Best Tips for Promoting an Online Store During Quarantine

Quarantine has become an extremely difficult time for many businesses. All the cafes, bars, spa salons, and shopping centers are closed, and most offices too! 

However, it is not a bad time for online stores. Quarantine gives people no other possibility than to order online. Whether it is clothes, any kind of materials, goods that have entertainment purposes, or decorations. Groceries and goods for the household are very popular as well while people are afraid to leave their houses. 

Why does everyone buy so much stuff online? 

We mean, lots of people lost their jobs or had to take a compulsory vacation, no one knows when the lockdown will end, and everything is so unsteady at the moment. Still, people keep buying as many goods as they did before the social distancing began. We started to buy even more and that seems ridiculous taking into account the situation.

People buy things because they are panic or bored or it makes them feel better or they have started new hobbies or sports and now they need new equipment, or they want to feel like social distancing is not getting into the normal order of things. That’s why Shopify & Amazon stocks are skyrocketing! No matter what the reason is, the fact that online stores are becoming even a bigger thing than they used to be is not a topic to discuss.  

So, if your website is not optimized, then act quickly to initiate the website redesign process.

Yet, many people got the idea of how popular online stores are becoming. Consequently, more and more shops are opening every day. The field of online ma rketing is getting really hot right now. 

In order to attract customers and to make the most out of your online business, you have to make sure that your online store is not drowning amongst the others. There are just so many stores launching that yours can become invisible. 

How do you avoid such a scenario?

You have to know to promote your online store. Promotion becomes different right now since quarantine has begun. It is one of the things that quarantine made a challenge of – we all have to find new ways of promotion.  

You can find a lot of advice on how to promote your online business. Some of them are useful, some are not working at all. Yet, finding out whether the method is working or not is time- and money-consuming. A bad promotion campaign can also hurt your reputation. 

We are here to save your efforts! After long research, we have gathered only the best tips for promoting an online store during the quarantine.

These promotion tips will definitely make you a better entrepreneur, make your store better than the others, and will help your business to grow.   

With no further ado, the best out of best!

highly recommended related post – How To Start An Online Store With No Money & Without Inventory In USA & WorldWide Legally? Free Ways In 2022 [No Skill Required]

Make Sure You Are Doing It Right

There is no sense in the promotion at all if your online store is just bad. You can create amazing adds and run the most engaging and creative campaigns that will bring you a lot of customers. However, the moment they decided to buy something, they understand that you do not have the things they want or they can not even find the “buy” button. Maybe your name is off or sounds totally unprofessional. Do you sell the products that people want or need?

There are a lot of things that promotions can not fix. Before starting to promote your business, do this:

• make sure your site is easy to use, and your page looks attractive
• check if all the descriptions of the goods contain all the relevant information
• put up only the up-to-date prices
• look at the stores of your rivals: what the prices are, how does their store look like
• sell the products that are sought for

The last point is one of the most important. During the coronavirus quarantine, the most desirable products are virus protection products (gloves, masks, sanitizers), fitness equipment (kettlebells, yoga mats, sports clothing, fitness balls), toilet paper and canned food.

As soon as you have a nice store, you can start to promote it!

 Combine Platforms

The site is usually not enough. 

You can automate customer engagement & conversation rate by taking help from different plaform like Spectrm AI Chatbot

The traffic on social media is crazy right now. People do not have something better to do than scrolling through boring news, looking at memes, or watching lives. Why not use such a great opportunity to promote your store?

Instagram was known as a good platform for Ecommerce even before the coronavirus outbreak. Young users, as well as grown-ups, usually have their favorite stores on Instagram. It is easy to browse since we have been using this platform a lot, and one can track updates about new products without putting a lot of effort into it. 

So we advise creating the account of your store with a link to your website, stated in the bio. 

We All Love Sales

Sales are a great way to attract customers. You can make seasonal sales (for example, spring sales, Quarantine sales, International books day, etc.) or to do them just because.

It is important to make it regularly, just so you know that you have regular clients and attract newcomers. 

If you followed the tip about Instagram, you can make giveaways. Set the rules, that the person has to follow your page, tag friends, and repost your giveaway post to their story. 

