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Building an Audience for eCOM

Without an audience you are doomed to fail at your eCOM business.

But that is simple, I will just run ads.

EXPENSIVE ADS!

Over the years, I have launched hundreds of stores. The stores that are successful out the gate already have an audience to sell to.

Those stores starting at zero have a tough climb up.

Typically when I launch ads to an existing audience we will see a cost per sale under $30 or so.

When launching to someone who doesn’t have an audience, we see the cost per sale over $100, often to sell a product that costs under $100.

Tough business to be in when you have a return of 0.1% and you are trying to pay back credit cards that purchased your product line. WHOOPS!

How to solve this massive problem?

Build an audience BEFORE launching your eCOM store.

Here are some different ways that I have launched eCOM stores to an audience:

1. Create a newsletter (like the one you are reading right now)

2. Partner with people who have a big audience already

3. Launch a free app to your target customer

4. Get into Facebook communities of your target audience

We can ease our cost per sale on a new store by having an audience already built!

Here is how to approach building an audience for your store:

• Decide on who you are targeting (i.e. new moms)

• Make your content unsuspecting of future sales (i.e. new mom hacks)

• Attract your target audience with free offers and value

• Poll your audience as you are building products (i.e. which is better?)

• Don’t sell directly through your new audience (share share share)

Doing this could bring down your cost per sale 2x to 5x! Making your business profitable right from launch!

Then your advertising will be far more effective and profitable!

Personally, I do all of the above on a new store.

I like having reputable people talking about our business.
And building an audience from the ground up…
And launching free apps to help your target audience.

Pick 1 thing to do first, make it great then do the next one.

Always remember! People buy from stores that they know, they like and they trust. It is your job to tell the story of who you are (company or personally), get them to connect with your message (start with your mission statement) and then create trust through fulfilling on what was promised.

It can be 8 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell to existing happy customers.

So your first big milestone is earning trust of your first 100 customers.
Then getting 5% of those customers to come back and purchase again.

The great eCOM businesses started with their first customer too.
And they rose to transacting with 10,000+ people per day.

Get to work building your audience!

If you know WHO you want to sell to, that is enough information to get started.

The difference between those who win and fail is execution.

So let’s get to work today!