They may be long in coming, but they are hard to forget. Getting the first sales is a challenge every entrepreneur faces, online and offline. How to reach your first customers and how long it will take to receive the first orders are often the most recurring questions.
We would love to tell you that there is a magic formula to get your first ecommerce sales in less than 30 days. However, in business, personalized strategy works better than infallible recipes.
In this article, we tell you what steps to take to reach your ideal customer and how to gain the trust of your niche market. Are you ready to start welcoming your customers?
Step 1. Set a realistic goal
Setting an achievable goal for your first sales and a reasonable time frame to achieve them is crucial to start meeting them.
Of course, an ambitious goal is always a great motivator, but if it’s unattainable, the difficulty of achieving it could discourage you. And that’s the last thing you need at a time as exciting as creating your own store.
Although it will depend a lot on the type of product or service you sell and the time you can dedicate to your business in this first stage, you can set a goal of getting 20 qualified leads in the first month. After those 30 days, you will be in a position to evaluate:
Was your goal realistic?
Did you achieve it?
If you couldn’t, what prevented you from doing so?
Will you be able to set yourself a bigger challenge or will you have to readjust your expectations?
Step 2. Define your value proposition
What if my product is not right, why don’t they take it off my hands? Am I selling it too expensively?
It is quite common to feel insecure when you start selling online and the first sales do not come. Especially when you have not identified your value proposition or your niche in the market.
If you are taking your first steps in the world of e-commerce, this article on how to conduct a market study is the guidance you need.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to position yourself and compete in the market: with lower prices or by differentiating yourself.
It’s true that competitive pricing can be a customer magnet in some sectors, but in addition to reducing your profit margin, it has other drawbacks. For example, you could cause your products to be perceived as easily replaceable items.
In contrast, differentiating yourself with a unique value proposition will give meaning to your presence in the marketplace and make your niche perceive you as irresistible and necessary.
Examples of products with a well-segmented audience might be toys for children with autism, office accessories for remote workers, or sustainable products with unique designs.
Step 3. Learn to find your ideal customer
In the world of online sales, it is not enough to raise the shutter and wait for whoever walks through the door to be interested and come in to meet you. It is you who must make it easy for your customers to find you when they are looking for what you offer. To do this, you must know their criteria and dynamics very well.
Within inbound marketing, two essential resources for getting to know your customers are the buyer persona and the customer journey of your target audience.
Create your buyer persona
The buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal customer. It is a kind of X-ray that includes both a socio-demographic profile and a summary of their interests, habits, motivations, objectives, purchasing preferences and pain points (concerns, problems, frustrations).
Internalize your customers’ customer journey
The customer journey is the path a customer takes during any purchase process and comprises at least three basic stages: discovery, consideration and decision. It is a useful resource for researching and detecting what needs your consumers have at each stage of the journey and what they do to meet them.
Drawing the customer journey of your market niche will help you to better understand your customers’ behavior, which is essential to achieve your first sales. It will also help you locate the touch points where your customer might be interested in hearing from you or buying from you.
For example, if you have an online sportswear store, in the discovery phase your ideal customer will appreciate it if you share content about which fabrics are more appropriate for practicing one or another sport. In the consideration stage, comparisons with other products and the opinions of other users could be important buying arguments. Finally, in the decision phase, a good shipping service or a discount on the first purchase can be key triggers.
Where to find your customers?
Any brand and creator aspires to be able to build its own community in the long term. But if you are new to the world of e-commerce and want to get your first sales, you will need to rely on existing networks. Here are some of the most successful ones:
Facebook forums and groups.
Virtual communities are super useful for bringing together people with similar interests and concerns, but also for promoting your products. Importantly, without spamming! You can start new thematic forums or participate in existing ones, but keep in mind that what users of these communities are looking for is content of interest.
Reddit and Quora are two of the most popular virtual platforms where you can find forums on a wide variety of topics. To optimize results, segment the conversations in which you interact.
It’s normal that at first you might feel uncomfortable charging your loved ones for your products, but if they perceive value in them, they’re sure to show interest in them right away. Another option is to offer them at a special price or, if your profit margins allow it, as a gift in exchange for feedback and reviews that will help you gain reputation.
Step 4. Optimize your website
Did you know that your most efficient salesperson can be an optimized website? Investing time and resources so that your website works at its best and has a good SEO is one of the best bets in the medium and long term.
Here are the main aspects you need to make sure you comply with to get the most out of your site:
Quality content
Your website is your best letter of introduction to potential customers. So, if you want to convert interested users into determined buyers, the first thing you will need to do is to inspire confidence with quality content.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is one of the strongest legs of digital marketing, but also one of the most time-consuming and persevering. Getting your ecommerce to start positioning in search engines organically is a challenge, but you should not throw in the towel.
The main difficulty you will encounter when you start looking for profitable keywords for your ecommerce (keyword research) will be to find the balance between concepts with a large volume of searches and keywords that are not overly competitive.
For example, if you sell organic hair products online, it will be difficult to rank on the first page of Google with keywords like “hair products”. On the other hand, long tail concepts such as “organic hair products” or “organic cosmetics for hair”, being more specific, will be less competitive and could be easier to work with.
Step 5. Use social media strategically.
Although tools like Instagram Shopping represent a breakthrough for social media monetization today, you should not lose sight of the fact that the main function of social platforms is to inspire. That is, people do not enter social networks with the purpose of buying, but this does not mean that they cannot be useful for your marketing and sales strategy.
Build trust with your audience
Gaining the trust of your audience on social networks will certainly help your sales strategy, but it requires time and dedication. To do this, you must create quality content, interact with your community and practice social listening to manage your brand’s reputation well.
Evaluate which ones you need to be on according to the behavior of your target audience. Instagram and Facebook are basic for a social media strategy, but do Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok or LinkedIn have something to contribute to your business? Once you’ve decided which networks to deploy your brand on, make sure the image and tone you project on each are consistent.
Joining trending social media formats will bring freshness to your profiles, but you’ll need to analyze how your actions affect your social metrics. As you are looking to get your first sales, the growth of your audience, the traffic you get to your site and the engagement rate will be the most interesting.
Step 6. Apply sales promotions
Sales promotions in the launch phase of your ecommerce can be a key incentive for hesitant users. Since their objective is to attract new customers, they have to be attractive, but also sustainable for your business. Here are some of the most common ones:
Introductory pricing.
Offering a special price for a certain period of time, as if it were a flash sale, will create a sense of urgency among visitors to your website. Make it clear that this is a special promotion, how long it will last and emphasize the price of the product without the welcome discount.
Newsletter subscription discount
Giving a direct discount to those who subscribe to your newsletter is another way of getting leads and building a database. Undoubtedly, a very interesting promotion for your customers, but also for your business.
Step 7. Keep in mind to invest in advertising
Paid online advertising allows you to reach a larger audience than you can reach organically. But it’s not just an investment in visibility. The result can be very effective for your sales if you include retargeting strategies aimed at those who have already passed through your ecommerce without buying.
The good news is that, to promote your online store, you don’t need a big advertising budget. If you are considering investing in a paid marketing campaign, these are the two channels that offer the best return on investment (ROI):
Facebook Ads and retargeting.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing), basically Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and Google Shopping.
