Running a successful Ecommerce business needs a steady inflow of revenues. Revenues flow in only when you have customers. That’s why lead generation is a must for Ecommerce businesses.
But first, let us make it clear what a lead is before we proceed.
A lead is somebody who shows an interest in your products.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a process of gaining interested leads for your business to increase your revenues. It is a part of the sales process that an Ecommerce business cannot afford to neglect.
You need to stimulate that interest with proven strategies.
In Ecommerce, lead generation is entirely different than in a physical store.
While customers usually prefer to go to a dealership to buy products like a car due to the high cost and the interest to test drive it before making a purchase, buying products online, such as clothes or electronics, is quickly becoming commonplace.
That’s because the cost of the product is relatively low. And if the customers didn’t like it, they can easily either return or exchange the item.
While doing lead generation, keep in mind that not anyone and everyone that shows interest in your offering is a lead. Many Ecommerce businesses make that mistake. We’ll discuss successful Ecommerce lead generation tips in this article.
But before that, let’s quickly understand some benefits of lead generation.

What Are the Benefits of Lead Generation for an Ecommerce Site?

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1. Increased Brand Awareness

Brand awareness means how well-known you are in your target market. You can generate leads to educate and inform your prospects on the benefits your products/services offer to them, thus creating ‘word of mouth.’
It builds trust and credibility with your target market and shows them that you’re an expert in the industry.

2. Target Relevant Customers

Lead generation helps you target the right customers. You can do this based on factors such as their location, age, interests, income level, etc. (more on this later). This will help you narrow down your efforts on only those prospects that will convert into customers.

3. Increased Revenue

This is a no-brainer. The more leads you generate, the more scope you have to increase revenues. As you generate leads, you should warm them up with targeted campaigns and drive them to the finish line — making a purchase.

4. More Market Presence

It’s important to ensure that you have a presence in a competitive industry like Ecommerce. With lead generation, you can. And one of the best channels to increase market presence is social media.

Related : Benefits of Using Social Media Marketing Tools for Ecommerce

Make sure you pin down those social media platforms that are ideal for your business. Usually, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are suitable for building brand presence if you are an Ecommerce business.

Ecommerce Lead Generation Tips

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1. Define Your Target Personas Clearly

What is a target persona? It is your ideal prospect or customer that you're trying to attract with your lead generation efforts.
Before you begin any lead generation campaign, you should clearly understand your target personas. There’s nothing worse for your ROI than targeting the wrong type of audience.
Understanding who buys or who will buy from you is crucial in getting the best out of your lead generation efforts.
You can define your target personas in a lot of ways. But the best way to do that is to know the following information about them:

• Location – Where do they live?
• Age – How old are they?
• Interests – What are their interests?
• Education – What is their level of education?
• Income – What is their income? Can they buy my product?
• Relationship status – What is their relationship status?
• Language – What language(s) do they speak?
• Their buying motivation – What will motivate them to buy?
• Obstacles – What stops them from buying the products?

These questions provide you a thorough understanding of your prospects. As you continue to nurture them, these questions will help you define the customer’s journey, which is part two of defining your personas.

2. Optimize Your Website For SEO

Besides content marketing (which we would talk about later), SEO provides the highest ROI for Ecommerce websites.
Once you put your efforts to rank well, you practically generate leads on autopilot. It sounds easy when saying that. But here’s how you do it.
Do keyword research
Start by brainstorming search terms that your ideal customers would enter in the search bar.
Keep in mind that keyword research for Ecommerce marketing is different than most other keyword research you find online. That’s because most websites talk about informational keywords like this:
But your goal should be to rank for commercial keywords like this:
We suggest using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush for keyword research. Choose your keywords based on four factors — volume, competition, relevancy, and intent.
Find keywords with the highest volume with minimum competition—target keywords with commercial intent relevant to the products you offer.
Optimize page URLs
Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz, points out the following guidelines for page URLs.

• Use keywords in the URL.
• Make the URL easy to read.
• Shorter URLs, ideally between 50 and 60 characters, are better than longer URLs.
• The URL and the page title should match.
• Don’t use stop words like “a,” “and,” “of,” etc.
• Don’t do keyword stuffing.

Write long, meaningful product descriptions Longer descriptions have more scope for relevant keywords. So, they help you rank better in search engines.
And, they describe the product in detail, providing all the useful information the visitor needs.

3. Make Your Website User-friendly

To run a successful Ecommerce business, you need to make it a habit to think from a user perspective. There is a popular saying that our attention span is smaller than that of a goldfish. With our present lifestyle, it is only getting worse.
Here are some easy tips to help you out.