Giveaways have a wide range of benefits, as follows:

• it helps you to grow your network 
• it is a cheap promotion way (ten sanitizers will not cost you a fortune but the number of customers who will come and take a look at your sanitizers and want to buy them (if you followed our tip number 1), will make you a much bigger profit)
• it helps to make your customers loyal (giveaway is a way to say a big “thank you” to people who shop at your store and to share some love in such difficult times)
•  people will know about the existence of your online store
• it does not require special knowledge (targeted advertisement is a difficult thing to do. Many companies hire targeting specialists for that task who know the potential customer and can track down the results of the adds campaign. Giveaway is just posting a picture and a text) 
• it will get people excited (more than sales, we love to win. Giveaway is a competition where you do not have to put much effort into it but you still have a chance to win)

As you see, sales and giveaways are great ways to announce your existence and generating leads (potential customers). Even though you will lose some money in the process, you will gain much more in the long-term.

Start a Blog

Starting a blog is a way of promotion people usually overlook and that is sad. Yet, you can be better than others. People will visit your site not just to shop. If someone is looking for a piece of advice or useful information, they can land on your site. Then, if the content is good, they may explore more and find out that is is a shop actually. 

You can also promote your products in your blog. A blog is to some extend is a way to describe when and how people can use your product. Show the actual value of your product. 

If you have a blog, you can promote it (and your store, consequently) by guest posting. Guest posting means that you are writing a blog entry for another company or a blog and they will post it with a link to your website and some information about you. Try to write for the sites that have a bigger audience than you do.

If you have a famous blog, you can get money for promoting others. People are ready to pay to big blogs if they add a link to their site or promote their products. Additional profit will not be something extra during a coronavirus lockdown.

Create an Engaging Newsletter

If you do not want your customers to forget about your online store, you have to remind them about yourself. Newsletters are a great way to do so. It can also make relationships between you and your customer more personal (at least he or she thinks so), since newsletters are sent to personal emails and good ones have the name of the customer in it. 

We have also some common tips for a great newsletter here:

• do not sell, be informative 

People are not really likely to open an email that starts with “Check out new incomings of the week”. Moreover, the risk that they will unsubscribe is growing immediately. Try to put it like “Coronavirus lockdown: everything you need to make the social distancing less stressful”. It is also a great opportunity to show that you are expert in what you are selling

• make sure you have an engaging headline 

If the headline is not interesting, a customer will not open the email and will not find out what great content you have put inside

• consistently scheduled and relevant

Let your customers be prepared that you will send them an email with useful information every Friday, for example. Make your newsletter “new”. Do not talk about how important jogging is when people are not allowed to leave their houses

• Put links into your newsletter

The whole point of the newsletter is that a customer visits your online store. Since customers are kind of lazy, they will not search for your store`s name in google and they will not look for a specific product you have mentioned on your site)

• Make an “unsubscribe” button

It will be just irritating if you forget about that. You want to make your customers happy even if it means that unsubscribing to your newsletter is what will make them happier. If you do not leave that possibility, the chance that a customer will never visit your online store ever again is super high

A Coupon in Their Package Will Do The Job

It is another part of everyone love sales. If a customer gets a package and there is a coupon for a 5 percent off for their next shopping spree, they are very likely to visit your shop once again just to use this coupon. 

You can play with the idea of putting an expiry date on it. It happens a lot that customers have coupons but they know that they have all the time in the world to use it. As a result, they forget about it and it ends up in a trash bin. Yet, if there is an expiry date and you send them a message a week before the coupon expires, they get stressed about the possibility of losing their sale.

You can also put a little surprise in there, like a pair of gloves or a mask. This small gesture boosts up the likelihood that you will get a very sweet review on the site, comment on your Instagram, or that they will promote your store on their social media!

These tips for promoting your online store during coronavirus lockdown will attract the attention of your customers in no time and you can get better than other online shops, just by improving your promotions techniques. 

Promoting your online store requires some effort and money. However, remember that all successful entrepreneurs know that their investment pays it off. Whether it is about new clients or the loyalty of your old customers, your profit will definitely increase in the long run. It means that your online store will be popular not only during coronavirus lockdown but will be a source of profit long after the pandemic is over.