How to drive more traffic to your ecommerce store
BACKNow that you’ve set up your online store, you need to attract visitors to convert them into customers. Despite the quality of goods you’ve stocked on your virtual shelves, you won’t make any money off them if no one knows your store exists. Therefore, you need to drive traffic to your online store to break even and then make a profit.
Spreading the word about your online brand is easier said than done. You need to draw up a comprehensive strategy that guides your digital marketing efforts. After all, you’re going against other players in the same field. Some of them are already established brands, whereas others are starting just like you. Therefore, you need to devise ingenious ways to get traffic to your eCommerce store.
We can’t stress this enough: you need to continually grow your stream of traffic to your online store if you wish to make any money off it. And it also helps if your store entices visitors to stay.
How to drive traffic to your online store
In this article, we’ll show you how you can make your brand make waves in the digital world and the different methods to use to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
Below, we take you through the different strategies you can deploy to ensure that your brand gets some recognition within your target market.
Optimize your online store for search engines
Potential customers rarely go straight to an online store when they’re looking for something. Most of the time, they have a problem that needs a solution. To find the solution, they turn to search engines like Google.
When they type in their problem, Google returns several results that contain potential solutions to their problem. The majority of these solutions link back to online stores providing a product that addresses the user’s problem. Therefore, you want to ensure that your potential customers can identify you through all the clutter in their search results. This is known as Search Engine Optimization.
For every industry, there are key search words that potential customers would use to search for solutions to their problems. The keywords could be short phrases or even individual words. Your job is to identify what your potential customers are likely to type into the search bar.
When you identify the keywords, you can add them to your SEO titles, descriptions, headings. This will significantly increase your online store’s likeliness to rank high in the results when these search queries are made.
The goal is to be on the first page of the google search because 93 percent of web traffic comes from a search engine. Furthermore, less than half of web searchers make it through to the second page of the search results.
Having a clean layout also ensures that search engines recommend your online store. Search engines pick up on this and present your store to more of their users. Therefore, search engine optimization is a great way to drive traffic to your online store.
Consider the world of blogging
Information is relevant. This is where writing blogs comes into the equation. Complementing your online store with a blog will help you hit two birds with one stone.
One point of benefit is that on top of the products in your store, you’re providing relevant information about these products and other aspects of your industry. This makes you a credible source of information, keeping visitors coming back to your site. Consequently, you get traffic to your eCommerce store.
Additionally, blogging works hand-in-hand with search engine optimization(SEO). The more the pieces of writing, the more the links leading back to your website. When these pieces are correctly optimized for search engines, you drive traffic to your online store more efficiently.
If you write a guest blog on another authority site in the same industry, it opens up avenues for you to reach larger audiences interested in your niche. These guest posts link back to your site, enabling you to drive traffic to your eCommerce store. Furthermore, guest blogs establish you as a source of credible information. This, in turn, leads potential customers to turn to your store for solutions.
Have a referral program in place
One customer, well taken care of, could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising. Word of mouth is a potent marketing tool.
Referral marketing stats show that about 81 percent of online customers make up their minds to make a purchase owing to influence from their friends making social media posts about the product. They trust this more than a post from the brand itself.
On the other hand, these customers can make or break your store’s standing by using their media accounts to spread a bad review.
The referral program core process involves inviting current and previous customers to act as ambassadors for your brand. When they bring in new buyers, you award them in various ways.
For instance, when you confirm that a customer completes a purchase, you can reward the referrer with discounts, gifts or early access to new merchandise. Members in your referral program will work hard to channel traffic to your site so that they can enjoy these benefits.
Optimize your store for mobile
There are at least 3.5 billion smartphones in circulation globally. In the US alone, adults will spend an average of 2 hours and 55 minutes on their smartphones every day.
Therefore, optimizing your online store into a mobile-friendly website is not a secondary consideration. On the contrary, it’s a necessity if you hope to get traffic to your eCommerce website.
