[Shopify] Three ways to attract customers. Attracting customers is vital for online shops.

Even if you create and launch an e-commerce website, that alone will not attract customers!

To put it bluntly, a newly launched website is nothing more than a " house in the middle of the desert ". If you think "it will sell once it's launched", you will only suffer. So, what are the actual ways to attract customers? What you can do online can be divided into three main ways, so let's take a closer look at these methods!

If you keep in mind how to attract customers to your e-commerce site before creating it, your sales will start to increase much more efficiently!

Before creating an e-commerce site, be sure to consider how you will attract customers.

With a physical store, depending on the location, people will usually pass by and there is a chance that they will be aware of the store, such as "There's a store like that over there." However, unfortunately, an e-commerce site will be starting out in a location right in the middle of the desert.

The chances of someone walking into the middle of the desert are not zero, but they are almost nonexistent.

So you have to attract customers. In other words...

Our store is here!

We need signs that will appeal to people and encourage them to walk over.

There are three main ways to do this:

• SNS (Instagram, TikTok, etc.)
• Advertisement (this time online advertising)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

With these three points in mind, you need to think about how to attract customers based on your budget and the times you want to avoid!

Note that this article will not cover "real world" methods of attracting customers, but if you have a physical store then of course you will attract customers, and there are other methods of attracting customers such as advertising in free papers and magazines.

Attract customers through social media

I think it is the most essential element in creating an EC website. First, let's make a table showing the effects of SNS...

The table will be explained later.

Well, since it's free to start using, I think it's the first method that everyone thinks of, and once you can actually establish it as a way to attract customers, it's an extremely cost-effective SNS.

However, the world is not so kind, so I hope you will read it carefully.

When we think of SNS, tools that come to mind are "Instagram," "Facebook," "X" (formerly Twitter), "YouTube," and "Tiktok." "LINE" may also be counted as SNS, but it is a bit different, so we will write about that at the end of this chapter.

When it comes to SNS initiatives, I think of "free" so I wrote "cheap...?" . Of course, there is a reason for this.

If you go viral on SNS, your awareness will spread all at once, and you can attract more and more customers from there! It may be a tool that makes you dream of such a thing, but in reality, very few things go viral. Going viral is like winning the lottery, and everyone wants to go viral, so they post every day, but the reality is that there is not even one person who goes viral on a daily basis in Japan. Going viral is not something that can be done strategically, so in reality, the only way to grow your social media strategy is to grow your social media presence "little by little."

If you actually try it, you'll see that for amateur work, sparkly content can grow to a decent extent, but even for sparkly content, it's an extremely difficult task to gain four-digit followers immediately after starting out.In the industry, those with more than 10,000 followers, like celebrities, are worshipped as having an enormous number of followers and are referred to as "ten thousand accounts."

This is a number that would be expected if you follow celebrities, but that's not the case for ordinary people.

However, one of the features of SNS is that it allows you to steadily grow your reach in a fairly strategic way !

★ It went viral in one go and has 10,000 accounts

This is not realistic, so don't aim for it. Instead, the quickest and most effective way is to take a steady approach and aim for four figures.

It may seem like having a lot of followers is a good thing, but when you want to sell things on an EC site, the intensity of your fans is far more important than the number of followers.

We can prove this, as among the accounts we handle, there are some that have 3,000 followers and annual sales of over 20 million yen .

Specialize first

If that happens, the question arises of how to grow your social media presence, and this requires a fairly strategic approach.

Above all, accounts that are easy to understand and specialize in something are more likely to be followed, so make sure it's clear what your account is communicating.

"I can do anything!" may seem like a strong message at first glance, but the recipient won't understand what you are trying to communicate.

For example, if you want to eat ramen and there is a "family restaurant" and a "ramen shop" next to each other, which one would you go to? (without considering whether there are families or not lol)

Most people would probably choose "ramen restaurant."

In the same way, if you want information about something, you will follow specialized accounts.

In addition, the information displayed is basically decided by the algorithm of each SNS , but if you can get the algorithm to recognize your account as an account for ____, it is more likely to be displayed preferentially! Therefore, specialization is a very important strategy .

Choose a medium

The next important thing to decide is which media to focus your activities on, but this will vary depending on the product and the target age group.

TikTok is a very effective way to target young people , but on the other hand, TikTok is hardly watched by people over 40. Even if you try to sell your "special bonsai" on TikTok, you will hardly sell any.

