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Without any of your inventory moving out for sale, you will see no money coming in from your current stocks. Beyond this concern, it is also important to track your inventory levels and make sure you have enough to sell to your customers. Striking a good balance between the supply and demand of your inventory is extremely crucial if you want to stay in business for the long term.

However, taking control of hundreds of inventory and equipment across various locations is no easy feat. Without a proper inventory management system in place, it’s almost impossible to keep track of all your warehouse and supply chain operations in real-time. Monitoring the number of raw materials that you have, as well as the unfinished goods and ready-to-sell items, becomes twice as challenging if you do not have the right tools for the job. 

Poor inventory management leads to many inefficiencies that can cripple the performance of your business. Whether you have too little or too much inventory, improper inventory management can cost you time and money, negatively affecting your bottom line and business growth. For every hour that your business experiences a downtime, you may lose around $140,000 to $5 million. 

So if you think your inventory practices are no longer efficient and unable to keep up with demand, implementing an inventory management software system is a great way to turn things around.

What Is an Inventory Management Software?

An inventory management software is a piece of technology that helps you monitor inventory levels, orders, sales, and deliveries. It is a helpful tool that automates many aspects of inventory and warehouse management, such as tracking inventory, managing reorders and keeping your accounting data updated. With an inventory management system, you can manage and organize your inventory across multiple warehouses with ease.

Inventory control is one of the most important features you’ll find in an inventory management system. This allows you to categorize products by type, SKU (or serial number), and location. In turn, you can easily search, filter, and view products to ensure you have enough stocks and can reorder supplies as necessary. Inventory management systems also help you audit data and generate reports in real-time. 

Most inventory management systems today are cloud-based, which means your data is stored in the cloud and is constantly updated. This allows you to track your inventory as they come in and out of your storefronts and storage facilities. Mobile-optimized solutions also allow you to access your warehouse activities from your mobile devices, enabling you to remotely manage and organize your inventory. As a matter of fact, 67% of warehouses now plan to take advantage of mobile devices to accelerate inventory and warehousing operations.

Benefits of an Inventory Management Software

Knowing how much inventory you have is critical for every aspect of your business. Aside from keeping track of your inventory levels, there are more ways by which inventory management software can benefit your business. Here are some examples:

Automated Inventory Management

One of the biggest benefits of inventory management software is the automation of your inventory control processes. Instead of manually entering data and recording every action that takes place in your inventory, inventory management solutions do all these things for you. These systems provide you with more accurate, efficient, and insightful inventory data, allowing you to save more time and optimize your processes.

Given the benefits of automation to inventory and warehouse operations, it comes as no surprise that the warehouse automation market is estimated to reach $37.6 billion by 2030, according to a report by BusinessWire. This data reflects the demand for inventory automation systems, which is driven by a need for more rapid deployment and greater efficiency of inventory practices. At this rate, the inventory automation systems are likely to capture a significant market share compared to the traditional methods. Moreover, USPs such as AI  incorporations and efficiency will drive considerable market shares. 

By automating your inventory processes, you can avoid the risk of human error from manual data entry, saving you the time and money that you can potentially lose as a result of any mistake in your inventory operations. An inventory management solution allows you to automate everything, from dropshipping to backorders, stock replenishment, partial fulfillment, and inventory counts to customer tagging and order invoicing.

Prevent Stockouts and Overselling

For growing businesses, stockouts and overselling are major challenges. Based on a report by RetailDive, retailers lose over $1 trillion every year from stockouts alone. Shoppers often encounter out-of-stock items after three shopping trips from the same brand, resulting in profit losses for many retailers.

Implementing inventory management software can help you prevent this scenario. The app lets you take control of your inventory count, enabling you to see which products are still in stock and which ones need replenishment. It also ensures that you have just the right amount of supplies to avoid overstocking. In this way, you can easily meet consumer demands while at the same time delivering financial elasticity to your business.

Aside from those, proper inventory control gives you better visibility of the complete lifecycle of your inventory items, from purchases, reorders, and shipping to warehousing, storage, turnover, and loss prevention. An inventory management system helps you manage the flow of raw materials, goods, and services up to the point your customers receive the items they ordered and consume the goods.

