The Definitive Guide to Redirecting Your Physical Store Customers to An Online Store [2022 Edition]

The last few years have been tough for brick-and-mortar stores! Due to the many restrictions caused by the pandemic, some have closed their doors for good! And others are struggling to keep their businesses afloat.

If you resonate with this, the next best action is to open an online store! That’s because then you can cut your costs and reach your customers. But how do you convert your physical store customers to online ones? Stay tuned to find out.

Why Move Offline Store to Online?

If you haven’t yet created an e-commerce site, you’re missing out on many sales! The e-commerce market is massive and continues to grow exponentially. Just last year, the market value was a whopping 4.9 trillion dollars (and no, that’s not a typo!) and is predicted to keep growing.

But other than that, it’s easier than ever to create a website! You don’t need to get a developer to do it. Instead, you could do it yourself, even if you don’t know how to code! It’s not unrealistic to expect to see your online store completed in a matter of days.

Guide to Converting Offline Sales to Online

Now that you understand how vital e-commerce is, we should redirect your current customers to your online store. Fortunately, with this 4-step guide, it’s easier than ever.

1. Know Your Customer

First, before we start doing anything, we need to know who our customer is. We can do it by doing market research. We want to find out the following information:

What social platforms do they use? That helps us to understand where to promote our website and deals.

What are your customers' dreams or fears? That makes it easy to create text for our website, which leads to more conversions.

What are your competitors doing? We want to check out what works and doesn’t on our competitor websites. That way, we can create a great user experience.

These questions are just the start of our research, but they should give us a good understanding of our customers!

2. Build Your Website

With the acquired knowledge, we can now start building your store. Here are a few tips for making a great e-commerce site:

Make professional pictures of your products. Photos with your phone aren’t going to cut it. I suggest you get a professional product photographer. While it might be more expensive, you’ll get more impressive pictures to add to your website. And first impressions are crucial for any website.

Make your pages as fast as possible. Nowadays, it’s more important than ever to have a fast-loading website! That’s because if your pages load more than 3 seconds, 52% of mobile visitors will abandon your store. You can use GTMetrix to check your site's speed.

Work on your product descriptions. Don’t make the rookie mistake of adding product details and calling it a day. Instead, you want to convince them that this product is for your potential customers.

3. Start Asking For Emails

If you have a newsletter set up, it’s easier than ever to convert your offline buyers into online customers. After the sale, all you have to do is ask if they’d like to join your newsletter. Be sure to talk about the benefits of using it, like special discounts.

That way, it’s more enticing to get inside! You can do the same to promote your social media profile.

4. Send Them Emails About Your Shop

All that is left is to use your newsletter to redirect your traffic to your shop. You can do it in a couple of ways:

Online Store Sales: Send them emails that your products in your online store are at a discount. That way, they’ll come and buy from your website.

Promote Blog Posts: If you’ve also chosen to create informational articles, promoting them through email is a great way to get people to your store. That will also build your authority in your niche, as you’re very knowledgeable.

And if you have social media profiles, you can promote your e-commerce site there as well! Just remember to be less like an advertisement!

Conclusion

And that’s how you convert your offline customers to an online store. All you have to do is have an e-commerce site, ask people to join your newsletter or social media profile, and promote your online store through emails or social media posts.

It seems easy, but requires sharp eyes to choose the appropriate e-commerce platform, social media networks, and KOLs to help you reestablish your physical empire to a digital one.

(Contributed by Andreas Ojala & Hermes Fang)