Educate your audience rather than trying to sell them your products.

Persuading somebody to buy your products all comes down to the need for your product and the value it will give your customer.

You need to communicate to your customers how your products or services will improve their lives, how they will become a better version of themselves by purchasing them, or how they will undergo a transformation by using them.

We’ve all heard the saying, “People buy from people they know, like, and trust,” which is the foundation for persuasion.

Building trust is part of building a relationship with your customers.

How do you do build a relationship with your customers?

• By listening to what they are asking or saying and providing solutions to their problems.
• It was showing up consistently and engaging with them.
• By being authentic and not expecting anything in return.

While communicating with your visitor or a potential customer, your enthusiasm and passion for your product will be reflected. This is why personal branding is so important.

Persuasion involves answering questions people ask themselves before making a purchase- consciously or subconsciously. This comes back to communicating, engaging in conversations, and having the correct information on your website.

“The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it." Dale Carnegie

Here is how you build your eCommerce business to persuade people to buy from you:

1. Establish your authority

2. Educate your customers

1. ESTABLISH YOUR AUTHORITY

As I have mentioned, the first step to building your personal brand is establishing your authenticity and authority. You have to convey that you’re trustworthy and have some knowledge of the subject matter.

A great way to start this is by creating personal pages in your store, adding blogs, and creating social media profiles that detail your expertise and experience within the industry. This should reflect your personality, your brand, and your expertise.

How can you stand out with an Ecommerce store? 

Be unique by helping and educating your customers when they land on your website and store.

Ask yourself this question: What do you do if you shop online without enough information or the website and store are very impersonal?

If you are like my husband, he immediately leaves the website and resumes his search for the product he needs where he can get enough information about the product he wants to buy and the store’s trustworthiness.

Content creation is an important part of building your authority.

You can accomplish much by establishing a blog and writing relevant articles for your customers.

I encourage people to sell what they are passionate about because it's easier for them to write and talk about their products with authority.

If you aren't passionate about what you're selling, it can be hard to establish yourself as an authority. People will quickly realize that they’ll move on to someone else if they don’t know what you’re talking about.

But when you provide the information people need to understand your products and market—that's where the real magic happens. When people appreciate and consume what you offer, they trust you more. And when they trust you, they buy from you!

Why Do You need to blog when you have an eCommerce store?

• 68% of all online experiences start with search engines.

• 63% of all shopping begins online, even if the purchase happens in a store - online or offline.

• Companies with blogs generate 67% more sales than those who don’t.

• 92% of companies who blog multiple times consistently acquire a customer from their blog.

• 81% of online consumers trust information and advice from blogs.

• 61% of online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations.

• On average, companies that blog receive 434% more indexed pages.

Blogging combines branding, content creation, and promotion to drive your website’s traffic.

Over half of the online users get Google answers instead of using social media or anything else online. So if you have consistently added more information to your store, the searches should pull up your answers from your blog.

It’s a huge business opportunity!

“A thoughtful, deliberate blogging strategy can help you nurture customer relationships, generate recurring inbound traffic, and give you a way to promote new products and services while building your brand.” ~ Shopify

Blogs can be articles, case studies, or educational information about your products, industry, or niche. Because you are providing your customers with information to get them to trust and like you, you will be top of their minds when they are ready to buy, and traffic to your store will increase.

You are creating a relationship with prospective customers by providing them with valuable information, and you are not an annoying salesy person who just wants to sell something.

Is Blogging Still Relevant In 2023?

Semrush says: “The secret to keeping your blog relevant today lies in staying on top of the blogging statistics, powering up your content marketing efforts, and having a powerful link-building strategy.”

If you create content no one is searching for, your website won’t attract visitors.

Here are some facts to consider: It takes an average of 7 - 10 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

Google thinks it takes 500 touch points to get a conversion…one of these comments is correct, but the bottom line is that it takes a lot of exposure to a potential customer to get a sale.

Blogs are probably one of the first touchpoints you can distribute and redistribute.

You will attract the same visitor when you keep distributing interesting and relevant information. The magic happens again when visitors start sharing your information with their friends.