Instagram still seems to be strong among people in their 30s and 40s, and for those in their 40s and 50s, Facebook is still surprisingly strong!

YouTube tends to be strong for all generations and products , but it is also the hardest to grow, and since it is video content, how do you create it? It is one of the media that is extremely difficult . If it hits the mark, it will be big.

When it comes to products , Instagram is especially powerful for apparel and women's products . Instagram influencers' sites have a truly phenomenal ability to attract customers, so it's easy to see why apparel companies value influencers.

Instagram is often weak for men, and X (formerly Twitter) can be surprisingly effective , so it is necessary to determine which is the best fit for each product.

It would be ideal if you could expand to all of them, but in reality, the operational know-how is slightly different and it's difficult to manage them all, so start by developing one thing!

Is it possible to operate it?

Once the medium has been selected, the next step is to actually put it into operation.

Although the medium is different, there are some things that can be said about all social media.

In any case, you need to update it frequently.

This is the only thing I can say for sure.

Simply put, all social media platforms have a system that prioritizes the display of "new posts." So, in order to get your posts displayed at the top of the list, you should update your posts as often as possible.

The golden time is usually around 12 hours after posting, so posting first thing in the morning may be less effective in the evening, so it's important to have a posting strategy that takes into account the times your target audience is likely to be most active.

Many people post using a timer, so posting at 8:03 is sometimes better than posting at 8:00. Simply put, there are a lot of timer posts at "exact time," so posting three minutes later is slightly higher in the latest rankings and has fewer competitors.

...If you've written this far and are thinking, "Okay, I get it! Let's give it a try!!", then you will probably try it at first... at first.

This doesn't improve either. It makes me hate it because it doesn't improve...it makes me hate it so I quit.

This golden vicious cycle is the biggest reason why social media does not grow.

This is where I first wrote "Cheap...?", but in the end it's better to ask a professional. To be honest, there are very few people who can grow their business through personal management. It's a completely gut feeling, but the chances are about 1 in 100 people.

The worst pattern is to "get a female employee to do it." This actually works in rare cases! However, the girls who do it well are highly sensitive to information. As a result, they will not work for your current salary. That's because... they realize that they have the ability to earn money. Because they are highly sensitive to information. As a result, they quit. If they quit, it's over. That's what employees do...

To keep them, you may have to pay a 100,000 yen increase in monthly salary. It's a world with that kind of destructive power. So it's better to outsource from the beginning! I think.

It simply requires continuity, and although it will cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yen a month, it's cheaper than hiring someone, and you can quit if you want to.

• Doing nothing = no sales
• Asking employees = Almost never works
• Outsourcing = Getting decent results

This is the easiest situation to think of, and while this doesn't necessarily apply to everything, it does come down to this.

LINE is a bit different

I guess LINE can be counted as a social networking site, but it's a bit different.

It is more of a communication tool, so it is similar to "email," and is rarely the "first step" in attracting customers. Other SNS are for letting people know about your existence, but LINE is a tool that should be used after people know about your existence and before they buy.

I think that in the past, this genre was mainly email newsletters, but nowadays, many people don't use email, so LINE is the main method and the main battlefield . Yes, it's literally a battlefield.

Some people even say that it's best to connect all SNS to LINE! It's a key part of the strategy!

Summary of SNS

Ultimately, you should use social media!

As for the table I wrote at the beginning, the main factor is that it is "highly valuable as an asset," and in reality it costs quite a bit of money and doesn't grow quickly, so it takes time. However, there is a high possibility that it will be known by people with a clear sense of purpose, the "apparent layer," who are customers who say "I want that information," so as long as you continue to send that information, your followers themselves will become an "asset."

If you are able to operate an e-commerce site while having the assets of followers on social media, your followers themselves will become your customers, and they will also help spread the word, creating the perfect situation for sales without spending on advertising.

You won't get to this point unless you do it, so it's a strategy that you absolutely must implement.

Advertising Strategy

Among the strategies for an e-commerce site, advertising is by far the most expensive, but it is extremely effective .

I'm sure you all search on Google, but you've probably noticed that the top three or four results have "sponsored" in them, right? Those are ads called "listing ads."

Also, you may have experienced being harassed by the same ads on various websites, wondering "Where did they get my information?" This is "retargeting ads."

