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Dropshipping Basics Marketing Product Research

How Many Products Should you have to Start a Dropshipping Store?

“I want to start dropshipping but I have no idea how many products I need to put in my store”. That is the common question that people are asking. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to build a dropshipping store, you probably asked the same question. 

Dropshipping is a business model which does not require you to have huge initial capital. This retail fulfillment method uses third-party suppliers to ship the products directly to your customers, without the need for you to stock inventory.

Start with 5-20 Items.

Even though you don’t need to spend much on operating costs, it is better to start slowly. Avoid being an aggressive seller who wants to sell every trending product. You can start with 5-20 items and focus on having a niche store. Selling too many items without a “focus niche” is a bad idea because you will have a broad audience. In dropshipping, it is vital to have a targeted audience.

Indeed, you don’t need any prior experience to start a dropshipping business but it is highly important to learn the basics. What products are you interested in selling? Who is your target audience? Are you passionate and knowledgeable about these products or are you selling them just because they are trendy?

Dropshipping is Easy to Setup and Scalable.

The statement above is true but without a proper marketing strategy, you won’t get any success. Start with a few items and test your products. Pick a niche that you can confidently sell. 

For example, if you love cooking, you can sell kitchen items and accessories. If you love technology, you can sell gadgets like earphones, electronic items, and other tools. If you are a fitness guy, try dropshipping yoga and gym equipment or health products. 

Of course, you can sell other items but selling products that you are knowledgeable of gives you an advantage. 

Start little, then expand.

The problem with selling too many products at the start is you won’t know what to focus on. You will have to deal with multiple suppliers and go crazy with marketing your products. 

Instead of bombarding yourself with many product categories, focus on your target niche. Don’t worry about other potential products to sell. You can always add them. The most important thing after setting up your store is to build credibility and customer reviews.

Once you got a few sales and good reviews, then you can start adding new products. When adding products, try to make them relevant or complementary to your existing products as much as possible. For example, if you have good sales on lipsticks and cosmetics, you can add fashion jewelry, bags, hairdryers, and other beauty products.

Now, if you want to add yoga mats, leggings, and fitness items, put that under a new product category. 2-3 product categories are good. Adding a ton of product niches will make your store a general niche store which can negatively affect your marketing strategy, advertising budget, and business operation.

Wrapping Up

In every business venture, it is a must to test the waters first. You don’t want to jump in there, build a store, and put a lot of products without an idea of what the market is. If you want to be successful in dropshipping, learn from the experts, study your competitors, do a ton of research, and start slow. Try selling a few products and grow from there. 

Now that you know how many items you need to start your dropshipping store, it is time for you to learn about dropshipping mistakes and advertising tips. These are important so you know what pitfalls to avoid and absorb marketing tactics to increase sales.

Here are some helpful resources:

Top 10 Dropshipping Mistakes

Best E-commerce Advertising Tips to Drive More Sales

Start small and grow BIG! 

Categories
Dropshipping Basics Marketing

How to Use Email Marketing for your E-commerce Business

Email marketing is one of the most underrated online marketing methods. In e-commerce businesses, it is not sustainable enough to just rely on your website and social media.

Unlike social media in which you are presenting your message to a broad audience, email marketing offers you one-on-one communication with your audience. Email messaging, when done right, will help you retain existing customers, and generate new ones.

Important Tip:

Before crafting your email marketing campaign, you need to have a thorough understanding of what a sales funnel is. A sales funnel is your lead magnet where you capture customer info to build your email list.

It can be in a form of sign-ups, free gifts, discounts, contact form submission, abandoned carts, purchases, and more. 

TYPES OF EMAILS

  1. Welcome Emails

Keeping your online visitors engaged with your brand is vital for e-commerce success. Welcome emails provide the first impression that you care for your customers.

Once someone signs up or agrees to be part of your mailing list or newsletter, you should send out a welcome email thanking them for taking action. Make your first email memorable.

Instead of bombarding them about your products and services, try to keep the message more personalized. Focus on giving value so that the recipients will not lose interest. Offer a freebie, discount code, or some extra incentive whenever possible.

