How to sell online: The definitive guide for 2022 – Tiendanube

Selling online has become a necessity for businesses looking to expand their growth. The ecommerce industry in the country is getting stronger year after year, and this trend is also observed in Latin America and in the world.

The numbers speak for themselves: 9 out of 10 Mexicans have already bought online and that number is expected to continue to rise. This means that it is no longer enough to have a single sales channel: today’s consumer demands the presence of brands in the virtual worldthat space where you spend several hours of the day and where you search, on a daily basis, for the products you want to buy.

That is why it is important that your business is present on the internet.

How to sell online?

To sell online you need:

Comply with the legal requirements of your country.
Have an online sales channel: online store or marketplace.
Attract visits to said channel through social networks or advertising.
Apply conversion strategies from visits to sales.
Carry out a post-sale follow-up through e-mail either social media.

Selling online not only gives your brand a greater online presence and makes it more recognizable among your potential customers. Throughout this guide we will explain each of these steps in detail and we will explain the advantages of selling online.

Advantages of selling online

Your business will be open 24 hours. This means that you can sell all day, every day of the year.
You can expand your audience to different cities and provinces. There will be no geographical limits that stop your sales.
You can reduce your costs. The fixed costs of an online business are lower since you will not require a space to offer the products.
Ease of product delivery. For the user, you will be giving them the ease of receiving their purchases at the door of their house, saving time, transfers and inconvenience.
Generates prestige and brand positioning. Today, not having a website or online store not only limits, but also makes the customer question the credibility of a company.

The options to sell online are varied and in this guide we are going to tell you which are the most professional. But beware, the key is not to offer your products in all these sales channels, but choose the ones that are more in line with your business and group them into a single strategy: omni-channel (omnichannel).

Applying this omnichannel strategy will not only give you greater consistency to your brand image but it will also help you simplify the internal processes of each saleeven if you have an offline channel.

Therefore, if you want to learn how to sell online successfully and get all your channels (and your business) in harmony, keep reading this exclusive guide.

Online sales phases

To sell online and increase your business’ turnover more and more, it is recommended that you implement what we call in the world of ecommerce funnel or online sales funnel.

What is a funnel or online sales funnel?

The funnel of sales indicates the steps that a potential client has to go through from the first moment in which he gets in touch with your brand, until the sale is made. That is, this funnel It guides you through different phases so that you effectively become a client.

So, as a business owner, what you have to do is design that funnel, those phases of the sale, to achieve your main objective: to sell more. In general, we could say that the funnel sales on the internet is divided into:

Phases of the online sales funnel

Phase 1: Attract visitors. 📈
Phase 2: Convert to sales. 🛍
Phase 3: Retain customers. 💌

As you can see, each phase has a different objective that we are going to explain throughout this section. The important of funnel or sales funnel is that helps businesses understand the cycle of the relationship with the user and, in this way, detect what adjustments would be necessary to nurture that relationship (and become customers).

For example, if the potential customer arrives at the online store, visits a product page but does not add it to his cart, the problem may be in the description of the item or in the quality of the photographs. Let’s analyze then, each one of the phases of the funnel of internet sales.

Phase 1: Attract visitors

The first step to achieving success with an online business is attracting visitors. Just as it happens in a local or show roomwhere people have to enter to eventually get a sale, the same thing happens in the online world: no visits, no people interested in your product, no sales.

Therefore, generating traffic in your online sales channel is key to growing your business.

But we are not talking about any type of traffic, but about qualified traffic. That is, people who are actually interested in your product and can become customers. In this way, you will ensure that they continue to go through the sales funnel.

But in order to reach that qualified traffic, it is essential that you know who those people are, those potential customers who may become interested in your brand, that audience that is waiting for you to find it. Knowing him will help you better plan your visitor attraction strategy and to achieve faster and more efficient results in your business.

Target audiences

So that you can discover who this target audience is, what their interests are, their aspirations, and you can also better define the type of message you are going to communicatewe share two essential tips to carry out this search:

1) Determine its quantitative characteristics: These characteristics refer to hard variables of your target audience such as gender, age, place where you live or marital status.

Some of them you can infer from your product (for example, if you sell women’s clothing, you can already know the gender and, perhaps, have an idea of the age of this public) and others you can discover from different tools in line that we share in this post: .

2) Detail its qualitative aspects: In addition to the hard variables of your target audience, it is important that you also know other more “intimate” characteristics of it. Do you know what motivates your potential customers? Do you know what their problems, needs or aspirations are?

Discovering this super valuable information will help you empathize with them and focus your message on it’s what your audience is looking for. It is worth clarifying that accessing this “soft” information requires a deeper research work than hard variables since they are data that are not as visible and require a greater analysis (but worth it!).

As we said above, this bidirectional analysis will allow you create better messages (where your audience feels identified) and thus communicate effectively (and humanely) with them.

Strategies to attract visitors

Once you have defined your target audience, it is time to think about how to take it to your online sales channel in order to sell online. There are different ways to do it and the choice will depend on the objectives of your business and your budget.

We share the advice of the Dasha Cloud Store and the 5 most relevant attraction strategies And they usually give the best results.

1) The strength of content marketing

He consists of create and share valuable content for your audience in order to increase the presence of your brand. Its main objective is to make your potential clients see you as a benchmark in your field, and not just as a brand that seeks to sell and sell. When we speak of “value content” we refer to that content that your audience cares about because it helps, informs, educates, or entertains them.

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It is, in other words, about content that does not advertise direct sales (trying to attract the attention of online consumers), but rather offer interesting content so that these people feel attracted to your brand and, later, this process leads them towards a “more natural” sale as a result of the value that you are giving them. toasting.

2) Two must-haves: Instagram and Facebook

Did you know that Latin America is the area of the planet where people spend more hours connected to social networks? This was reported by the GlobalWebIndex in 2019. Mexico ranks eighth in the world and fourth among the countries of the region.