For example, if you want to buy an air conditioner, when you search a website, you may come across an article like "Top 5 air conditioners written this summer." That is an "affiliate ad." If you click on the link to the product information from there and make a purchase, the site owner will receive a commission.

Credit cards have a high reward rate, so some people even run affiliate sites using Google search listing ads to attract visitors to their "Top 5 Credit Cards" website. From the user's perspective, it's like they're jumping from ad to ad.

I can't introduce them all here, but I'll introduce a few.

Pay-per-click advertising

This is probably the most common ad you see, isn't it? It's the one that comes up at the top when you search on Google or Yahoo.

It's easy to tell because it's the same old ones labeled "Sponsored," but the first thing that comes up is a really strong point, and if the ad here is attractive, you'll want to click on it, right?

The feature of this ad is that you decide the search words that will be displayed, and you are charged for each click that is displayed. The price of each click is determined in an auction format.

"We can pay 100 yen per click."

"I can pay 120 yen."

In that case, 120 yen will be displayed preferentially. However, since each sponsor also sets a budget limit, it doesn't mean that people who spend 100 yen won't be displayed at all. It's just that the chances of being displayed will be lower.

If you target an extremely popular word, you could pay 1,000 yen per click, so you need to carefully consider which words to advertise with.

If you get it wrong, people who are not in your target demographic will click on it, and you will end up wasting money.

Retargeting Ads

This is the typical stalking ad.

When someone clicks on a listing ad, the click is recorded. (This is usually recorded in a browser cookie, but other methods have recently emerged.)

Based on that recorded information, the same advertisements will be shown to you over and over again.

Why would you do something like this?

The answer is simple: people who have clicked once are "likely to be in the purchasing demographic." In fact, retargeting ads are said to be cost-effective ads, and while listings can make it difficult to pinpoint the target, there is an extremely high chance that they are the target. After all, they have clicked once.

People are strange in that when something is displayed repeatedly, they feel "annoyed" but also feel "attached" to it. In psychological terms, this effect is called the "mere exposure effect" (Zajon's effect).

Affiliate Advertising

This is an advertising system in which you pay affiliates to write articles on blogs etc., and if the product is sold the affiliates are paid a commission.

Another feature is that it is extremely effective if you simply want to increase sales.

However, it is important to be aware that if your product is not attractive to affiliates , it will not be treated as such.

In short, affiliates will be active when there are factors such as "easy to sell" and "high return rate" . Yes, they want to make money.

So if we make a "cheap product that doesn't sell in large numbers," no one will write an article about it (or rather, it's tough business-wise from the start).

Even if you sell a lot of items, if the return rate is low, they won't carry it. If a 1,000 yen item has a 10% return rate, you'll sell 1,000 units and make 10,000 yen. With that, you probably won't want to go to the trouble of writing an article, right? It would be a different story if it was a product that was likely to sell 1 million units, but that kind of product is rare.

On the other hand , even if you don't sell a lot, if the return rate is high, you will still attract affiliates.

Credit cards are a great example of this; affiliates can receive around 5,000 yen in return for each card they create, so it's a product they're willing to pay advertising fees to sell.

Display Advertising

This is likely to be most familiar to people who access Yahoo.

This banner ad on the right is it. You see it often.

Just like with listings, advertising costs are charged on a per-click basis, but you can narrow down to a certain extent the attributes of the users who are displayed.

In the case of Yahoo, it is not just that; it is also possible to have advertisements that take over the entire screen, which is apparently called a "reservation type" advertisement, and the cost of this can range from hundreds of thousands to millions, depending on the scale of the promotion.

Influencer Advertising

This is one of the most effective forms of advertising that has become popular in recent years.

In short, the system works by having famous influencers handle the products and post about them.

Because regulations were so loose, recently things such as "PR" and "promotion" where users cannot recognize that they are advertisements are considered "stealth marketing" and will be punished, so care must be taken.

However, the influence of influencers far exceeds that of companies!

As someone who creates e-commerce sites, I am keenly aware that we live in an age where companies cannot compete with individuals , so this is one form of advertising that I would like to utilize, and depending on the product, it is my number one choice!!

When making a request, you can negotiate directly with the influencer, or you can request an agency that manages influencers. There are various ways to do this.

The cost also varies, and famous influencers are naturally expensive! Depending on the industry, influencers with only a few thousand followers can be extremely effective, so it's important to give it a try and see what you think!

Beyond the ad is the landing page

LP stands for "Landing Page" and is the page that awaits you after clicking on an ad.