  1. Abandoned Cart Emails

Every abandoned cart is a potential loss in sales. If you don’t have an email strategy for it, you cannot expect to recover sales from your potential shoppers.

Shoot them an email within the first hour of cart abandonment. Set up a campaign trigger that re-engages your shoppers who do not complete the checkout. Time is the essence here. The slower you send the email, the lesser chance for lead recovery. 

You can offer free shipping, discount codes, or any promotional offer in the email. Depending on the number of clicks and results, you can determine the reason for cart abandonment. This data will help you strategize better and create offers more aligned to your customer’s purchasing behavior. 

  1. Post-Purchase Emails

Marketing does not stop after a customer makes a purchase. The goal is to make them repeat buyers. With this, you craft a post-purchase email thanking them for the products they bought. 

Saying “thank you for your purchase” can increase your customer’s trust. By nurturing your new customers, you are giving them lifetime value. Acquiring new customers is less expensive than retaining existing customers. Never forget to thank your customers for every made purchase. 

  1. Engagement Emails

Engagement emails are important to keep in touch with your customers. The idea is to make customers love your brand without being too pushy. 

You can also send email updates about your new product offerings or a link to a blog post. This will help build traffic to your website and re-engage your customers with your content and products.

  1. Promotional Emails

This is a type of email where you grab the customer’s attention by announcing new products, events, or special sales. According to statistics, sending “price decrease” leads to a higher click-to-conversion rate when doing promotional emails.

Send out emails for new products, sales, discounts, and holiday promotions. Spread the word to all your customers and let them know about your promotions and offers.

Categories
Dropshipping Basics Marketing

How to Write a Perfect Product Description for your Dropshipping Store

Product descriptions. What are they? Product descriptions are one of the most important elements of a product page. However, most online store owners do not put the effort into writing product descriptions. We get it. It’s time-consuming and tiring to write product descriptions particularly if you have thousands of products.

This is why the majority of store owners skipped this part. What are they doing is just copying the description provided by the supplier. If you aim for higher conversions and sales, you should not copy and paste from your supplier or Aliexpress. A lot of dropshippers do that, expecting they will get rich the next day. The result? Low traffic and little to no sales.

Things to Consider when Writing a Product Description

1. Define your Target Buyers

Your buyer persona dictates your writing tone. What is your niche and who are your ideal buyers? If you are selling to professional people, it is better to have an authoritative writing voice. If your audience is teens and average people, you can consider writing informal and adding a bit of humor to spark interest and attention. 

2. Be Informative

Don’t make potential buyers crave more info. Consumers need to know important information about the product they want to purchase. If you are not providing that, you are leaving them with tons of unanswered questions in mind. 

Include all the specifications and features of the product you are selling. There is nothing wrong with writing a detailed product description. What are the dimensions and measurements of the products? What problems does it fix? What are the benefits that it provides to the buyers? Make sure you outline this information in your product description. 

3. Make it Easy to Read

Choose a writing format that is scannable. Divide paragraphs into small chunks for easier readability. Instead of writing long paragraphs, you can use bullet points when explaining product features and benefits. Make proper use of sentence breaks and spacing. 

When possible, keep your product description format consistent. Avoid long sentences and always check grammar and spelling. Run some advertisement tests and see how your product description performs. You can always tweak and change it based on the conversion rates.

4. Remember SEO

Take note that when writing product descriptions, you are writing both for the customers and search engines. Optimize your product page and include target keywords that your customers are searching for. 

This will help your products increase online visibility and appear high on search results pages. By understanding Google’s algorithm and optimizing both content and product images, there’s a huge potential that you will get high traffic to your dropshipping store. 

5. Use Social Proof

If you have social proof or a product review to share, be proud to include it on your product page. 89% of consumers worldwide are reading product reviews before making a product purchase. By sharing social proof, you are building more trust and credibility with your store visitors. This also leads to an increase in sales and customer base. With thousands of competitors today, having customer reviews on your product page can make you stand out against the competition.