If you’re the owner of an online business, you know how important it is to reach customers and create consistent incoming revenue. Determining the best way to create a steady flow of both new and returning customers is essential for creating a long-lasting and profitable brand. Luckily, the best way to gain that steady stream of customers isn’t a mystery. Every business can do a few simple things to bring in revenue and build revenue.
Here are three things you can to to bring in a steady stream of customers to your online business.
3 Things All Online Businesses Need To Attract A Constant Stream Of Customers | Stephanie Burns
1. Social Media And Email Marketing Strategies
It’s easiest to reach online consumers through a strong digital marketing strategy. Social media and email marketing are low-cost and highly effective tools within your strategy. In fact, experts estimate social media to have the second-highest ROI of any digital marketing strategy, landing at 28%. Email marketing takes first-place with an incredible ROI of 36%.
If you haven’t set up an email marketing strategy yet, it’s time to get started. Begin building a subscriber list and create valuable content that will encourage subscribers to continue reading your content. Your email subscriber list allows you to move your potential customers through the customer journey.
Social entrepreneur and founder of Rrevu, Amarilla Nirmala, explained how versatile social media marketing can be during a recent interview. She stated, “I am using Quora Indonesia to also share my knowledge about branding and marketing, giving advice and some simple steps about career and education. I believe social media is a powerful tool we can utilize for anything. Selling your products? Creating your professional persona? Building your company’s image? Or getting your 15-minute fame as Andy Warhol said last time.”
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2. Strong SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools available to us today. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for achieving a high rank on the search engine results page.
Before the world of digital business, brick and mortar retailers tried to get prime locations for a storefront on busy downtown streets, thriving street corners, or in popular malls. Just like brick-and-mortar businesses thrive in prime physical locations, digital businesses thrive when they have a top rank of the search engine results page.
Fernando Raymond, founder and CEO of ClickDo, a digital marketing agency based in London, says, “I’ve become one of the top SEO consultants in the UK by helping business owners improve their SEO through the creation of unique content that adds genuine value. When I work with business owners, I tell them their website is useless if it’s not visible for people searching for what they offer online. E-commerce businesses must prioritize SEO if they want to grow into a successful brand.”
In addition to creating unique and valuable content, strong SEO relies on meta tags, HTML optimization, and keywords. SEO will rarely improve if you only focus on one aspect and forget the others. It’s important to focus on all the pieces of the SEO puzzle to get to the top of the results page.
If you haven’t yet optimized your meta tags, HTML, and keywords, it’s time to do your research and make some updates. There are tons of online resources that can teach you how to use keywords, HTML, and meta tags more effectively to take your SEO to another level.
3. Data-Informed Customer Insights
A major benefit of being a digital-first business is that it’s easier to gather data from online customers than customers shopping at a brick-and-mortar retailer. If you utilize customer data, you’ll gain insights into customer behavior that could transform your business.
Anu Bidani, CEO of STEM MINDS and Inno-Hive, described the value of information in building your business during an interview back in June of 2020. She remarked, “You need to know the drivers behind your business, what pain points are you addressing and who is your real client. Understand the competitive landscape and find your unique value proposition.”
You might think you already understand what pain points you are addressing and who is buying your product, but many businesses misjudge why their customers are making a purchase. In the famous “McDonald’s Jobs To Be Done” case study, researchers determined that McDonald’s customers were not buying milkshakes because they were craving a sweet treat. They were buying milkshakes because it was the most convenient food option during their commutes.
The researchers gathered data about McDonald’s customers, and it completely changed the understanding of why and who buys milkshakes. To gather this data, researchers had to observe hundreds of customers and personally ask them questions. Luckily, digital businesses can collect customer data much more easily. As an online business, you can use website analytics to gather data into your customers’ decisions. With this information, you can determine how to market your products better and create products that better fit your customers’ needs.
If you haven’t started looking at user data on your website, set aside some time to review it. You can learn things about the customer age and location. You might also learn things about the time of day that users browse your site. All of this information can be used to better understand who your customer really is, and why they are interested in your products.