Soon they become regular visitors, and the relationship with your visitor becomes intimate. And boom, they start buying your products.

This can happen anytime and not even in this order because people buy products when they need them or perceive to need them. It is ultimately up to you to persuade a visitor to buy your products.

But think about blogging as a huge part of that persuasion!

This is part of the customer journey that you need to create in your eCommerce store.

[4.8.2] Created by Veronica Jeans

3 reasons why blogging works

1. Brings People to Your Products

As a business, you must be able to compete for clients with your rivals to thrive. Since you might not have a physical presence, you must be more deliberate about putting your brand online. A blog within an eCommerce site is the perfect platform to create awareness for your brand and drive potential clients further through the sales funnel if put to great use.

Think of it this way; if you wrote a blog of five exciting ways to solve a problem for your product, you can recreate that particular blog into 5 separate social media posts and lead visitors to your website. So with one blog, you don’t have to consider what to post on social media, and you have provided potential customers with information that led them to your store.

Now you have a visitor on your blog who has shown interest in your article and, while on the blog, will probably start discovering more information about your business.

This is known as a potential customer’s ‘Get To Know’ phase.

You will attract the same visitor when you keep distributing interesting and relevant information. Then visitors start sharing your information with their friends, and you have begun that relationship that is important for an eCommerce store.

Soon they become regular visitors, and the relationship with your visitor becomes intimate. And boom, they start buying your products. This can happen anytime and not even in this order because people buy products when they need them or perceive to need them. Ultimately, it is up to you to persuade a visitor to buy your products.

2. Brands You as an Expert in the Industry

The goal of setting up a blog is to lead people back to your products and increase sales on your site. However, your blog should never take a hard-sell approach.

Instead of coming out as someone with a product on the shelf, gear your articles towards advising and helping your clients. For example, you could give them easy-to-follow tutorials or tips and tricks on how to do something they care about.

Your goal should be to add as much value as possible to the consumers. Let the blog be a resource center for them to learn everything they need to know that can influence a purchasing decision.

When they finally see a link to your products, they will not feel bothered to check it out.

By providing solutions that consumers did not even realize they needed, you will position yourself as an authority in the industry. Cultivating sales will become easier in such a position as your opinion is trusted.

3. Helps to Cultivate Brand Loyalty

It is always exciting to land a new customer. However, for your business to reach its full potential, you must be able to retain your customers. For a standalone eCommerce site, generating repeat sales may be challenging.

This is because clients will only visit the site to make a purchase. When they need to make another purchase, there will be nothing compelling to make them want to buy from just you.

A blog may be just what you need to get them coming back. As it grows and you continue to present yourself as an industry expert, you will not only be a source of information but a trusted partner.

Therefore, you will be able to interact with consumers even when they do not necessarily want to make a purchase.

Through this interaction, they will appreciate your information, which develops into brand loyalty. At this point, whenever they need to make a purchase, they will come directly to your website.

To further enhance this relationship, extend it to the customers themselves. Link your blog to your social media handles and allow customers to comment on posts and interact.

💡This week's Pro Tip: from Matt Beaudoin from Mysticknotwork.com: “We get 44,000 hits from Pinterest, but we don't post anything on Pinterest to speak of. What we do is create blogs.

We make a blog, then go in and pin a couple of pictures a day from our blog on Pinterest. And we tag it appropriately and edit the text to ensure its SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is compatible with attracting views. Then while we're on Pinterest, we find other people's pins and, comment on a couple of pins, save a couple of pins.

It's part of Pinterest’s community. Because that is the big thing people, who try to sell online, forget - it is social media. There are two sides to that. There's you; I crave everybody else’s attention and want them to notice us.

But there's also the other person hoping they're noticed and crave that attention. So if you give them the attention they are craving and genuinely appreciate their photo, genuinely notice something they are doing, and show interest in them as both a person and a visual artist, that favor will return by itself. It is very much part of retail marketing.

Pinterest is very slow, and maybe five years from now, the community finally thinks of buying something from you because you've created some goodwill on social media.

We post about three times a day on Instagram.