Have you ever seen a vertically long page with a "Buy this item" button at the end? That's it!

The purpose of advertising is to attract customers, but why do we attract customers? It is to sell products. Users who click on an ad are people who are interested in the product, so the landing page that follows needs a mechanism to make them want that product even more !

In that case , it will be more effective to provide ``information that makes the customer want more'' that is linked to the ad they clicked on, rather than simply having them visit the homepage of your e-commerce site, so you will need to prepare a landing page.

Therefore, when developing an advertising strategy, keep in mind that in addition to advertising costs, there will also be costs associated with creating a landing page !

There is a certain theory behind how to make an LP, so you can't just do it haphazardly. Also, you often won't know if it will be effective until you actually try it out, so you will need to make corrections after you've made it. LPs that aren't corrected often don't sell well, so it's a good idea to ask about the costs and expenses in advance.

Summary of advertising strategies

Advertising costs money anyway.

Basically, for any advertisement, simply take into account costs other than the advertising cost!

For example, look at the "click-through rate" of a listing ad. Even if it is displayed, it is meaningless if it is not clicked... And if it is clicked but does not lead to a purchase, it may be that the ad is being advertised to a different target demographic, or the composition of the landing page is not good at all.

Therefore, you need to review the wording of your ad, change the layout of your landing page, and repeatedly revise and verify your ad so that it will always sell. Excellent marketing companies are very good at this and will always guide you in the direction of increasing sales, but such companies are quite expensive, so how much can you invest in this area?

It is best to decide on a landing point for your future vision -- a so-called "KPI" -- before acting strategically.

Otherwise, advertising operations will consume so much money that it will be said to be "melting away."

Also, when you don't spend on advertising, you don't attract any customers, so it's almost not an asset. (Learning how to operate it is an intellectual asset.)

Is an SEO strategy possible?

When creating an e-commerce website, you naturally want it to rank highly in search results, right?

SEO is a strategy to determine whether or not your website will rank highly in search results. If you are looking for information about SEO on the Internet, you will probably see a lot of articles that say "SEO is the key to attracting customers."

The cost of countermeasures is often quite high. I will explain why later, but in reality, SEO is effective. However, it is very difficult to see results.

There was a time not long ago when you could advance to the top of search results if you took certain measures. Then, that information spread around the world and everyone started adopting it.

This is called "hacking the algorithm" or "using the algorithm," but if the algorithm is completely exposed, more and more people will abuse it. And then Google will get angry!

"What the hell, all the affiliate sites are at the top!!"

Google was so angry that it made major changes to its algorithm, changing it so that information that is useful and trustworthy to general users appears at the top.

So, to be honest, most of the articles that say you should do SEO are a bit outdated. SEO is still an effective strategy, but it is also one of the most time-consuming methods , so I would like to explain that in more detail.

Has domain authority

The current algorithm is not like the old system where you could simply set keywords and your site would easily appear at the top of the rankings.

Of course, I don't know everything as I write this article, but I can tell you that this is a general trend.

First of all, we must not forget that "large companies are extremely powerful." From the perspective of "reliable information," companies, even if they are small, are more trustworthy than personal websites, right? (Contracting with a corporation is more trustworthy than contracting with an individual freelancer, right?)

And wouldn't you trust what a large company says more than a small one?

Simply because of this logic, larger companies are displayed higher if the information is the same .

Therefore, you can assume that the chances of a small company ranking highly for a big word like "shampoo" are "close to zero."

Also, domains with a long history have been in continuous use, meaning they are not suspicious domains that were just created recently. This is why domains with a long history tend to be valued highly. That is why there is a market for used domains.

See also the article inside

The reason why a website ranks highly in Google searches is because it is "useful to users." Google also wants users to search on Google . If users think that they can't find any decent information when they search on Google, they will leave, so we will examine the contents of the website in various ways to ensure that such articles do not rank highly.

It seems that this verification system is getting stronger and stronger, so copy-pasted articles could be discovered, and unreliable information will no longer be displayed at the top of the results, although I don't know if people will think, "This is scary, so I'd better not post it."

In other words, unless the content is solid, it will not be ranked highly.

There is a rumor that you need to write about 3,000 characters to be evaluated, and 3,000 characters is about 7.5 pages of manuscript paper.

If you assign this to elementary school students as homework, they'll go crazy! (I remember that even university students hated writing 5,000-word reports...)

