How to run a Shopping Website in Pakistan Successfully
Pakistan has a population of over 200 million. According to a digital global overview report released in 2017 by Hootsuite, the country has a total internet user penetration of 18% and rapidly growing. This means a lot of internet users keep adding to Pakistan’s internet everyday and with that comes a lot of E-commerce shopping opportunities. In this article I will explain how to run a successful Ecommerce Shopping Website in Pakistan i.e. how to sell your services and products online on a website effectively, productively and efficiently.
First thing first, you have to have a website, many new graduates and small business owners try to rely completely on the power of social media which is good if you already have millions of followers but chances are that you don’t. So to begin, you need a website. Why? To put in lay man terms, you can track your visitors and their purchase behaviors. Let’s now quickly dive into the technical aspects of how that happens, how to market your products your website visitors and how to keep them engaged with your website.
A. Tag your website:
If you’re a hardcore digital marketer, chances are you know what the above headline means. Be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google’s advertising platform i.e. Google Adwords, all these advertising platforms give you an option to track visitors that visit your website in general or from their own platforms. Simply put, each user that visits your website, they record their visit and build an audience on their platform so that you can re-target them.
Before I even start advertising a website with paid methods, I make sure that all these platforms are recording my visitors so that later whenever I want, I can show them my products on these platforms.
What is a Tag? A tag is a piece of pixel\code that you place on your website and that does the recording for you.
B. Social media profiles:
I cannot stress this enough, but the day you come with an idea of a business or a product, log in to all your social media platforms and register your usernames before anyone else does as it helps visitors find your website much quicker and easier if your business or website has the same user name on social media platforms.
Place the links of all your active social mediums in your website footer as part of Search Engine Optimization via social media which we will cover later in this article.
C. Facebook or Google Ads?
The most common question my clients ask me is ‘hum Facebook pay paisay laga-en ya Google pay?’ in English, should we start our paid advertising through Facebook or Google? There’s a simple answer, if you are selling a service let’s say spa or beauty parlor deals, home renovation or fumigation, you should spend your advertising money on Google (Adwords) because people will mostly like search for a service in their area on Google.
If you are selling a product for example a shoe, clothing or food, Facebook ads will be much more helpful.
How do I select or analyze my target market on these platforms?
For Google, you can use the Google keyword planner, the keyword planner tells you exactly how many searches are happening of your service in your target city.
For Facebook, use the Facebook Audience Insight Tool, in one of my previous blogs I have described in detail about how to effectively use the FB Audience tool, click here.
D. Collect Data: First Name, Last Name, Email & Phone Number.
People will not buy your product the very first time they visit your website. According to a recent email sent to me by Google, almost 96% of the visitors leave the website without making any purchase.
But what if you were able to get their information i.e. Name, email and phone number? You can definitely give them a call or drop them an email about the latest products on your website or maybe a discount offer catered specially for your previous website visitors. How do I collect data if someone has not purchased from my website? Good question. Continue reading.
E. Email & SMS Data Collection & Marketing:
Use a good email marketing service (I highly recommend MailChimp), a well known email marketing service will give you several different options to create different kind of sign up forms. Some our embedded right into your website pages and some are pop-ups. Example below.
In the above example, Nike’s website is simply asking visitors to register their name, email and gender without asking them to buy anything. Probably because it knows the purchase behavior on an online shop visitor. This (pop-up) form is the most effective way to gain visitor’s data. Once you have the data, you can send them targeting emails to visit your website and make a purchase. This strategy will bring down your overall advertising cost.
You can also collect data from your online service if you are using one as shown in the screenshot below.
F. Search Engine Optimization:
So for how long will you spend money on advertising? Every new business\startup begins to ask this question very soon in their business journey. So you need an alternative to answer this question right? That alternative is optimizing your website pages so that it is easy for Google and other search engines to read and figure out the content on your website and its target audience so that these search engines can rank your website accordingly.
In one of my previous articles I have described how to optimize website pages for search engines. Click Here.
G. Conclusion:
To conclude quickly,
- Make a website
- Make sure you are tracking your visitors through tags
- Make sure you are using the right paid platform to get your visitors
- Make sure you are collecting their data
- Make sure your website pages are optimized for search engines
- You are good to go.
I know there must be a remaining a lot of unanswered questions like how do I actually make effective campaigns on Google or Facebook for my target audience. That varies from business to business and website to website. Drop me a note in through my contact form and I will be more then happy to help.
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