Now that your online store is ready to go live; it’s time to start thinking about a solid and smart eCommerce marketing plan.

Many times, brands put 100% of their attention on the actual creation of the online store and forget that, once the shop is open, you need to promote it. Think about it: you have spent months and months deciding what products you will market, how you will display them, how much they will cost and where you will ship them. Then, you have spent weeks to plan, create and optimize your online store pages. Eventually the golive date comes. Wow, the shop is now open: a big party in the company to celebrate the golive!

However, you have not announced it to the world. And the shutters are closed. How do you expect your potential customers to get in the shop and become actual customers? So, here are some easy steps you need to follow when creating a solid marketing plan to boost your online store.

1) Online and Offline press releases: it might seem obvious, but you actually need to announce that the shop is open! Make sure you gather all your business contacts from all the possible channels and write a press release for the offline circuit, and plan the sending of a newsletter for the online circuit. This, of course, is possible only if you were already in the retail business. For a 100% pure brand new online business, rules change. You should have dedicated some time during the creation of the shop researching and building your potential customer base. Once all the data is gathered, scream to the world that your shop is live!

2) Build and enlarge your customer Database: make sure that your home page includes a very well designed and displayed newsletter subscription box; consider every email address you get as a potential customer. Ask for the minimum information possible during the subscription in order to make this process smooth and quick, but make sure to integrate more data once the customer registers an account. Your targets must be first to get as many email addresses as possible, and then to get as much information as possible about those customers. This will allow you to segment your database and offer customized promotions to each segment, so that you can optimize your direct email marketing performance.

3) SEM and SEO: attract the right customers to your online store. First of all, make sure you do a thorough keywords research. What are the most searched clusters? How many competitors do you have? Once you have a good keywords list, integrate it with a short list of keywords that you think your customers could search. Integrate the two lists into one, and pass it to a PPC specialist who can build a campaign. At the same time, use the same keywords when writing the content of your online store, especially in the product page. The more SEO the product pages will be, the more interested potential customers you will get into them. You can research some SEO services and simply have them do the job for you. Once your customers are there, it’s just a question of a couple of clicks to reach the checkout page!