If people don’t see it, they won’t buy it.
You might have the best products, with top quality and an amazing e-commerce site with the most seamless shopping experience ever created. However, if you don’t get people to visit your site, you won’t make any sales.
Of course the amount of traffic is not everything, quality matters. But the more people visit your website, the more likely you are to make a sale. Hence the importance of having a strategy that covers as many flanks as possible to drive traffic to your online store. So, this time we would like to share with you:
1. Attract your target audience with Content Marketing
There are many types of content you can create:
- Blog posts
- Whitepapers
- Success stories
- Videos
- Infographics
- Tutorials
Content marketing is great for both big and small businesses. It doesn’t require a huge money investment and you can use the channel and the type of content that best suits your industry, your audience and and your brand.
One of the keys to a successful content marketing strategy is consistency through time. One blog post a year is not going to do anything for you, you have to constantly create and publish relevant content that’s aligned with your target audience interests in order to see results.
2. Work on your SEO
People are going online right this minute looking for your product. You need to do everything you can to make sure your online store appears in the top results of those searches and one of the ways to do so is optimizing your SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of combining different techniques that help improve the position of a website in search engine results and gain more visibility. The cornerstone of SEO are keywords, the words or phrases your target audience uses to find products like yours.
You need to take your time and do a lot of research to find out which keywords suit you and are the most used by your target audience, so you can focus your SEO efforts on those specific ones. There are a lot of online tools you can use to identify keywords such as Google Trends, Ubersuggest or Semrush.
Once you have identified the keywords you want to target, you need to add them to your website’s content and metadata: slugs, SEO title, SEO description, images ALT description and headings (H1, H2, H3). It is also a good idea to create content that focuses on specific ones that are the most valuable to you.
Just remember that, as the same as for content marketing, SEO optimization is a job that requires a lot of time and consistency in order to show results. You have to be patient and work on it constantly.
3. Run paid ad campaigns
As we mentioned before, for people to visit your website, you need them to see your website. You need to get your online store in front of your target audience and paid ads campaigns are a way to do just that.
With SEO, you gain traffic organically via search engines, while with ads, you pay different channels to show your site to your potential customers. You can choose to advertise on social media or on search engines and do retargeting campaigns to customers that are most likely to complete a purchase.
For social media ads, each platform has its own system, and they are very simple to use and set up campaigns is very easy. You can segment your audience by age, language, country and serve them tailor-made ads that have higher chances of getting clicked.
The good thing about social media advertising is that you don’t necessarily have to have a big budget. You can promote posts to a very big audience with little money spent and achieve great results. This makes social media ads a great option for small businesses that want to get their brand out there with smaller budgets.
The other option is to advertise on Google using Google Ads. The downside of these paid ad campaigns is that it might be quite challenging to get good results if your budget is not as big as your competitors’. Google Ads campaigns work with bids for each keyword you want to target. If your competition puts in a higher bid for the same keyword you are focusing on, their ad will show above yours because they win the bid and your ad won’t show.
4. Send web push notifications to bring users back
Web push notifications are a great addition to any marketing strategy aimed to increase traffic to an online store. This channel allows online businesses to send messages and connect with anonymous users through browser-based notifications even when users have left the website.
There are two types of web push notifications that can bring users back and increase traffic:
- Automated web push notifications: notifications that are triggered by individual user behaviour and delivered automatically with hyper-personalized messages based on users’ actions on the site. They are great for recovering abandoned carts when users leave without completing a purchase and you can create as many triggering scenarios as you want suchs as: category retargeting, product retargeting, cross selling or recurrent purchase reminders.
- Manual web push notifications: these bulk notifications are the equivalent of newsletters. They are sent to all users’ databases and are great to inform about offers, promotions or limited time flash sales like Black Friday. They are amazing at generating lots of traffic very quickly.
The best thing about web push notifications is that, unlike paid ads, there’s no bidding competition or cost per click. Frizbit charges for number of unique sessions with no limit on the amount of notifications that can be sent.
This makes web push notifications a great option for all business sizes, being extremely profitable for e-commerce sites.
5. Social Media Marketing
According to a recent study, out of 7.82 billion people in the world, 50.64% of the population use social networks, regardless of age or internet access. This can easily be translated into: if you have an e-commerce and want to connect with your target audience, you must have a social media presence.
The first thing you need to do when planning your social media marketing strategy for e-commerce is to identify which platforms suit your brand the best. Depending on the products you sell and your target audience, you will find more and better use to a specific social media channel over the others.
Once you have decided, you are ready to start working on your editorial calendar and start sharing your content that will ultimately lead traffic to your e-commerce site. Keep in mind that the main purpose of social media is to create a community around your brand: take part in conversations, reply to comments and really engage with people. These actions will help you reach your purpose of driving traffic to your website.
6. Referral programs
All of the tactics we mentioned above are great proven ways to drive traffic to your e-commerce website, but none will ever be as powerful as mouth-to-mouth marketing. That is why encouraging customer referrals is still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your e-commerce website.
Having good quality products and ensuring a great customer experience will help you get good comments, reviews and possibly, recommendations. But why stop there? Give your customers more reasons to talk good about you and make them want to recommend your products to their friends and family with customer referral programs.
The thing is people trust recommendations from people they know and you can benefit from that by offering your existing customers a special benefit or reward from purchases made by their friends.
This will be a win-win-win situation: you will get new customers and increase loyalty from existing ones and they will get a discount from products they like.
To sum up…
By combining these tactics and tailoring them to your own business, you can drive traffic to your e-commerce website whether you are a small or big company. Don’t get overwhelmed trying to apply all techniques and once, it is best that you start slowly but with a good plan and scale it accordingly to your needs and requirements.
Remember that, with most of these tactics, patience and consistency are key to success!
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