Ecommerce businesses from all over the world have been using Instagram to sell their products for quite a while now. There’s a chance that so have you, even if not knowingly. Perhaps you like to post nifty product photos, share your customer experiences and images or have hired a social media influencer to spread the word.
Whichever the approach, the end goal is the same – to get people interested in your brand and make a sale. And with more than 500 million daily users, it’s a perfect platform to do so.
But what is the approach to knowingly combining your eCommerce store with Instagram, gaining new leads, making sales, and building customer retention? Let’s find out!
What is an Instagram Shop?
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Luckily, gone are the days where you had to refer to the link in the bio to direct customers to your online store. Now, the process of leading customers to visit your online shop is completely streamlined on Instagram.
Social media marketing for e-commerce and the ways of promoting your online store have taken a new turn with the launch of Instagram Shop, which allows businesses to set up an in-app storefront to market their brand and drive product feeds.
The Shop is accessed from a business’s Instagram profile, posts, or stories. Once visitors are in the storefront, they can browse products, collections and even make purchases straight from the storefront with the help of Instagram’s checkout.
TIP: Visit here to find more ideas beside Instagram Shop to promote your online store.
Connecting your store products with Instagram
Social media and e-commerce go hand in hand in 2024, so it’s definitely the right time to get started and increase your sales through Instagram. Follow these simple steps to create a convenient and seamless shopping experience for your customers.
- Make sure your business fits the requirements. Check from Instagram if Shops are available in your country and see if your Instagram has a business or creator profile.
- Upload your product catalogue. You can do this either from Facebook catalogue manager or through eCommerce integration when using Shopify or BigCommerce.
- Get approval for your Instagram Shop. After setting up your product catalogue, your account is ready to be submitted for approval. For this, go to the “Settings” tab, find a button “Sign up for Instagram Shopping”, follow the instructions and push “Submit” once completed. The request should be approved within a few business days.
- Turn on shopping. From “Settings”, find the “Business” tab and then proceed on to “Shopping”. From there, select the product catalogue that you wish to connect to your shop. In case you cannot find the “Shopping” button, your store has not yet been approved.
- Start creating shoppable Instagram posts and stories. Now you can finally start making sales directly from Instagram. Upload a photo and tap to tag products. One post can include up to 5 tags and one story is limited to one tag.
How to succeed on Instagram?
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Naturally, for your shop to perform well on Instagram, you need to think through how you are going to manage your store. If you are just getting started, browse some well-performing Instagram accounts for inspiration from here, note down things you like and create your own plan and content.
Prepare your shop for sales
Just like your online store has information about the products you sell, your Instagram Shop needs to contain all the necessary product information as well. For making shopping enjoyable for your customers on Instagram you should:
- Make sure that your product catalogue always has up to date information, such as inventory counts, pricing, etc.
- Description and photos help customers make up their minds if they wish to make a purchase, so add all relevant product details. Snappy descriptions, high-resolution images and attributes, such as colour, size, material, and shipping information are all helping towards making a sale.
- Create collections of different products to customize the shopping experience for your customers and make browsing products enjoyable.
- Use product tags to help people find your products. This helps to highlight items in your product catalogue and brings attention to products you especially wish to promote. You can add tags to your posts, stories and also create ads that feature product tags.
Building followers list
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Over 90% of users on Instagram claim they follow at least one business account and your brand can easily be one of them. But having followers just to increase the number displayed on your profile is not the way forward. The key to turning followers into customers is engagement and interaction.
To grow your followers’ list, drive engagement and build customer loyalty, try these things:
- Time your posts. This way you can easily set up a weekly schedule or even a monthly schedule, time the posts according to your followers’ activities and never miss a day while you are busy doing other things.
- Focus on quality over quantity. Add some value with every post, otherwise, it will be difficult to keep your followers interested. Use analytics tools to understand which posts drive the most engagement and use high-performing elements to create ads that have a clear call-to-action and lead people to your store.
- Use daily stories to keep your followers engaged and in the loop. Stories are great for driving engagement with fun polls and surveys. Additionally, you can create a highlight on your profile with the most important information or just fun moments that can be watched even if the story itself has expired.
- Socialise and comment on other posts. Think where your customers might be and engage with the content they could be interested in to bring attention to your account. And while you are active under other people’s content, don’t forget to reply to your DMs, comments under your posts and follow hashtags that are likely followed by people interested in your brand.
To wrap things up
Make sure to meet your (prospect) customers where they are spending numerous hours each day – on Instagram. Take advantage of the possibilities the platform now offers with its Shopping feature, create engaging and fun content and start turning your followers into customers and vice versa.