Mobile phones have proven a lot more handy and durable. Chances are high your customers will reach out to you via their mobile devices. However, all this depends on how mobile-friendly your store is. Poor user experience on mobile will cause your potential customers to leave.
Owing to the statistics above, Google and other search engines have gone ahead to consider mobile first. This simply means that Google now ranks sites that perform well on mobile higher compared to those that don’t.
Choose the right theme, one that is easy for the customers to navigate. Additionally, ensure that the store loads quickly and minimize the text on the products to avoid clutter.
If you want to know if you’re headed on the right direction, enter your URL in a page like the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to see how it performs.
Tap into Influencers’ audiences
On social media, some people have built numbers and a massive following that’s usually readily available. Brands can leverage these audiences to increase brand awareness and even grow traffic.
These personalities, known as influencers, are regarded as trendsetters and reliable sources of information. A large majority of millennials prefer product endorsements from their “peers” rather than celebrities.
Just like with guest blogging, engaging and involving influencers will open up your brand and expose it to an even wider audience.
Not all social media figures with a massive following suit your brand. You need to carry out plenty of in-depth research to determine who fits your field or industry. Additionally, they need to fit in with your brand voice. Finally, they need to generate a high level of engagement within your target audience.
Tap into the power of social media
Online advertising, particularly on social media, is very fruitful. Facebook is the biggest social media site, and it boasts 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020.
Instagram and YouTube also house similarly large numbers of users. These numbers are enough to show that you can find your target market on this social media platform.
You can then single out your target audience, fine-tuning this targeting as precisely as possible. You can sort your audience of interest based on location, interests, behavior, gender etc. By presenting your content through your social media channels, you can reach out to your target audience, encouraging them to visit your online store.
This also ties in with your mobile optimization. A large majority of people access their social media via their mobile devices. Therefore, by optimizing your store for mobile use, you can readily receive and convert visitors from your social media channels.
Take advantage of paid ads
Google is the biggest search engine on the internet, meaning several people turn to it for solutions. While some brands have optimized their sites to appear high in the search results, you might find it hard to break in.
However, Google gives you the chance to appear on the first page as well. The search engine will place your ads just above the organic search results. Of course, you have to bid for these spots with other similarly-placed eCommerce brands.
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising method designed to draw more people to your eCommerce site. These ads also appear in YouTube search, which is beneficial on two fronts.
Google offers three ways to put your ad in front of web browsers; search ads, Google Display Network, and YouTube ads.
The extent of your reach totally depends on how much you invest in the particular ads campaign.
Give away some freebies
Everyone loves something free. Giveaways are a proven tactic to increase the traffic to your store.
While customers look at it as getting something free, you’re interested in them visiting your store. When they land in your online store, you can give away gifts in return for their email address. This enables you to market to them later.
The giveaways could be managed through competitions solely done on the store. The drive to win is incentive enough for them to come to check out your store. More often than not, they will browse through the rest of your products.
Write compelling and effective CTAs
The end goal of directing traffic to your online store is to convert the visits into sales. This can be a challenging undertaking if you have ineffective calls-to-action.
It could be possible that your CTAs are unclear, leaving potential customers wondering what they’re supposed to do on a particular page on your site. This can result in a high bounce rate, a situation where visitors leave soon after landing on your site. After all, your CTAs don’t let them know what to do.
This has a knock-on effect on your standing in search engine results pages. Google won’t recommend any more of its users to your site if it notices that several visitors leave without doing anything. Therefore, you have to craft compelling CTAs that leave no room for doubt in the potential customer’s mind.
In Conclusion
Despite having an excellent store layout, you need to set up a strategy that increases visitors to your site. Above, we’ve looked at several ways you can implement to drive traffic to your eCommerce site.
Nevertheless, this newly acquired traffic won’t do much for your bottom line if you can’t convert it into sales. You need to use the right theme to ensure that your site’s visitors become customers.