Once is something to do with the workshop, our product, something like that. The second one is about local interests - something going on in town, something attractive that creates dimension to the product. And the third one is some information we curated from somewhere else - it could be a repost or somebody else's content.

Another trick is if you have somebody help you with the daily posting on social media.

And I spend a lot of time commenting on other people's posts. Like I said, showing love, sharing, and showing them that what they're giving to the platforms is being respected.”

There are great ideas to create more authority online, but we start with your blog. And the benefit is it will also enhance your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which means you might pop up for search queries on Google.

Here are 4 quick tips on other ways to enhance your authority online:

1. Comment and engage in other people’s groups and blogs.
2. Create a Gravatar profile on Gravatar.com (free), and wherever you comment or are featured, your profile will automatically be added and seen by other commenters.
3. Post your blogs on news-related online sites.
4. Speaking engagements are a great way to stand out. Not everybody wants to be in the limelight but look for opportunities locally if you are inclined.

Quick tip on why you need to create a Gravatar profile: To show up as a profile image and your information when you are commenting online and being online if you don’t have a profile on the platform.

[4.12.1]

If you don’t have a Gravatar profile, the image that pops up is the blue ‘G’ symbol shown on the previous image and has no information about who you are.

2. EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMERS

All of the above is a way to educate your visitors to persuade them to become customers. There are more ways to inform your visitors by providing information pages, for instance, your story (About Page), the sustainability and eco-friendly commitment of your business, detailed ingredients of your products, the company information and team, shipping information, and other information about your products.

In my experience, few online businesses build their website to create a comprehensive information font for their customers.

When I build my clients’ web stores, I look at what the competition has, check out big brands in the same market, and curate information online that compliments your products and business.

Here is an example of what your shipping page should not look like.

Shipping information:

“[Product] is available for immediate shipping!

We use USPS first class packages and ship them the next business day.

USPS First Class • 3-4 business days 

Free Shipping on any order with a multi-pack.”

An excellent shipping page that answers any questions you think your customer might have? Brilliant!

Check out TheMissingPiecePuzzle.com to see an excellent shipping page.

5 great ideas to add more value-added information for your customers and visitors to your eCommerce store.

Once you have created a value-added page of information, you can create an FAQ page - all the questions you can think of that will answer a customer query. Again, look at other stores in your marketplace, and you will find all the answers you need. Here are some examples:

1. Product Demonstrations

Create some videos to show how your product is used or get an existing customer to show how they use it.

BTS - Behind The Scenes Images and Videos:

Create a company page and add videos and images of how you produce or create your products.

2. Ingredients Information

Especially if you have skincare products or food products, you want to add this to your store.

Examples:

InviCible Skincare has a great ingredients page: https://invicibleskincare.com/pages/ingredients. 

Artistic Africa Gallery - TheMoyoCollection.com has a page dedicated to their sculptures and different types of stones.

3. Artists Information

One of my clients has a page for each of her artists, and all the artist’s products are on the same page.

Example: https://moyocollections.com

4. Community Information

Creating information about a community you support is also a great idea.

Examples:

NaughtyGoodBites.com supports women in business locally.

KalahariGold.com supports local women in the community.

5. Sustainability & Eco-Friendly Information

The materials you use for your products or the packaging your products are shipped in is excellent information to showcase the uniqueness of your products.

Examples:

Kalaharigold.com ships with eco-friendly and reusable packaging.

Hugpatrol.net uses sustainable, eco-friendly, and reusable packaging.

Communicate with your customers and build relationships

READ MORE IN MY BOOK: POSITION YOUR BRAND!

RESOURCES:

For product descriptions and any other information you need to create:

Copy.ai (https://veronicajeans.online/copy-ai)

Blog of increase sales on your site: https://veronicajeans.com/blogs/news/double-sales-online-business

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {E-commerce Success} blog and while you’re there, take a look at my Shopify Bootcamp coming up, and my Shopify and E-commerce series of books on Amazon. For news and insights find me on Twitter at @veronicajeans, to see what I do when I’m not working, follow me on Instagram and to discover my E-commerce Success community.