1. Thoroughly Research the Market
Market research requires due diligence. It is absolutely necessary to conduct a market research on your chosen market using surveys, focus groups, interviews, and industry reports. This research will help you to identify who your target audience is within your chosen district, city, or region. Carefully identify the specific group(s) of people most likely to purchase your products or services. Through this, you can create a buyer persona that describes the ideal customer in your local market. If you identify their age, education level, language, and interests, it can help you to properly frame a brand messaging that resonates with them.
Next is to perform a competitive analysis on other businesses selling similar offerings in your area by analyzing their price points, target customers, sales pitch, and shipping policy. By understanding the competition well enough, you can easily recognize the unique value proposition (UVP) of your own offerings. This can help you to stand out in your local market and attract the right customers.
2. Identify Your Market Niche
You can do this by first choosing the scope of the local area where you plan to focus your sales efforts. This could be as small as a town, an entire province or even a state. It helps to factor in your operational capacity, delivery costs, and customer density. If your eCommerce business will not be serviced by a physical storefront, it is best to choose a delivery area around your order fulfillment warehouse or where you store inventory. For efficiency and effectiveness, you must set a clear delivery radius based on where you pick, pack, and ship inventory to avoid wasting time and money on long, inefficient deliveries.
But, if the business will be serviced by a brick-and-mortar storefront, it is best to choose a local delivery radius around that area to create cross-selling opportunities. By doing this, it can help turn your in-store shoppers into repeat online customers. Alternatively, you can easily offer a variety of product options to enhance customer experience out of same store.
3. Launch Your eCommerce Store
Depending on the products you are selling, it is advisable to choose a reliable eCommerce platform to host your online store for local sales. There are many advantages in doing this. Many popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and others do offer the software tools you need to build and run your online storefront even without prior experience. These platforms help you to facilitate routine everyday tasks like inventory management, payment processing, and marketing, thereby helping you to cut down on operational costs significantly.
4. Market to Local Customers Online
To acquire local customers, it is best to invest in marketing strategies designed to drive traffic to your local eCommerce store. Get the business on Google My Business, GMB. Invest in Geo-targeted landing pages and Search Engine Optimization, SEO. Local pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns using geo-targeting to find customers in your local area, is also recommended. Don’t ignore Local Referral Programs through affiliate marketing. Partnering with a well-known influencer who lives in your chosen marketing area is also a great marketing idea. All these marketing techniques can help drive local customers to your eCommerce site continuously.
5. Invest in High-Quality Customer Service for Locals
Because your business is focused on a specific number of potential customers in a local area, it helps to try effective retention strategies. Strategies like encouraging customer accounts, offering a loyalty program, discount coupons, cash refund programs, responding to and resolving customer issues promptly are quite helpful. Making it easy for customers to contact your business post-purchase through a variety of communication channels like email, phone calls, chatbots, and even in person is great. All these help to enhance customer satisfaction. The real benefit of a good customer service is to boost customer satisfaction and drive repeat purchases for your local eCommerce business.
6. Establish an Effective Local Order Fulfillment System
One main advantage of a local eCommerce business is the opportunity to focus your order fulfillment efforts on quick deliveries to a specific local market. You can thus offer next-day or same-day delivery service options with lower shipping costs than remote delivery addresses. You can decide whether you’re going to offer in-store pickup, curbside pickup, or home delivery. The radius of delivery for each of these delivery offers plays a major role in what you can decide. If you engage the right software, you can even automate your delivery systems. If you automate your order fulfillment, it can help you to keep track of your inventory and deliveries. Products delivery can even be better enhanced if you partner with reputable third party logistics companies operating in the local environment.
