How to make your first E-commerce Sale

Starting up an E-commerce store, or online store sounds exciting, but getting your first customer gives you jitters. Many new (even seasoned) entrepreneurs face this problem. Let’s see how to deal with this.

Getting your first customer is a milestone for every business, but sealing the deal takes a lot of hard work and persistence.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of perfection; given there are hundreds of ways to acquire your first customer. It’s easy to get lost to try and implement every new exciting idea which comes to your mind while constantly changing things, and waiting on too much for things to happen.

Focus on targeted traffic

When you start a new online store, you can easily get busy in selecting your brand colours, logo, fonts, pricing and many other minute details as you build your brand.

You can only get real improvement as you introduce your business to the world. You can’t understand the real-world scenarios and the market unless you go live and experience real potential customers. That is why traffic is so important.

Also, you may not know if there is actually any interest in your product for the people if you don’t drive traffic. You wouldn’t know if your brand is likeable to your targeted audience or not if you don’t focus on targeted traffic.

So now we know that traffic is crucial for any business to grow, let’s check out some tips and tactics.

Free traffic sources

Leverage your networks

There is nothing more important than word-of-mouth and many young entrepreneurs have started their businesses from personal connections. They may be your friends, family, relatives, colleagues, alumni, co-workers, and others.

Share your business across your online network too. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X whichever you are present and active on. This helps you to get the word out online and is important for the start.

You should also consider emailing your contact list which might include various businesses as well. Don’t be hesitant about asking them for a share, they don’t need to buy from you but sharing always helps to spread the word.

Join Online Communities

Online communities have a lot of potential in them. There are various online communities in different social media platforms. These are generally close-knit communities that share a similar interest.

Talking of similar interests, Reddit is another social media platform that is based on this idea only. Lots of Redditors take part in long discussions on various topics every day. You need to find out such groups which might have your unique audience and be diligently involved in conversations there where you have an opportunity to showcase your brand.

Another great place is Quora, which is a Question-based platform, where there are users asking questions and others replying to them. A strategy that works sometimes is searching for some questions that might be directly, or indirectly related to your brand. Next is to provide some value with your answers and in there you then can refer about your brand, if you get some good responses or upvotes.

Paid advertising

Although free traffic is good, most of businesses do require it at some point in their journey, so it is good if you have the knowledge, and also try a bit of paid advertising. 

There are various platforms for paid advertising. Each one is different, and you need to know the similarities and differences in them. You also need to figure out which platform suits your business more.

Before starting paid ads, here is a small tip: First populate your main social media feeds with some valuable post, grow a bit organically then push it via ads. Otherwise you might have a bunch of people coming to your site and social channels and then going away without seeing anything.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular, and old social media platforms out there, and their audience is diverse in terms of age, gender, income and ethnicity.

Facebook is good for spreading Brand Awareness and Reach. They have dedicated campaigns for those objectives. 

They have the option of finding out your custom audience too; that is segregation of your traffic and channelizing your audience based on how much they are warm or cold in respect of your ads.

Instagram

Instagram is another popular website which is popular among the young generation. Although there are more millennials in it striving for recognition, it can be a good spot for you to find out your potential customers.

Instagram ads are connected with Facebook, and although they don't have as many metrics as Facebook, it has Smart Insights which help in acquiring data from running the same adsets in Facebook and Instagram.

Hashtags is also an important factor in Instagram, as it helps to connect with the ongoing trend in Reels using various templates.

X (Formerly Twitter)

X ads are a costly bunch,  which started out as a celebrity-oriented follow-based platform, and now has people of different backgrounds and a sizeable portion of millennials too.

I won’t suggest starting out with X ads in the initial phase, as the brand awareness of your store would be low.

Once you have a certain amount of customers, you can reach out to them with your store account on X and build your own follower base there. You can start advertising then.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a platform which is quite different from the bunch. This platform is mostly used by professionals, whether a employee or an entrepreneur, you have people here meaning business.

Although traffic can be less compared to the other social media platforms, you can find businesses here who are willing to listen to you and interested in your business.

Advertising in Linkedin is also a little on the heavier side, but it has good options such as private message ads where you can curate and target very specific, niche businesses and business people who might be interested in your business.

It has a premium feature too, where you can send a certain amount of personalized inMails where you can directly reach out to potential customers and businesses.

Google Ads

Google is a search engine which is still the most sought-after search engine in the whole world to look up for something.

If your store has some product which has some form in the market already and is not a totally unique product, then investing in Google Ads is a must.

It has two networks: Search where ads will appear when people start searching, and the placement of your ad depends on how you fare in the bidding. The higher your ad in the search result, the higher the clickability.

The second network is Display, where Google shall show your ads in various websites and portals, including YouTube, which it finds relevant.

Keyword research is very important for Google ads and it should be done before you start crafting your ad.

Influencer Marketing

Big brands aren’t the only ones that can hire influencers.

Small businesses also can utilize influencers as a way to spread out the words about your business quickly.

Influencers exist on every channel from Instagram to YouTube to Instagram. And while you can reach out to them directly to negotiate a deal, several influencer marketplaces connect customers with brands.

Some examples of them are Grapevine, Famebit and Crowdtap.

Last words

There are various way that you can try out and grow, but remember, every initial business that starts has to go through a tough phase of trial and error.

Optimization is the key: You need to continuously optimize your marketing campaigns, your social media strategies, your branding choices and so on. 

You need to Tweak your product and/ or your messaging if you aren’t getting your desired result. You need to identify the problem that is causing your sales to fall or traffic to lessen and find out the solution.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Exploring and experimenting fearlessly is the key. So go out there, explore, adapt, conquer. The world is your oyster!