Systematic Inventory Tracking

An inventory management software also helps you to categorize and track your products by SKU, type, or location. This allows you to group similar inventories together and keep them in an organized location, making it easier for you to locate products. By systematically arranging your inventories, you can easily determine which products require reordering and generate sales data for every item that gets sold. 

Furthermore, inventory management systems improve your inventory tracking operations. These tools allow you to monitor every single one of your inventory throughout its entire lifecycle—from the moment it enters your warehouse to the time, it gets sold to your customers. This means having access to each product’s location in your storeroom, relevant sales, and purchase orders, as well as the total number of all available stocks for the same product.

Batch tracking is also a powerful functionality of any good inventory management solution. This system allows you to the group and keeps track of all items that share similar properties. Moreover, batch tracking helps you track defective items back to the batch where they belonged. From here, you can inspect other items from the same batch if they have similar defects, allowing you to ensure the quality of your products before they get delivered to your customers. 

Improves Inventory Planning and Forecasting

Inventory management software products have the capability to use past data, trends, and known upcoming events, such as holidays and peak seasons, to help you predict the estimated amount of inventory levels needed for a future period. This ensures that you have enough products to fulfill customer orders without running the risk of stockouts or overstocking unnecessary inventory ahead of time. 

Through accurate inventory forecasting, you can easily identify trends and patterns in consumer behavior, allowing you to adapt to dynamic conditions and meet the demands of your customers. On top of that, inventory management systems provide you with replenishment of data, such as the timing, availability, and delivery speed of your inventories. This helps you meet the right amount of inventory levels based on inventory goals, supply, and demand for a certain period.

Harness the Power of Inventory Management Software

With all the benefits outlined above, it’s clear that inventory management systems have the power to transform your business and maximize its potential to generate more sales. Implementing the right software product can help you manage and track inventory within your facility and overall supply chain, leading to higher productivity and better profitability for your business. As such, inventory management software can bring all aspects of your inventory operations into one cohesive system.

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Today, more buyers shop for products online. 

According to Statista, over two billion people bought products or services online in 2020, and e-retail sales grew past $4.2 trillion worldwide.

Luckily, this is an opportunity to increase your eCommerce sales and profits.

How can you turn these shoppers into your customers? 

By first converting your website visitors to qualified leads.

If you execute this step effectively, it becomes easier to nurture your leads and convert them to customers. But, first things first, how can you capture more leads for your eCommerce store this year?

In this post, I’ll show you 7 eCommerce lead generation tactics that work well in 2022.

Why Does Lead Generation Matter in eCommerce?

Before we go into the tactics, why does lead generation even matter for your eCommerce store? What are the potential benefits you stand to gain?

Here are 5 of them:

You have access to buyer’s information

When you acquire leads, you’ve obtained details such as: 

• Name 
• Email address
• Phone number
• Address
• Gender
• Product preferences

With the stiff competition among eCommerce stores today, having information about your potential customer can provide an edge to convert an individual into a customer.

These pieces of information will help you create relevant offers that can convince your prospects. 

Again, buyer information can help you determine the right time to send offers to them. 

Acquire more feedback

When you capture a lead, one of your aims is to understand that lead. 

And to achieve this, you need to acquire as much information as possible from them.

Through interactions with your leads, you’ll obtain information about their favorite products, their pain points, budget, and more. This feedback gives you the ability to improve your service and capture even more leads in future marketing campaigns.

It becomes easier to track marketing results

In some cases, shoppers browse through your store and buy products without leaving their information. This can make it difficult to know how effective your marketing campaigns are.

By generating leads, you’ll have an objective number of your audience size. 

While running marketing campaigns, you can easily track results based on the number of leads you have and how they progress through the sales funnel.

Increases your chances of boosting sales

Since you have leads in your marketing system, you can create personalized marketing sequences to convert those leads into customers. 

Through your interactions, you’ll understand a lead’s preferred marketing channel and connect with them on those channels.

Furthermore, the knowledge you have about leads over time helps you recommend the right products to each prospect. 

As a result, you’re likely to improve sales compared to sending your whole product catalog to a lead.

Increases website traffic 

During your interactions with prospects, you’ll often share website links for them to check some pages. Whether you’re trying to educate your audience or promote an offer, directing them to your website pages will provide all the information they need at different stages of the sales funnel.