Has it been updated?

I also check to see if the website is updated regularly!

Nowadays, the times are changing so fast that information from three years ago is outdated. Therefore, a page that hasn't been updated for three years is inevitably less reliable. Google can easily tell how often a page is updated, so the site needs to be updated regularly.

When running an e-commerce site, there is often a high frequency of updates for new products and announcements, so I think that the corporate website is more of an area to worry about.

Strategies to increase entry points

SEO is a strategy that aims to make your website more likely to be clicked if it appears at the top of search results, but it is difficult to get a ranking with "big words," so niche words are also used to aim for a higher ranking. Users who search with multiple words often have a clear sense of purpose, so EC sites have a higher chance of being found by the right users, so it is something you want to actively aim for.

For example, I said earlier that it's almost impossible to rank high for "shampoo", but if you add the words "cheap shampoo, no additives", you can narrow down your target, right? It's still a strong category, but if you add "cheap shampoo, no additives, 50s", the searchers will be narrowed down to those in their 50s, and you can see that there are very few pages with that word.

Niche words have a low number of searches but tend to have high click-through rates, so an SEO strategy is to conduct various analyses and aim to get clicks on such words.

Also, the more niche the word, the more people tend to want solid information, so you need to prepare a page that can meet their expectations. In other words, you need to write useful articles, so increase the number of articles that can serve as a receptacle for this!

Since you don't know where the entry point will be, you need at least one article for the targeted keyword! I think it's better to focus on quality than to have too many articles. I don't know what the algorithm will be like yet, but as AI comes to the forefront, the eyes that can judge the quality of articles will become better!

SEO is "Strategy, Analysis, and Improvement"

In the end, what costs money comes down to "strategy," "analysis," and "improvement."

Which keywords do you want to rank for? This needs to be done strategically, but to be honest, it would be difficult for an amateur to come up with such a strategy. That's why we bring in a professional to help us come up with the strategy.

After that, you will need to redesign the page to match that strategy and add more blog articles , and there will also be a strategy for how you write the blog.

If you ask whether you can do it all by yourself, it's not impossible if you study hard, but it's quite a high hurdle. As I said when talking about SNS strategies, if an employee could do it, they would probably quit. Because they're highly sensitive to information... they could make money.

That’s why you may need to outsource SEO. However, in most cases, you’ll be surprised at how much it will cost.

Also, your first strategy may not always be successful. It is often the case that after analysis, you find that unexpected keywords are causing traffic. When this happens, you need to make improvements.

Therefore, it is a big job to constantly analyze and improve. And Google changes its algorithm every few years. Will you be able to take measures at that time? However, professionals will quickly grasp new information and try new things, and they will also verify it with many clients, so there is no way to beat them in terms of knowledge.

Ultimately, we must not forget that the people who are paying money to take measures are our rivals.

However, its asset value is very high, and if it ranks highly, the number of visitors will increase explosively! No advertising is necessary!

It is unlikely that your search will be ranked highly right away, so it will take time!

So it's a fairly long-term strategy. The most effective way to do it is to keep doing it secretly.

Reasons to create an EC site

To be honest, in today's world, not having an e-commerce site is a loss.

So far, we've talked a lot about the high hurdles and how it will cost quite a bit of money, but what would you answer if someone asked you, "Would you like to create an EC site?"

Will you think, "No way, that's impossible, I can't do this," or will you take on the challenge, saying, "You won't know until you try!"

I think there are two options, but an EC site is often cheaper than hiring a person. For example, even if the annual maintenance cost is 3 million yen, it's about the salary of one person, right? If it increases sales, it's obvious that it's a good idea to do it.

We've also mentioned that it costs money, but why are there so many people who are willing to pay that much? The answer is obvious: because there are many people who are able to get their money's worth!

It is true that there are many e-commerce sites that are abandoned before they see results, but most of these cases are when the e-commerce site is run "on the side", and there are many cases where the site sees steady sales if the owner puts in the effort!

The biggest attraction of EC sites is that their trade area is extremely wide, covering the whole world. Unless you do cross-border EC, your trade area may be limited to Japan, but that still means you can sell to a range that is significantly different from your local trade area!

Isn't this something that companies have no choice but to do?

• Social media
• advertisement
• SEO

First of all, which of these three should we start with? Let's plan it out.

If you are unsure, please feel free to contact us and we will be able to suggest various solutions!