4 tips for more leads in your online shop

The goal of every online shop is to convince prospective customers of the shop and the products. Ideally, visitors arrive into the shop, trust the company and find the right product, so that a successful purchase is imminent. However, this happens only in the rarest of cases. After all, the average conversion rate in e-commerce ranges from 2 to 5 percent.

So what happens to the remaining 95 to 98 percent? You’re nowhere near convincing all potential customers to buy quickly. So take advantage of the great potential for lead generation to convert prospects into paying customers down the road. In this article, you’ll learn how to generate leads in e-commerce.

Generating leads: Success factor in e-commerce

By generating leads, you create the opportunity to interact with prospects and positively influence the purchase decision with the help of well thought-out lead management. Before this can happen, you must first generate the leads.

But what exactly are leads in e-commerce? Leads are potential customers who express interest in your products or online shop. In order for interested parties to be generated into leads, they have to provide a company with some personal data – for example, their phone number or email address, which is much more common in e-commerce.

As an online merchant, you can interact with these leads in the next step and convince them of your shop and your products with a well thought-out strategy. Specifically, lead generation has several advantages for your you, all of which are important for sustainable business success:

1. Win new customers

By generating leads, you strengthen your customer acquisition. Very few customers are actually ready to buy at the time they are in your online shop. They will leave the shop and only very few will return. To prevent them from ending up with the competition at a later date, you as an online merchant should generate the prospects who are not ready to buy into leads. Afterwards, these can be converted into new customers with the help of newsletter marketing.

Want to know what other options you have for winning new customers? Read the article How to win new customers in e-commerce.

2. Expand existing customer base

See visitors who are not ready to buy as an opportunity. If a potential customer is not yet ready to buy but can be generated as a lead, you can use the newsletter to increase their loyalty to your online shop. Unlike customers who make a purchase immediately and may not return, newsletter leads engage with your business in depth beforehand. With good content and lots of added value in the newsletter, you accordingly expand your existing customer base, which significantly increases customer lifetime value.

Learn more about how to increase customer loyalty in your online shop.

3. Use traffic potentials

With an average conversion rate of 2 to 5 percent, there is a lot of potential waiting for you in your online shop. Seize this opportunity and use the flow of visitors to generate leads. Otherwise, you won’t even begin to use the potential of the hard-won traffic profitably for your business.

Channels for successful lead generation

Companies use different channels for lead generation. Social media and the company’s own website are particularly popular and promising. Offline generation of leads – for example at trade fairs – is particularly useful for the B2B sector. As an online company, however, you should clearly focus on online channels. After all, your target group is just a click away from you.

Generate leads in your own online shop

The best way to generate quality leads is through your own website. After all, the visitor is in the shop for a reason. Your online shop, the offered products or your content have already aroused the first interest. Now you have to use this interest and either convince the visitor to buy or win him as a lead. To do this, place a form in suitable places to request contact details.

• Footer: Be sure to place the lead generation form in the footer. This ensures that the visitor has the opportunity to sign up for the newsletter on every single page. In addition, this placement is in line with the user’s expectations.
• Blog CTA: Do you have a company blog where you provide your target group with content? In this case, place the form as a CTA at the end of blog posts or between paragraphs, as long as it is not too large and does not interfere with reading. The more compelling the content, the more leads you will generate.
• Newsletter Popups: Approach your customers proactively, but not too pushy, and use newsletter popups that generate leads automatically. To do this, use tools that provide different incentives for a newsletter subscription and play them out individually using intelligent data processing.

Learn more about newsletter popups.

Lead generation via social media

Social media is also great for lead generation. With a social media penetration of over 85% and an average daily usage time of just under 1.5 hours (source: We Are Social, Digital 2022 Report), social networks offer you many opportunities with which you can reach your target group and generate leads.

Meanwhile, Facebook and its competitors have specialized in generating leads. For example, forms can be combined with advertisements that not only encourage potential leads to enter their email addresses. The possibility of direct contact through Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or Instagram is also available here.

Since these forms of lead generation are paid tools, think carefully beforehand about who your target group is and where they spend time online. This will help you prevent wastage.

4 tips to help you generate leads successfully

Do you know which channels you use to successfully gain your leads? Then it’s time for implementation! But how exactly do you generate leads? We have 4 tips that will help you generate significantly more quality leads and reduce the cost of generating them.

1. Reduce data collection to a minimum

Whether through social media or your own website: The form is the decisive factor that determines the success or failure of your lead generation. So give in-depth thought to what data you want to ask for. The minimum data request is the email address. First and last name as well as date of birth are also useful for the further course of the customer relationship.

But beware: each additional data request reduces the success and ultimately results in you generating fewer leads. Therefore, the data request should be reduced to a minimum. For example, if you only ask for the email address, you can obtain more information about the lead as the customer relationship progresses.

2. Offer added value to potential leads

At the beginning of every lead generation is one question: what does the potential lead get out of sharing his or her data? Give the potential leads a good reason for sharing their personal data and provide added value. Possible incentives are the classic voucher as part of voucher marketing (e.g. 5% discount or €5 off the first order), a sweepstakes or FOMO – the fear of missing out. Since potential leads naturally have different personalities and needs, the targeted and individual use of these incentives leads to significantly more success in lead generation. However, this is only possible to a limited extent, as the form must be individually tailored.

The free newsletter popups from uptain provide a solution to this problem by delivering a slim form with incentives tailored to the individual visitor. The uptain® ALGORITHM recognizes the visitor’s needs based on different data and plays out the appropriate content at the right time.

3. Use owned media channels

To successfully generate leads, you don’t necessarily need a lot of budget. If you want to generate leads for free, owned media channels are a good option, i.e. the company’s own channels:

• Own website
• Blog article
• Email signature
• Social media

For this, use newsletter popups in your online shop, appealing CTAs in the blog articles, your email signature and a social media post with a reference to a newsletter subscription.

4. Get close to your target group

If you want to go a step further and actively approach your target group outside your own channels, online magazines, blogs and external newsletters are a good option. Look for media that have a similar target group. For example, do you have a DIY store? There are quite a few DIY blogs and DIY influencers on the web that are suitable partners for lead generation. In this way, you also increase your level of awareness in your target group.

In online magazines and blogs, you can also provide e-books for download that interest your target group. This approach is particularly suitable for B2B companies.

Lead management after lead generation

The goal of lead generation is to keep the leads loyal to the company in the further course and to convince them to make an initial purchase. How exactly this is to be done depends heavily on the industry and the target group. For B2C online shops, newsletters are the tool of choice when it comes to communicating with existing leads and increasing sales opportunities.

From this point on, your newsletter marketing strategy will determine whether or not you convince your leads. So, increase your opening rate and click rate. After all, it’s of little use if you generate leads but they don’t open, read, and ideally click the email to enter the shop.

Newsletters offer senders countless opportunities that should be used to the best of their potential:

• discount promotions
• product presentations
• current news
• recommendations
• teasers for blog articles
• competitions and raffles
• polls
• tips and tricks related to products
• seasonal promotions and special holidays

Informative content in form of teasers for blog articles pursue different goals than, for example, product introductions and recommendations. While a blog article can be just another touch point, product introductions can lead to a direct purchase. From the newsletter, you can guide the lead into the buying process with one click.

Generate leads and grow sustainably

It’s never too late for online shops to start generating leads. Even if you don’t have a sophisticated lead management strategy yet: Take advantage of the traffic and fill your email list. Via owned media channels, such as your own website, leads can be generated for free and quickly converted. The footer, the blog and the free newsletter popups from uptain are suitable for this.