Due to these campaigns, you can get more valuable traffic to your website. 

Effective eCommerce lead generation tactics

Now that you know why lead generation is a must for your eCommerce store, you probably want to generate more leads. 

But it’s not an easy task. For instance, stats have it that 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge. 

Nevertheless, you have to engage in this activity and do it successfully. So, what are lead generation tactics you should consider using in your marketing campaigns?

1. Use a lead magnet

Think about it, your inbox is crowded. Likewise, your website visitors’ inboxes are crowded.

This makes people reluctant before giving out their personal information. Of course, you intend to provide value to your subscribers after they sign up.

To most visitors, however, that’s insufficient. You have to provide value right now. 

That’s why using a lead magnet can increase the number of eCommerce leads you generate. 

For eCommerce stores, some common lead magnet ideas include:

• Discounts
• Free shipping
• Giveaways
• Shopping guides

Here’s a popup from Old Navy promising a 20% discount for its visitors:

Beyond that, the clothing and accessories company also promised information about new arrivals and exclusive sales. These are lead magnets that can convince a visitor to enter their email address.

While using a lead magnet, you have to observe some best practices. First, the lead magnet has to be relevant to your audience.

For instance, a discount offer is more attractive to a shopper than telling them to subscribe to your latest blog posts.

Therefore, a discount will be more effective as a lead magnet than promising to send newsletters.

Another point to keep in mind is that the lead magnet should be helpful within a short time. If potential leads don’t need your lead magnet until 3 weeks, then it will have a weaker pull.

2. Use exit-intent popups

Since shoppers now have so many choices, they might compare offers on 4 or 5 websites before deciding where to buy. 

Apart from that, shoppers may have other reasons to abandon your website.

And sometimes, when they leave, they never come back.

Whatever reason they have to leave your site, you can use a popup maker to create exit-intent popups to bring them back. 

And if they’re on your checkout page, you can turn the leaving shopper into a customer.

Even if they end up leaving your website, exit-intent popups allow you to acquire their details for future contact.

Here’s an exit-intent popup example from Minimum, an eCommerce store:

Through this exit-intent popup, Minimum captured 9,362 leads they would have probably lost.

3. Optimize your pages for valuable keywords

A lot of times, shoppers begin their buying process through a Google search.

If your website content shows up among the results, you have a chance of attracting visitors and converting them to leads. Otherwise, you’re losing potential leads.

Now, the first step to content creation is by optimizing your pages for keywords you want to rank for. 

What keywords are your potential customers using on search engines?

You can discover keywords and group them based on different search intents. 

These include:

• Navigational keywords: these are keywords used to find specific brand pages e.g. Shopify login page.
• Informational keywords: these are keywords used to find information about a topic, product, or service, e.g. how to identify original calf leather.
• Commercial keywords: these are keywords from searchers who will likely buy in the future but have not settled on a product e.g. best TV set.
• Transactional keywords: these are keywords searchers use when they’ve decided on a product to buy e.g. buy brogue shoes in Boston.

These keyword groups allow you to target potential leads at different stages of the sales funnel. 

That said, you can’t perform adequate keyword research without the right tool.

Some popular keyword research tools today are SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, keywordtool.io, or any of these alternatives to SimilarWeb.

Once you discover the keywords potential customers use, you can optimize your page for those keywords.

Optimization includes tasks such as:

• Adding target keywords to parts of your pages such as URL, title, subheadings, and more
• Ensuring your page content meets the search intent of the searcher 
• Increasing your website speed
• Making your website mobile-friendly
• Having a simple website structure

Apart from optimizing your pages, you should also perform off-page SEO tasks such as building backlinks to your pages and guest blogging.

4. Optimize your landing pages for optimum conversions

Landing pages are one of the most potent tools for generating leads. In most cases, you can create landing pages specifically for marketing campaigns.

Whether you’ve created a social media or search ad, you’ll direct clicks from them to your landing pages. 

On this page, you have to present an offer that is convincing enough for visitors to submit their details. 

Furthermore, you can use psychological concepts such as social proof, fear of missing out (FOMO), scarcity, and more.

Some elements you need to optimize on your landing page include your offer, page copy, background image, CTA text, CTA button color, and more. 

