Making the first sale is a significant milestone for every business owner. Particularly when you want to sell online and start an e-commerce business with less money, sealing this first sale takes considerable focus and time. From finalizing a product idea to build a full-fledged online store and then marketing the same, a lot goes into launching your online business. With a plethora of channels available to promote your business, it can often be difficult to find the right ones that can produce worthwhile results in less time.
For many aspiring entrepreneurs, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of revising their online store endlessly to the level of perfection and not investing adequate efforts in one of the most important business tasks – which is to get people to your store.
Also, the chances are that you have already searched for the following aspects but couldn’t get much out of them:
- How to increase online sales fast?
- Powerful strategies you can implement to boost online sales in 2023
- Tips and tricks to sell more and sell fast
If you are looking for the right answer to how to make your first sale in one month, this blog post is meant for you.
You will get to know about:
- Why does your online store need targeted traffic?
- 9 tips to get your first sale in one month
Why Does Your Online Store Need Targeted Traffic (Not Just a Random Surge in Traffic)?
If you are planning to launch your online store, it is fair to assume you are improving: analyzing competition, redefining checkout, and prioritizing shipping strategy as you build a business behind closed doors. However, real improvement happens when you make your store open to the world. You do not get to know what’s improving unless there’s a quantifiable benchmark backed by numbers.
You won’t be able to know if the target audience is interested in your products if there is no traffic. You won’t be able to know if the product pricing is too high or low if there is no traffic. You won’t be able to understand if your brand is meant for the target audience if (you guessed it right) – there’s no traffic.
That’s why traffic to your online store is quite important. Since every store visitor might not be a good prospect, you need to further trim down the traffic to include more potential customers. To get that traffic, you need to market your e-commerce store and make your first sale.
5 Things to Keep in Mind Before You Start Marketing Your Online Store
- Double-check that your online store is ready to serve your customers and all the information – product, product pricing, etc. is up to date.
- Select the right channels to market your brand/product lineup. For example, if you are selling eyewear directly to customers, you will need to know more about D2C marketing and not LinkedIn marketing.
- Define your target audience and build an ideal customer persona.
- Set up Google Analytics to keep a close eye on the traffic and see how it changes as you market your brand.
- Make sure you are following a well-crafted business plan before you begin with your marketing strategies.
7 Tips to Make Your First Sale in One Month
Leverage your personal network
There’s nothing wrong with making your first sale using your personal connections. Many individuals following the basics of entrepreneurship do that.
To market your business to the right audience, share updates about your online store as a Facebook post, a tweet on Twitter, or an Instagram post. Announce your business achievement to the entire community of friends and family. You can even email some of your closest connections directly to spread the word about the launch of your e-commerce store.
Also, ask for feedback on the overall store experience and products to see if anything needs to be changed before you start selling to the public.
Keep in mind that not everyone is going to buy from you and it’s okay. The idea here is to bring in traffic to your store and introduce it into the online space.
Join online groups and communities
Just as how you seek referrals by posting in online communities and groups, you can drive traffic to your e-commerce store through them. Being able to put a link to your store in the right places can give a good start.
For this, join both open and closed communities available on WhatsApp and Facebook – particularly the ones that include your target customers. Build genuine connections with the community members and benefit the group members with a link to your store along a group-specific discount code.
Pro Tip: Join communities and groups with particular interests relevant to what you sell online. For example, if you sell personal care products, join communities where people share tips, ideas, and products for personal care to drive relevant traffic.
Create social media profiles for your brand
It does not make much sense to keep on posting about your brand or products on your personal social media accounts. That’s why it is important to set up brand profiles/accounts on different platforms, particularly the ones where your target audience is most active.
Once these profiles are 100% complete and activated, you can start sharing product photos, videos, and customer reviews on them proactively. It would be better to streamline this marketing plan by building a social media calendar to post consistently on various channels.
You do not have to create a brand profile on every social media platform. Simply start with just one and increase the social presence gradually.
Interesting Read: All About Social Selling
Explore Facebook and Instagram advertising
While organic marketing efforts may take some time to get results, you can also start exploring paid marketing on Facebook and Instagram to reach the right audience. The targeting capabilities of these platforms can help you reach a qualified audience in less time. You can select the ad targeting based on the demographics of your ideal customer and even benefit from different formats of advertising on these channels.
Before you invest your time and efforts, we recommend you read the following guides:
- The Ultimate Guide to Paid Advertising in 2023
- The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing (SMM) in 2023
Start with branded or product-centric Google Ads
For many online buyers, the journey begins with a Google search. With Google Ads, you can make your online store appear at the top of the SERPs when customers search for products like yours. Google Ads is a comprehensive suite allowing you to invest in different types of ads, including:
- Text ads in search results
- Banner ads having your product photo and price
- Video ads
- Call-only ads and more
Reach out to both influencers and bloggers
Most publishers and even influencers are on the lookout for fresh stories and content for their audience. With a solid pitch of your brand, a good story around your product, or an interesting product lineup, you can win a spot on a blog that has already established a high domain authority in its niche. To do this, look for blogs in your segment or those writing about the same target audience. Try pitching them about your e-commerce store and get published either for free or on a paid basis.
Similarly, you can work with influencers – the creators having a sizable audience in your niche, to tap into an existing base of loyal buyers and make your first sale.
Make strategic partnerships
You can get your brand/products in front of some other brand’s customers by making strategic partnerships with non-competitive yet like-minded brands. The chances are these brands already attract the kind of customers you are looking for to make your first few sales.
This can be done in the following ways:
- Sponsoring an event
- Creating a product bundle with some other brand and market it together
- Run a contest and give your product(s) as a prize for it, etc.
Get Your Brand Out There to Make Your First Sale
Attracting relevant traffic to your online store is more about connecting the dots that pave the way for your buyers to reach your products. That’s what makes business marketing quite overwhelming – the fact that there are endless possibilities out there.
Explore, try, fail, and improve – the only mantra to succeed in running an online business. If you are still struggling, explore this complete guide to starting an e-commerce business.
