How to Promote a Brand New Ecommerce Site on a Budget

With demand for online shopping increasing exponentially within the last year, many Entrepreneurs are re-focussing their efforts on ecommerce.

If your business plans include setting up and promoting a brand new ecommerce site, then this will help you to do so on a budget. All the elements that you need can be created with very little financial investment.

As long as you do the groundwork, a small budget doesn’t have to hold you back. Good promotion without a big investment works when you understand which forms of marketing are the most cost-effective, and also the most relevant to your business.

Once you know which routes to take, it is a matter of creating and releasing promotional material consistently. And of course, showing that material to the right people.

Focus on email marketing

Let’s begin with email marketing, as it is statistically the most cost-effective route to market for most small businesses. In ecommerce, having a list of email subscribers helps you to regularly reach more interested people.

But in order to promote your ecommerce site to an active email list, you first have to create and grow that list.

For an ecommerce business, a popular way to do this is by offering discount codes to your email list members.

It is quick, simple and free to create an email sign up page using a free account with Mailchimp. There are also many other email marketing providers to choose from with good deals for new customers, so do look around.

Once people are signing up to your email list, you don’t want to bombard them with too much. But the occasional email, once every week or two, with announcements of new products or discounts just for them is a great promotional activity.

Social media

Invest some time in social media, and start growing a tribe of interested people.

Social media is a great place to host the email sign up form mentioned above. Use graphics to encourage people to visit that sign-up page, join your email list, and get those discount codes to their inbox.

Create some eye-catching graphics with your brand colours and logo – Canva and Logo Creator are free tools you could try.

You could also give away some discount codes directly from your social media accounts, perhaps for special occasions like Black Friday or the Spring Sales. But keep in mind that you have a more captive audience on your email list, where you are not fighting social media algorithms.

So sending people to your email list for discount codes is a smarter, longer-term strategy. 

Giveaways

This follows on with the topic of social media, but here I specifically want to talk about the power of running giveaways from your social platforms.

These do a number of things for your business.

• Giveaways increase exposure to new customers, when those people entering are asked to tag their friends.

• They grow your social following, and therefore your social proof, making your business look more established.

• They create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) around the product you are giving away – potentially leading to more sales of it.

For guidance on how to run an Instagram Giveaway, which is very popular, check out this guide from Hubspot.

As you can see, there are some simple and effective promotional activities you can do with very little budget.

Growing your email list does take time, but it is a really worthwhile investment. To get results faster, running a few social media giveaways is a smart move. This will both increase your following and create some sales from the fear of missing out that your promotion creates.

You don’t need to spend much budget to get started today.