Are you looking for a bigger piece of the pie? One sure way of growing your business and increasing your market share is to coax away your competition’s customers to your ecommerce website. But still, it’s a time-taking process involving a number of steps such as what is it that your competitors offer, how do they market their products and services, and what techniques do they actually use to stand out against the competitors themselves.
As if attracting new customers wasn’t hard enough, now you have to worry about getting customers to switch from your competition as well. You will require to prove that your product or service is better, all the while preserving your ethical integrity. Ever thought of all this while creating an online store? Ok, enough with the jokes. The best way to pull it out is the extensive research because as the saying goes, knowledge is power.
Today we are going to look at five of the best ways to encourage your competitors’ customers to switch over to your brand.
Table of Contents
1. Cut your costs
The first and the most effective tip I can give you is to undercut your competitors' prices. And I am not asking you to cut a huge margin but even as small as knocking off 1 rupee from your competitors base price can make a huge difference to your ecommerce website.
It’s the basic nature of human beings to be drawn to good value for money. I mean isn’t that why people spend hours browsing Amazon or eBay, looking at a selection of identical products before making a choice on the final price. Or use flight comparison websites to find the cheapest price for the day while searching for a flight.
Now, I am not asking you to come across as too good to be true. The best way for you to deal here to check out your competitors' prices since the time they created an online store and aim to be two to three per cent lower than them.
Also, try to avoid round numbers and 99 price tags. Yes, 99 too. I know most of you will say a price tag of 199 has much better chances of selling than 200. I agree, but using 98 instead of 99 has an even bigger impact.
The reason being, since most customers filter products from the lowest price range to the highest, you improve your chances of exposure and the likelihood of attracting your competitors' customers.
2. Improving your visibility and website traffic
The key here is to use a good marketing campaign for your ecommerce website that can not only raise your profile but can also make your business.
But beware, there’s a fine line between marketing and spamming. Overstep it and your online business can lose the customers trust. And though content marketing, SEO, and email marketing can work to your advantage, still it won’t hurt to think outside the box.
Social media is your biggest asset in improving your visibility. Here you can easily promote your products and services to your audiences. The key is to build a connection with them. Yes, the same reason why you built an online store in the first place.
Once, you get this into place, you can think of working on discounts and competitions. Likewise, you would want to put some high-quality content on your website including tips and advice all while targeting your content to your demographics.
3. Offer great customer service
Offering great customer service is one of the most effective ways to woo competitors’ customers to your brand. Because when people recommend your business, either on an internet forum or on social media, prospects have more faith in your ecommerce website. And no amount of money or clever marketing strategies can topple that.
Start by Googling your brand and products. And when you find reviews and comments about your products, reach out to the blogger (try to pick influencers) and send them products for free to be reviewed. But this time, offer their subscribers a chance to avail discounts on the products via a referral link.
Make sure the products that you send them are in perfect condition. The last thing you want is to send them a defective item from your ecommerce website and receive a negative review in return.
Believe me, if you pull it out successfully, this one review will be enough to take your product off like a rocket.
4. Focus on video
Have you heard the quote “a picture is worth a thousand words”? I am sure you have. Consider this, a blog is made of words and a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video tells an entire story.
Video marketing is an amazing way to showcase your products/services besides boosting web traffic. You should keep this in mind while creating an online store to add a fair amount of video content on your website. Below are a few basic rules to consider while creating video content.
Keep it short and simple.
Pick the right audio.
Use high-quality video and images.
Answer questions such as why your product is the best value for money.
Avoid using a sales pitch.
Your aim here should be to grab your audience's attention within the first five seconds and then retain it. Also, make sure it is share-worthy.
5. Fill in all the gaps
This is the final tried and tested tip to help woo competitor traffic to your ecommerce website. It requires you to look out for any gaps in the market that you can fill. This could be anything from offering a unique product or service this is missing t providing useful and informative answers of less common questions regarding products/services.
But why stop here, you can reach one step ahead and ask your audience directly on social media about the type of products and services they would like to see become available. This is an interesting way of finding out what’s missing from the market.
This is quite similar to the time when you created an online store where you did the research before bringing in the product for the first time.
After doing this research part, you will have a clear idea of what direction to take next. And when you did, do not hesitate to take the leap of faith. There are chances your competitors may release something similar in the future but for now, the market is yours. Take it!
So, there you have five tried and tested tips for gaining competitors’ customers to your ecommerce website. We at StoreHippo ecommerce platform offer a host of inbuilt tools and techniques to help generate more sales for your business. These include a strong discount engine to tweak pricing and offer free deals, promotions etc.
StoreHippo is an SEO-friendly platform that can help you optimize your website to get better SERP ranking and hence traffic. Also, a better display of your products with large product images, zoom and videos on product pages helps you convert the traffic faster. The platform helps you with easy integration with all the popular social media platforms which boosts your visibility on social media and other digital channels. You can also integrate with customer support tools of your choice to offer multi-channel support to your customers.
Isn’t this all you needed to steal the traffic from your competitors? Agree don’t you!
So, what are you waiting for? Join us today and create an online store with our 14-day free trial. You can also book a demo to explore the entire range of features offered by StoreHippo.
Leave a Reply