The e-commerce industry has been on the rise for a long time, according to last year’s statistics.
According to Statista’s data, global e-commerce sales reached 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars, and e-retail revenue is expected to grow to 4.88 trillion U.S. dollars by 2021. This shows that a large number of customers want to shop in their comfort zone. However, having a market full of customers requires identifying e-commerce target audiences for your business (especially e-commerce stores). Therefore, how to find a target audience for an online store is an important business-level task.
Whenever you want to promote a product, the biggest mistake you can make is to think that your product is suitable for everyone. It’s like shooting without aiming. If you want to succeed in business development, you must define your ideal customers in as much detail as possible. For this, you should follow these methods to target your audience more effectively.
Table of contents
1. Understanding the Importance of Ecommerce Target Audience
One of the main problems faced by online businesses is the influx of irrelevant traffic on the website. It is undeniable that the latest tools and technologies have helped many companies attract traffic to their platforms, even if it is only a few seconds. However, in most cases, the conversion rate for this type of input is almost negligible.
Basic e-commerce SEO skills and decent content strategies can get you up to 100,000 random clicks at once, but their value is less important than the 500 clicks from users who are actually looking for your service or product. This saves you the time and effort of reaching a wider audience and focusing only on potential customers.
Defining a target audience for an e-commerce store can help you develop your business strategy in many ways. It saves the marketing energy you previously used to reach more but less interested audiences. Therefore, if you know what your target audience is looking for, you can generate the same income with fewer resources.
2. Know Your Audience
Audience’s operation in the e-commerce industry is different from the real world. Merchants don’t interact with customers as they do in physical stores. Therefore, in almost every encounter, the judgment of a person’s behavior and personality will be different.
Suppose you have an online sportswear store. Now, it is important that you understand the lifestyle and behavior of people who exercise regularly. If you are a fan of the products you sell, it’s even easier. As you know, the act eliminates the need for basic research; what, how, and when your potential customers need your product.
3. Picture Your Potential Customer
As an online sportswear store, you should understand your e-commerce target market. This step can be performed by making a profile for each user who visits your online store. Once you determine who you must focus on, your marketing decisions will become easier. You will be able to selectively locate a group of similar customer profiles.
4. Customer segmentation
Now that you have created your customer profile, it’s best to categorize the target audience of your e-commerce store. Use demographic information such as name, address, user behavior, etc. In fact, modern practice shows that companies should pay attention to customers’ lifestyles, occupations, and unmet needs. This helps the online store to better cater to users and correctly shape the promotional message.
5. Surveys and Customer Feedback
Many successful entrepreneurs claim to come up with the best business-driven strategy when talking to the right customers. It has become a common practice to record customer feedback immediately after completing the business with the customer. Some online stores even go one step ahead, offering short welcome surveys for new users so that they can be aware of their needs from the start. When making business decisions, knowing more about customers should be North Star, so using survey tools (such as JotForm) can be the first step to better understand customers.
The data generated from surveys and customer feedback can be displayed graphically to see where your e-commerce business is and what can be improved. In addition, due to regular communication with customers, you can also ask them to write reviews for your products or services on public rating forums.
6. Know Your Promoters
Once you have determined the target audience for your online store, the next step is to take care of your brand promoters. Customers and promoters are basically advocates of your business, helping to promote your brand through word to mouth. It has become a common practice to use satisfied user groups and educate them to build a strong recommendation group. In this regard, most companies offer good rewards for their promoters.
7. Stalk Your Competitors
This may be one of the most important detail that companies need to pay attention to. Tracking competitors and their strategies has always been the best practice of e-commerce among industry giants. In fact, this practice can be seen everywhere in daily life. Take, for example, a disinfectant that claims to wash away all 100 viruses of your hands. In response, another competitor introduced an improved hand sanitizer that can accomplish the same job in a shorter time.
Similarly, online businesses need to understand the products and services that competitors are using. Sometimes it is the same product or service, but different marketing strategies for the right audience. Therefore, tracking your competitor’s audience is an effective way to understand which market you should focus on.
8. Re-evaluate Your Marketing Efforts
Now that you have a better understanding of how to find your e-commerce target audience, it is time to review your business plan and consider a few things.
See, if your e-commerce target market will benefit from your product, will it really appreciate its existence? Try to figure out what drives your potential customers to make decisions and how often they can afford to do business with you? Answering all these questions should help you better prepare your business strategy for the target audience of your online store.
Conclusion
The success of an e-commerce store depends to a large extent on the traffic you generate on your website. More importantly, the traffic you get must have enough potential to bring sales and conversions.
The e-commerce target market varies by niche market. An e-commerce store that deals with women’s cosmetics cannot have the same e-commerce target audience as an online store that deals with men’s beard products.
Therefore, understanding your potential e-commerce target market and audience is essential to profitably selling products online.
Understanding how to choose e-commerce target audiences and e-commerce target markets is essential for a planned and better online growth.
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