers trust you to be able to provide you their information?
If you provide a good user experience to your audience, surely they might trust you in providing you their information or make a sale.
Don’t be afraid to ask your customers about what can be improved on your website. They are the ones buying it so it means a lot if you listen to them.
- Is your content adapted to your customer needs?
Is your brand helping your customers? Or are you trying to sell them each time they visit your website? Are they walking away with some meaningful information? Many businesses avoid putting content on their online store, they just put images and product prices. They are not providing enough value of how this product might help the buyers.
2. Adjust your website to generate more leads & sales
If you don’t adjust your fundamental marketing strategies to match your copywriting changes, you’ll likely cause more harm than good.
You also need to reconnect with those types of prospective customers in other mediums. You can put together a combination of content marketing campaigns, blogging, and social media engagement strategies that were all designed to target the changes you made on your website. This will lead to getting more traffic to your website and improving the lead generation process.
How to optimise for lead generation?
- Use Google Trends to identify which product categories are being surged in the search. And ran promotional items related to what’s surging.
- For e.g, your customers are spending more time at work maybe they want to improve their home environment, their home office and so on.
- Don’t be afraid to test different ad & content creation, to see what’s working for your audience.
You won’t be sitting in front of your laptop all day to check if you did get leads, or made a sale. You have automation to do that. To know more about how messenger automation can help you get more leads check it here Messenger Lead Generation.
Automation has helped Mimshacks to increase its online sales by 35%, we’ve tested it with some of our clients and it has worked.
3. Connect online & offline experiences
Transitioning to online stores, customers will still miss out on the relationship-based selling approach. The question is how can you do that in an online store?
The solution is to have an online sales assistant to assist your leads in their buying journey.
Since most of your employees are now working from home, they could follow up with online leads. Offering your leads a personalized service either by phone calls, chat system will definitely help in moving your leads to a potential sale.
Moving forward creating these experiences means you’ll be able to organise both online & offline data more efficiently.
Setting up an online CRM is crucial that will help your store to support your mix of phone calls, chat interaction, email interaction, messenger interaction, and more.
Combining those data will help you think beyond leads and understand to better meet customer needs.
Doing all of this with a proper online marketing strategy using the above information will help to 5X your online & offline sales.
