An eCommerce store is basically worthless if it cannot drive traffic and generate significant sales. Any business (whether new or old) that fails to understand their niche and the needs of their audience, cannot hope to bring the potential quality leads that their online store needs to thrive in the long-run.
Nowadays, it can be very challenging to pull traffic to your eCommerce store, even if you have a WordPress-developed website. Fortunately, I have written this article as a great solution to your traffic driving problems. The following tips have been tried and tested to increase eCommerce traffic from anywhere around the world.
Ways to Increase eCommerce Traffic and Sales
- Facebook Ads
- Email Marketing
- Writing Blog Content
- Paid Search
- Include CTA in All of Your Social Media Posts
- Video Marketing
- Product Reviews From Customers
- Quora
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads have been proven to be a great means of driving traffic. At first, developing a Facebook ad will be hard, but once you have it, your chances of inviting traffic over to your online store will be higher.
To create a Facebook ad, you need to test several images, product,s, and copy so you know which one works best for your Facebook promotion. Besides that, you should also test various kinds of Facebook ads.
Visuals are great at grabbing a visitor’s attention in an instant and motivating them to buy. Choose a high-quality resolution image that translates the message of your brand and has vibrant colors. Above all, the image has to be appealing and stimulating to the target audience.
Email Marketing
Though a relatively old method, emails have proven to be one of the biggest ways to get customers into your online store. In fact, Entrepreneur reports that ‘Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter’. Therefore, making an effective email marketing strategy is highly essential for marketing as well as remarketing strategies.
In order to take advantage of email marketing, you must build an email list. Some of the best ways in which you can build an email list are; adding RSS subscription buttons on your blog site; using coupon apps to offer discounts or coupons in exchange for customers’ emails; hosting social contests in which customers can enter by using their email addresses.
Another highly effective way to use email marketing is to segment your emails so that you can target the appropriate target audience with the right content. In fact, MailChimp says that segmented emails have a 14.32% higher open rate than non-segmented emails. By specifically tailing emails to give customers exactly what they want, you will get big boost in traffic and sales.
Writing Blog Content
If you’re not consistent in blog writing, then you won’t be able to get higher search engine rankings. As a matter of fact, it could take at least 2-6 months according to Ahrefs, especially when you are operating with a minimum budget. However, this is dependent upon how much your target audience appreciates your content and the interaction you maintain with your audience.
You can use a proper SEO plugin such as Yoast, All in One SEO Pack, or Jetpack to highly optimize your blog posts. You must especially ensure that your blog post contains 1500 words and use various kinds of content for your blog such as images, videos, and audio that is of high quality and relevant to your audience. Google and other search engine love to give a higher ranking to such content.
If you want to look for topics to write on, look for those that are trending the most with the online community by using Google Mention, Twitter, and Quora among others.
Paid Search
There is an organic way to drive traffic to an eCommerce store, which takes months or even years to build, and then there is the paid search method, which gives quick results. Even though it is quick, there are certain elements that eCommerce store owners must keep in mind for this method to work without a hassle. You will need to know about Google AdWords and Bing Ads for this.
For one thing, you must ensure that whatever your potential customers click, lands them where they want, which is your landing page and not somewhere else. If visitors bounce from your site, your Ad rank will be affected and your quality score will drop. Use relevant keywords and make sure that the ad click lands the user to the page they wish to see.
AdWord campaigns have to be constantly monitored and optimized so that you achieve the right balance between what you paid for and your ROI. You can also tweak daily bids, budgets, text and URLs to ensure you get the best budget results.
Also, try using the AdWords Keyword Tool for negative keywords. These are keywords that you do not want your content to appear on. For example, if you’re selling business shoes, you should use “sports shoes” and “party shoes” as your negative keyword.
Include CTA in All of Your Social Media Posts
When operating an ecommerce store, you will want to do everything you can to drive traffic from all your social media channels. For this, I recommend adding a CTA in each of your Instagram and Facebook post, tweet and other social media channels.
The challenging part about this method is that you never know which of your social media posts will be well-received with the audience and you may even miss adding a CTA at the end of it. That’s why it is good practice to include a CTA in all of your social media posts just in case.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is indeed a big traffic driving tool that you must be using for your ecommerce store. At this point, who isn’t on YouTube? You can rest assure that most of your online traffic will be found there. Visual content is the most stimulating of all content. People want information on the fly.
Apart from YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo are huge marketing platforms that you can use to your advantage. The kind of video that you should make, depends the business you operate.
A popular type of marketing video that you can use is the ‘how-to’ videos. For example, if you run a cooking business, then you can show people how to prepare a certain dish online. You can also show a product in action, do an unboxing video or conduct interviews around your niche.
For each video you make, include a detailed description about what your business is about, along with a call-to-action to drive traffic to your ecommerce store.
Product Reviews From Customers
Asking your customers to leave product reviews is a powerful SEO tactic that is proving more useful to ecommerce sites everywhere. Not only does this inspire potential visitors to become new buyers for your brand, but it also improves your search engine ranking as well.
Google loves crawling on product pages that consist of customer reviews because of every recent content that online users/customers make on those pages. The more reviews you get, the better your search ranking will be and thus, more traffic means more potential sales as well.
Also, these days, customers can share their reviews on social media platforms where their friends, family members, and acquaintances can see them. This further boosts the visibility and traffic of your eCommerce website that is all the more merrier.
Quora
Third-party resource platforms such as Quora have been monumental in driving traffic to ecommerce stores. It is where people can post questions about anything and get a slew of answers with links that drive traffic to reference sites and online store landing pages. One such example includes Imran Esmail, whose question got him over 84K views.
The idea behind the success of Quora is to offer useful, expert and relevant information regarding your niche. It helps drive traffic and establishes you as the top authority in your niche. There are three things that you must do in order to make this work:
Step 1: Make a Great Profile
Make a good profile that contains a detailed description about your niche, professional career and experience. Be sure to include a link to your store, blog and social media profiles.
Step 2: Do Extensive Answer Research
Look for answers that are getting the most views as well as upvotes. Look for topics relevant to your niche, especially those with over 50K or 100k followers and look for the most popular questions around them.
Step 3: Answer Carefully
When you answer, be sure that it does not consist of a single sentence as it will not give you any upvotes or traffic. What you would want to do is ensure that your answers are highly detailed, include visuals such as images and videos and that it invites interest in other users to respond to your question.
Conclusion
I certainly hope I have provided aspiring online store owners with enough strategies that will allow them to increase eCommerce traffic. If I have indeed missed out on other traffic-driving tips and tricks, please let me know in the comment section below.