Have a search bar

Ecommerce websites usually have a lot of pages, unlike other websites. Having a search option makes it easier for your visitors to search for whatever they are looking for.

Make the navigation trouble-free

Every Ecommerce website has categories, sub-categories, and deeper variations to list the products. Organize your site architecture so that it has no more than three levels.
Source: Kissmetrics
Note: Keeping the hierarchy levels to a minimum also allows you to optimize your product titles and descriptions.

Remove distractions

If you want to keep users focused on what you are offering, remove any distractions that urge them to click elsewhere. That means no unnecessary graphics. No unnecessary menu navigation. No unnecessary calls-to-action, etc.

4. Do Not Forget To Optimize It For Mobile

It’s pretty evident that smartphones have taken over our lives.
As a result, mobile Ecommerce has shot up in the last few years. And it is projected to only grow from here on.
Source: Statista
When you see the upward trend in the graph, it’s pretty clear that we’re already living in a mobile-first world. So, how can you, as an Ecommerce brand, make sure that your website is mobile-ready?
These tips can help.

• Create a responsive website. That means the site’s navigation, images, videos, buttons, and tabs should all respond well on mobile as they do on a desktop.
• Make sure that the pages load fast.
• Cut down on the pop-ups and sidebars.
• Put the most important elements above the fold.
• Remove any unnecessary words on each page. The screen space on mobile is very valuable.
• Wherever possible, minimize forms. Typing on mobile is not easy. So, make use of autofill if you can.

5. Create Valuable Content For Your Target Audience

Yes, Ecommerce websites need to create content. And no, it doesn’t mean just those flashy product pages. You have to provide visitors with information and inspiration.
Create articles, videos, guides, expert interviews, etc.
Say you sell clothes on your website. You can create content that will provide fashion advice.
Source: Cutter & Buck
It all comes back to reducing steps in the buyer’s journey. A visitor can go from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom in a short time, even when the idea to buy has just occurred to them.
Here’s how it can work.
A person conducts a Google search on sun-protective clothing. At this point, he’s only doing research. So, he’s at the top of the funnel.
He finds a result in Google’s SERPs that matches his interest. He clicks it and reads the article. Here, he comes across the perfect solution for him.
And, bingo! There’s a product link to that shirt. He clicks on it and lands on the product page. The shirt checks off all his requirements. Sold!
You need to attract visitors, educate them, and drive them to the right place. This is why you need content.

6. Create a Lead Magnet

Since you run an Ecommerce store, you’ve most likely researched online for lead magnet ideas before. But not all of those ideas work for Ecommerce.
Here are a few that do.

Offer how-to guides

Offer your visitors free how-to guides that will help them achieve their goals and improve their lives. For instance, if you sell gluten-free products, you can assume that your visitors are interested in living a gluten-free life.
You can create and push out a guide with free gluten-free recipes to help them get closer to achieving that goal. This makes them more likely to return to your site whenever they want more recipes or products.

Run promotions

Launch a subscriber program if you can where visitors enter their email to get daily updates on the newest promotions you offer. This makes for a terrific lead magnet, provided you have the margins to run it.
Source: Daily Deals

7. Build Your Email List Continuously

Once you have leads coming in, you have to build and grow your email list. To grow your email list, use email collection forms in the right places on your site:

• On the sidebar
• In your blog posts
• On the footer
• In your checkout pages
• In the pop-ups

Besides, have a relevant landing page for each of your lead magnets. The page should have a persuasive copy, genuine social proof, and the benefits of joining your email list.
Now that you have leads flowing, it’s time to segment them. Understand that not every subscriber will become your customer. Not only that, if you sell a variety of products, you will have subscribers with different interests. For these reasons, segmentation becomes crucial.
You can segment your email list by:

• Types of Customers (potential customers, new customers, loyal customers, occasional buyers, etc.)
• Demographics (age, location, education, income, etc.)
• Behavior

Note: Do not forget to delete subscribers who are not interested in your products at all. This will help you focus your email marketing efforts on only the interested people, reduce spam rate, and increase your open rates as a result.

8. Use Exit-intent Pop-ups

Wikipedia defines exit-intent pop-up as “a technology used in Ecommerce websites to retain visitors that are going to leave the site.”
You can track the website visitor's mouse movements using the exit-intent pop-up. When the visitor moves the cursor outside the upper page boundary, a pop-up window is shown to prompt the visitor to stay back on the webpage.
Exit pop-ups work well. And there is data to prove that. Fastrack Digital, a digital marketing agency, reportedly recovered 53% of its abandoning visitors using exit-intent pop-ups.
This tactic showed great results for so many Ecommerce businesses. Now, some people have the opinion that such pop-ups can be annoying to visitors. Even if it’s true, your visitors are about to leave the page anyway. So, you will lose nothing in trying to get their attention before they leave altogether.
Pro tip : Offer a discount in the exit pop-up in exchange for the person’s email.

