Cyberspace On Aisle Five
Today’s world is the world hallmarked by internet revolution. The dot com boom has changed the way businesses operate. It has led to evolution of new means of communication. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace have become popular meeting points in the virtual world.
Entrepreneurs and business owners now look up to cyberspace for attracting customers in real life. Search engine optimization, social media optimization, viral marketing, internet marketing etc are the tools to attract the consumers to the website.
As a business owner it is important for you to understand that web traffic will only increase your visibility online unless you have shopping cart and express checkout facility on your site. If you do not have a fully fledged ecommerce site then you must think of alternative options to pull these virtual customers to your brick and mortar store.
When you look at search engine optimization reports, you get a fair idea of how many people visited your site and which product pages were visited most often. You need to understand that people who have visited your pages are people existing in physical world. They are not BOTS. If they have viewed your website it means that they were looking for products that you offer. Now your job is to divert these customers from the website to the store. They should be able to buy your products.
There are several ways in which you can do it. For example you can provide online discount coupons which can be redeemed only on a store purchase. People will not want to miss out on attractive discount coupons. You can up-sell many items when they come to the store. Another way of attracting them is to run online contests where they can pick up their prizes in form of gift vouchers from the store.
You can also arrange special events at the store. Book signing by the author or CD signing by the singer can attract lots of fans to your store. Your increased sales can help you in recovering the event expense.
Do not just be happy by your increased page ranking. You must make every conscious effort to turn your internet visitors into real time shoppers. Your store managers should contribute ideas to derive sales from internet. You can also increase your sales by setting up an e-commerce site and waiving off the shipment charges. Consumers prefer vendors who deliver the goods without any shipment charges.
If you regularly set up contests and deals on your website; consumers will get into the habit of checking your website for weekly deals. This is going to have a dual impact. Firstly you will have increased web traffic and loyal customer base and secondly your stores will have increased number of visitors.
Internet can be effectively used to generate revenue. You should think of creative offers and out of the box contests to drive them to the site. You should set the momentum in such a way that consumers come to your store and look out for cyberspace on aisle five.