How to Make the Right Product Recommendations to Online Shoppers
Product recommendations can be found in almost every online shop. No matter which method you choose, the end result can really impact your sales.
If you own a seasonal business, you might feel a bit hopeless during the off-season months. Whether you own an ice cream shop or a winter sport shop, you might find it difficult to stay engaged with your customers when the seasons change. However, there’s always something you can do during the slow period to prepare for the peak-season and even make a few sales.
1. Prepare your customer database before the off-season
Okay, this first tip is a bit of a cheat because you need to do this during the peak season. However, this is necessary in order to make the most out of some of the other tips I’ll provide. Gathering email addresses or getting your customers to follow your social media pages can be really useful for staying engaged with your customers during the off-season.
If you have a local shop, encourage your employees to promote your social media accounts. Let customers know that you offer discounts once in a while with your newsletter (more on that later) and that sharing their info could really benefit them.
2. Work on your website & create a blog
There are always things you can do to improve your website. Sometimes it’s difficult to see your own website through the eyes of a consumer.
Try to gather honest opinions from friends, family, and trusted customers and see if your website really instils trust. Test your website on mobile and check its responsive design. It's not 1998 anymore, so your website should look professional, inviting, and be easy to navigate.
Creating a blog for your business is a great way to get traffic to your website.
For starters, you can offer your clients knowledge, something that can really establish you as an expert in your field.
Secondly, adding fresh content to your website is a great way to improve your Google ranking. Google loves new content and they spread this love by rewarding websites that do this.
Try creating (off-)seasonal content as well. This bridges the gap between the activity and the time of year. For example, if you have a snowboard shop, create a blog about how to take care of your gear during the summer months.
Make sure you have strong CTAs (Calls-to-Action) in your blogs that connect with the topics you write about. If your customer base is very niche, unique content can help your blog articles can rank high in certain Google searches, getting you more traffic to your online shop.
3. Find a niche to target
Every industry has an enthusiastic audience, whether it’s extreme sports or clown college. Honing in on this niche is key to staying engaged.
When creating a blog, it’s important to keep this niche in mind. How do they think? What terms do they search? How much do they earn? All of these factors can help you build an audience persona, something that can be really helpful when creating content for them, whether that’s a blog, a newsletter or email marketing.
Get involved and find their forums and build rapport with the active users. If they’re enthusiasts, they’re going to be the ones to sing your praises and share their experiences with your shop with other enthusiasts.
This can also be a great way to discover micro-influencers in the industry who might be willing to promote your shop, either for free or a fairly reasonable fee.
If you sell jeallybeans, find those jellybean enthusiasts! Trust me, they're out there.
(Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands)
#4 Get involved with social media
Once you know who your niche audience is, get involved in their scene. There’s a good chance they’re on Instagram and Facebook. Join the groups. Learn the hashtags. Get noticed.
Sure, it might seem silly posting ski photos in July or ice cream images during Christmas, but if you use the right hashtags and imagery, you can tap into people’s nostalgia with the right posts. On a cold winter day, post an image of someone eating a melting ice cream cone and ask who else is counting down the days till summer.
Create a poll on Facebook to keep your customers engaged. Ask them what ice cream flavour they’d like to see added to the menu. You don’t need necessarily need the post to be productive towards business. Have fun with it by asking who still eats ice cream in the winter.
You can do cross promotions with other businesses as well. If you own a snowboard shop, maybe you can help promote a mountain biking company and arrange it so they can do the same for you once the seasons change.
#5 Collect reviews
As we mentioned, it’s important to stay engaged with your customers during the off-season. We also talked about whether or not your website instils a feeling of trust. We also mentioned how Google loves fresh content. Did you know that reviews can help with all of the above-mentioned issues?
Stay engaged with your customers by sending them an email requesting their feedback. Even if they ignore their email, you are still putting your company in their heads again. With the right review provider, you can even send review requests to past customers.
When it comes to building trust, consider the following: according to Bright Local, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Kind of shocking, isn’t it? Well, it may be shocking, but it’s not really surprising if you think about your own shopping habits. Can you honestly remember the last time you spent more than £20 at an online shop and didn’t at least read one review? Neither do I.
Last, but not least, getting a constant flow of reviews up on your site is the equivalent of getting fresh content on your website. Reviews tend to contain strong SEO keywords for your shop, so getting those reviews up can boost your company’s ranking in Google search results.
#6 Email marketing
Create an email marketing campaign with the email addresses you’ve collected. Send out a newsletter with the blogs you’ve written or offer discounts to repeat customers.
You might think that email marketing went out of fashion with baggy pants and frosted tips. However, according to eMarketer, 80% of retail professionals said that email marketing is their greatest driver of customer retention (with social media coming in 2nd place with 44%), so ignoring email marketing would be a big mistake.
You can also be sure to promote any sales you have with these emails, which brings us to our last tip for you:
#7 Promote sales
Shutterstock/photopixel
This tip isn’t exactly like discovering plutonium, but having a sale in the off-season is a good way to get people back in your store. However, this strategy can work really well in cooperation with your social media strategy
Now that you are engaged with your customers with a Facebook page, email addresses, an Instagram account, and a Twitter handle, use this info to promote any off-season sales you want to have.
If your followers are enthusiastic, they’ll definitely appreciate a good deal on a snowboard, even if it is July. If they’re really hardcore fans, they’ll be counting the days until they can get back on the board and shred some snow (did I say that right?).
Conclusion
If your business is seasonal, there’s no need to get blue. There are plenty of things you can do to stay engaged with your customers. The biggest thing you can do is get your customers’ to follow you and share their information. Make sure that they know how much it can benefit them in the future. Then your job is to stay in touch consistently with regular posts and updates. This way, you’ll stay in their minds for all four seasons.