9. Create Urgency With Your Website Copy

Another tactic you can use to encourage visitors to become leads is to create a sense of urgency. That means you can show them that whatever discount or offer you have running will only last for some time.
According to behavioral psychology, urgent situations cause people to suspend rational thought and act fast. Therefore, running a very limited-time offer will nudge your visitors to take action and buy from you.
For instance, you can have a pop-up like the one below that will show the visitor how long the offer will be available.
Pro tip : Place action words in the CTAs that clearly state the benefits.

10. Nurture Leads Using Live Chat

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you usually turn visitors into leads and then into buyers by welcoming them politely, providing them with expert advice on a particular item, suggesting ideas on style, etc.
But in an Ecommerce store, it’s slightly different.
Number one, there is nobody to welcome them to the website.
And, number two, you will have visitors to your website during non-business hours too.
Using live chat software gives them that personal touch.
To effectively use live chat for your website, do the following:

• Identify the time of day when you get the most traffic to your website. This helps you prepare conversations for both business and non-business hours.
• Greet your website visitors with a warm, welcome message.
• Ask the visitor how you can help them. Keep in mind that YOU need to guide the conversation instead of keeping it open-ended. Since it’s a chatbot talking to the visitor, it cannot respond to open-ended questions.

Take note of the conversations regularly. See what your visitors are asking. Do they want to know more about the product? Are they interested to know about offers or discounts? Use this information to slowly optimize the chatbot for humane conversations.
Pro tip : Program your chatbot to offer coupons, discounts, or freebies as incentives in return for their contact details right on the homepage. You can generate leads faster that way.

11. Use Analytics To Improve Your Website Performance

Keep track of your analytics regularly. We recommend using Kissmetrics for this. Based on your findings, make changes regularly.
Relevant: Analytical Tools & its Importance for an Ecommerce Website
Online shoppers hate a slow-loading website. The longer a page takes to load, the higher its bounce rate is going to be. And a higher bounce rate informs search engines that users don’t find your website useful, so its rankings will drop — which means your traffic will plummet, and ultimately your lead generation efforts will not show results.
Source: LoadStorm
In short, your website speed is very important. You can run a quick test using Google’s page speed tool to check how it currently performs.
For starters, here are some things on your site that you can optimize.

• Reduce the file size of images.
• Remove unnecessary JavaScript code and poorly implemented tags.
• Limit the use of plugins.

12. Do Guest Blogging

On the surface, guest blogging may not look attractive. You may think, “It’s already hard enough to blog on my own website. Why should I write on another website for free?”
Guest blogging has three benefits. It gives you

• Access to a brand new audience
• A platform to show your expertise and
• An opportunity to generate qualified leads

You can show your content to relevant audiences and build authority for you and your company. You may also have the chance to showcase your products in the blog post if the website you write on allows it.
To do guest blogging effectively, you have to:

• Target websites visited by your potential customers (we suggest using Ahrefs or SimilarWeb to find these sites)
• Reach out to their content team and pitch your idea
• Create valuable content
• Link to your website in your author bio to generate traffic to your site

Pro tip : Link back to a lead-generating resource from your website in your author bio, like in the image below.

13. Grow Your Social Media Following

Your visitors convert into leads if they show an interest in your brand. You can say the same for your social media followers too.

Related : Social Media SEO

In the case of social media, if someone is your follower, they have put themselves within a few clicks of purchase from you. Lead generation, traditionally, requires you to fill out forms, download content, and so on. But, by simply encouraging them to click the “Follow” button, you are removing a lot of that clutter.
So, get more followers! But how do you do that?

• Identify how your potential audience behaves on social media. You’ll get an idea when you look at how they interact with your competitors’ content.
• Create such content. Use tools like Canva or Crello to make your social media posts.
• Prepare an editorial calendar. This helps you to stick to a consistent posting schedule.
• Interact with influencers in your niche. Look for micro-influencers as it’s faster to build relationships with them. You have to engage with them regularly to get a follow back.
• Piggyback on the latest memes and trends. Such posts have a great chance to go viral.
• Use tools to automate and monitor your activity.

Wrapping it up

Ecommerce lead generation is not easy. There’s so much competition out there. Focus on providing value to the customer in any strategy you implement, and you will reap the rewards.
We hope these 13 tips successfully help you level up your lead generation game. Good luck!
Speak to our ecommerce experts to know more about increasing the leads for your website.