If you’re a small business that has traditionally relied on off-line sales from bricks & mortar shops, the impact has probably made that difficult to continue.
But there’s hope out there: pivoting your business to the digital world can really help your business scale by reaching new audiences, gaining more customer insights and benefiting from lower marketing costs. In this short blog post, we want to show you the three reasons why you should start selling online.
- Reach new audiences
If you’re used to selling from a local shop, your customer base was probably very limited to those in your neighbourhood or passers-by. High street shops are a great shopfront for your brand, but sadly they restrict the number of people that hear about you. With an online shop, you can reach anywhere in the world!
By creating an online shop, you can now reach a wide range of new audiences locally but also globally. Online sales have greatly benefited from the ease of deliveries, and with so many new shipping alternatives it’s now easier than ever to send your products to customers. There are also numerous third-party solution warehouses that can help you with the pick and packing of your products, or you can do it yourself at home (or even from your high street shop).
- Gain more insights form your customers
If you used to rely on retail sales, you probably weren’t able to gain much information about who your customers really are. When selling online, you’ll have access to incredible amounts of valuable data that will help you perfect your products, market to new customers and much more.
Some of the insights you can expect to gain includes: age groups, average time spent shopping, how many times one customers goes onto your website before they shop from you, where customers hear from you in the first place, what messaging works better to sale products, etc.
Use the data effectively, and you can easily increase your sales by targeting your products and customers better.
- Lower marketing costs
Advertising your website online has become a lot cheaper than traditional methods. With the use of social media, email marketing and content marketing, you can reach new audiences and nurture your existing clients with the click of a button. Most of these services are either free or very low-cost to run and will only need your time as well as some creativity. Online advertising is a great tool to increase traffic to your online shop and boost sales.
Sound like a good idea? Wandsworth Council, in partnership with Enterprise Nation, has launched Wandsworth Digital a FREE support programme for businesses in the borough who want to start selling online. You can find out more and apply here.
