Hello one and all, welcome to part three of our ongoing series on advertising your online platform. We’ve already covered content marketing and influencer marketing in previous articles, and this time, our friendly experts at Linkeo Ltd. will be covering the basics of a few techniques.

How to Promote a New Online Store with Email Marketing

Analysts have noted that email marketing generates a higher ROI than any other acquisition channel, since the algorithms that power social media, Facebook and Google have resulted in an ever-rising cost of doing business and reaching customers for online retailers. Email allows retailers to intimately connect with and address their most loyal customers while enabling budding startups to develop armies of influencers. Something all experts advise is to focus on your database. Emails are the only thing without an algorithm at play.

Even if you don’t focus on social media marketing alongside email marketing, you can start building your email list on day one. Building a database of emails is as simple as including an email subscriptions form somewhere on your website. Capturing the contact information of your earliest visitors lets you engage with those visitors over time and leverage that engagement to drive conversions. It’s a great way to maximize value on a sustainable basis.

How to Promote a New Online Store on Social Media

Right from the beginning, it’s important to go live with your social media marketing efforts. This includes building a following and also making sure you have a presence on all major global platforms. The genius behind social media marketing is that it is designed to spread ideas and news like wildfire. As a result, it should be one of the first channels for new companies to get exposure and bring traffic to their stores.

And while it’s possible to grow your social following organically, you may also want to consider running paid ads.

Tips for Succeeding with Paid Ads on Social Media Channels

Below is a curated selection of tips for succeeding with paid ads on social media.

• The key to social media advertising is the accuracy of your demographic targeting. You can use interests, hobbies, followed pages, ages, job titles, etc. to get incredibly granular with who you show your ads to.
• Create an engaging video that educates or entertains your audience. This will allow you to get a gauge for your potential strongest supporters.
• Retarget the portion of the audience who watched the video past the halfway mark with a promo ad.
• Retarget the users who didn’t make a purchase with a special offer. Make them enter their email addresses to claim the offer.
• Send out an email blast towards the end of the campaign with a follow-up message that sends out a separate promo built around social proof and an emotion-tugging CTA.

Even if you don’t hit your sales target after the campaign, you will have developed long-term content resources and generated an email list of interested users to target again in the future.”

However, you may need different approaches for organic and paid social campaigns. For instance, most customers will treat your social media feed like a brochure, going through your wide range of options before inquiring or going to your site. The content for this purpose is very much traditionally styled shoots and flat lays.

However, for paid acquisition campaigns, the content needs to be much more emotive. Re-marketing content, including video and stills, must be more focused on conversion messages regarding your unique selling propositions.

So Which Promotion Tactic Should You Choose?

After exploring the many options presented in our last three articles, you should now hopefully have tons of ideas for new ways to promote your online store. But where should you start?

Building your email list is a great place to start because you can do it on a tight budget, and you can use the email addresses you gather in every other campaign you run in the future.

Plus, email marketing is effective no matter what you’re selling. And that’s key because the best way to promote a new store really depends on your audience and your product—more specifically the cost.

On a budget, we recommend influencers, blogging, and email. Once you’ve hit comfortable numbers and you have the funds to really invest, the best long-term strategy will be dialing into advertising profitability.