Google "Grand Opening". You will see a lot of results but there are ZERO for new online stores. Why not?

Did you make the most of your Volusion Online Store Grand Opening?

On Day One, most likely your online store will have no customers. Your store will have no page ranking and you will be spending lots of money on PPC and PPV ads. In a month, you will stop your ads and wonder why you spent all this time and money developing an online store that you really did not understand in the first place.

We might change your destiny with our Grand Opening advice.

True story:

John is new to Volusion and e-commerce. However, his family has been in retail for years and they know that business. His instincts were to use outbound marketing just as he would for their B&M store. He spent thousands on AdWords, Yahoo Ads, Bing Ads even AdSense. PPC or pay-per-click sounds like a great deal until you have tried it and lost.

The outbound marketing analogy is what most businesses have followed for years. But, even if you spend lots of money on advertising to push people to your new site, you still have to convert them to make a sale and that my friend is not easy as John quickly discovered. I refer to this as the CV phenomena. (click and vanish). They cost you money and worse they will not even remember your site 30 minutes later.

Grand Openings for B&M stores is quite different than online stores. Remember—location, location, location. You most likely thought that location is not important to an online store and you are wrong.

Location is a key difference but not the way you might think.

Retail store owners are familiar with the Grand Opening event. News paper ads, flyer's, postcards, coupon books, ads in High School newspapers, a banner over your sign, a tethered balloon that hovers 100 feet in the air, free this and free that. Anything you can think of to get people to change their well established buying habits.

Have you ever seen a Grand Opening graphic on a Volusion store? I never have. Why not? It seems that new e-commerce websites never want to admit they are new. They want you to believe that they are just new to you and therefore you will not even question who they are or from where they came.

"GRAND OPENING - WE HAVE NOT SOLD A DARN THING YET! BE ONE OF OUR FIRST ON LINE CUSTOMERS! TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!"

I am not here to tell you to post a "Grand Opening" graphic on your online store home page but I think it is a great idea.

Now full disclosure—I still know of no new Volusion stores to have done this. Mostly because we tend to deal with customers that have had their store for awhile. But, I am going to do this soon and I will let you know how this works out.

A Volusion store Grand Opening and no body shows up or hundreds show up but no one buys anything (conversions rates of zero)? Internet marketing is all about conversions. This game is totally different than your B&M store.

Go back to your B&M store experience. A large crowd of your best friends show up to support your Grand Opening. They did not buy anything and you really did not expect them to do so. They enjoyed the little freebies, the wine, the Hors d'œuvres and you were feeling pretty good.

Now your Volusion store is having its Grand Opening. Are you local friends going to visit your site? Why? You must give them a reason.

A huge mistake that many new Volusion store owners make is not promoting their new online store to their existing customer base. We somehow figure that they have no reason to care or even use your site. But, Bing Google are watching and getting a hundred or 500 or 1,000 old customers to visit your new online store will make a huge difference to your SEO and your bottom line. You might find that these same customers who have not been in your B&M store are more excited to see your online store. Give them a reason to buy something on online. Give them a reason to link your site to their Facebook page or email a friend.

To have 100 old customers visit your new site is 10,000 times better than having to pay per click to get people to your site that statistically will never come back. PPC conversions of 1-2% are high. These 100 customers may buy online or they may stop by your store to see whats new. Either way, you win.

But, that is ok as they are going to pass by your store on the way to work everyday. They will tell their friends about your store and

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