Beyond that, your landing page should be congruent with your ad. 

That is, your ad design and eCommerce offer should be similar to that on your landing page for continuity. 

Another vital part of optimizing your landing pages is performing A/B tests. 

With A/B tests, you can compare two variations or more of your landing page to see the one with the highest conversion.

However, to run effective A/B tests, you should only test a single element of your page. This way, you’ll easily identify the change responsible for your increase in conversions.

Some A/B testing tools you can use to track user behavior and perform A/B tests on your landing pages are VWO, Optimizely, and Crazy Egg.

UK Tool Centre, an eCommerce store, removed filters from its woodcare product page. 

Through this optimization, the store achieved a 27% increase in engagement on its product page.

5. Create search ads with sitelink extension

For your eCommerce store, there are many product categories your customers want to browse. 

When you create PPC ads, the sitelink extension allows you to add page links below your ad.

For instance, if you’re running PPC ads for a keyword such as “men’s shoes,” you can link to a landing page that contains a selection of men’s shoes. 

But below the result, you can add sitelinks to different types of shoes.

In this situation, the searcher may see a category that interests them. Consequently, you increase the chances of a searcher clicking through to your website. 

Here’s an example from Kate Spade:

You can see that even the ad sitelinks are relevant to the search query.

According to Google, adding sitelinks to your ads can increase the average CTR for that ad by 10-20%. And for queries where the searcher is searching for a branded term, the CTR can increase by 20-50%.

Once you get searchers using valuable keywords to visit your landing page, it becomes easier to convert them to qualified leads.

6. Host social media giveaways

Most people love gifts. Especially, if the gift is a product they admire.

That’s why giveaways and contests are popular with most people. 

Think about it, if you have social media followers, these are people who are already interested in your brand. Therefore, a giveaway will only improve the interaction and trust they have in you. 

Apart from improving interactions, there are other benefits of running a giveaway depending on your campaign goals. 

For example, some possible benefits include:

• Increasing social media followers
• Improving brand awareness
• Increasing website traffic
• Generating leads
• Increasing sales

Talking about generating leads, how do you achieve that during your social media giveaways? One effective way is to use your entry criteria.

Some of your entry criteria may include participants entering their email addresses or following you on social media. Even though it’s challenging to account for social media leads, they can become customers in the future through your social media campaigns.

Here’s an example of a giveaway on Instagram by Goodnight Macaroon, an eCommerce store for casual women’s clothing:

By using a giveaway tool, you can create a giveaway landing page on your website. Consequently, visitors can enter giveaways and submit their contact details. 

7. Run ad remarketing campaigns

No matter how great your website or effective your campaign is, some visitors will leave without converting. 

Are these people lost forever?

With ad remarketing, you have the opportunity to bring back visitors who have left your website. One advantage ad remarketing has over traditional ads is that recipients already know your brand. After all, this is not an ad from an unknown brand promoting products they have no interest in.

Therefore, remarketing ads usually get more clicks than traditional ads. 

If you want to run a remarketing ad right now, some popular platforms you can explore are Google, Facebook, and Instagram. 

To create effective remarketing ads, you can create ads according to the pages an individual visits. This way, the ads will be even more relevant to the recipient.

For instance, a WordStream study revealed that remarketing audiences get 2 – 3X better click-through and conversion rates than new visitors.

However, the landing page for your remarketing ad shouldn’t be the original page they bounced from. If the page failed to convert them the first time, what’s the chance it will convert them the second time?

So, you should modify the original page to increase the chances of conversions. When some of them come back to your website, they can submit their contact details or, better still, buy a product.

In a remarketing ad case study, Sierra Trading Post sent ads to visitors who viewed their products. This led to a 5X increase in conversions for the eCommerce store.

While this campaign has increased sales, you can run similar campaigns for lead generation. 

Conclusion

Generating consistent leads is a must for your eCommerce store if you want your business to survive and thrive. In this post, I’ve provided 7 tactics that still work effectively in 2022.

Of course, there are probably tens of tactics you can exploit. However, you can start with these tactics to capture more leads and generate sales.

Which of these tactics is your favorite? Is there a tactic that has worked wonders for you but is absent here? Let’s hear in the comments!

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