How to Drive Traffic to Online Store
One of the biggest challenges facing small business owners who run an online store is poor website traffic. Driving traffic to your online store can make the difference between running your business as usual and expanding it to its full potential.
It’s a simple equation: More Traffic to Online Store = More Sales
Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Online Store
However, all clicks are not the same. You might have the chance to drive a substantial amount of people to your e-commerce store, but will they make any difference, especially if they are not interested in your products or services?
It can be tough to covert such types of people from viewers to customers.
Driving traffic to your online store and growing your small business is all about identifying the sweet spot of quantity and quality.
Here are various ways to drive more traffic to your e-commerce store.
Related: 5 Key Components for a Successful E-Commerce Business
11 Simple Tips for Driving Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store
1. Understand that every channel is different
If you are like most small business owners, social media is vital in your sales funnel. But each social media funnel has different uses and offers diverse purposes. In every platform, customers behave differently, interact and make purchasing decisions differently.
For example, if you have followers on Instagram, you have to know that they are looking for a graphic on your products regarding how they fit and the colours available.
On the other hand, Facebook followers are likely to scan for your reviews from the comment section. Therefore, make sure that you cater adequately on each social media platform to ensure that you are precisely talking to high-potential clientele.
Get the help of an e-Commerce Consultant whenever you are having a hard time deciding the best platform to use.
This is the most common sales strategy, thanks to the rising popularity of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Influencers are usually people who have a large following of people who look at their posts daily for trends, reviews, and recommendations. Influencers are also trend makers that lead their followers in what to see or even buy.
Keep in mind that utilizing the best influencers can help you shift the main market and take the lead. Ensure that you look for organic means to tap into influencer marketing to build your online traffic.
Take your time and engage with well-established influencers in your niche. These influencers can help you reach a greater audience and promote your products genuinely.
To get the best results, consider offering the influencers with affiliate codes, a trade exchange, or even free products for promoting your online store to their followers. You can even go the extra mile and offer exclusive discounts for their followers.
3. Write blogs and drive traffic to your store with SEO
If you want to drive long-term traffic to your e-commerce store, SEO is a must-have. And very soon, you will have to consider SEO as a workable tactic.
So, why don’t you start creating blogs from the start and slowly build up your content? Blogging is vital, particularly when you have a small budget to invest in paid channels like advertising.
The best way to drive traffic to your online store through blogging is by writing what your consumers are searching for and get ranked high on the result page.
Remember that if you don’t get on the first page of the search engines, most customers will just assume that you do not exist at all. Therefore, take the necessary steps and learn how to optimize your website for SEO.
4. Take a new line to email marketing
Another excellent way to drive more traffic to your e-commerce store is by building your email newsletter list and using email marketing to reach your target audience. Ensure that your website gives your customers the option to enter their contact information to subscribe to your email newsletter.
After you have collected their emails, the next step is to create an appealing newsletter. First, decide when you would be sending the email; however, it is always advisable to send at least one email newsletter every week.
Never take the power of email marketing for granted; it can improve your e-commerce conversion rates and eventually help you grow your small business.
5. Use referral marketing
Do you have a referral program for your online store? If you have existing customers that buy your products, consider encouraging them to refer your products to their friends. This way, you will be using a social influencer to market your online shop and leverage your clients who are already buying your products.
Have organic link backs to your online store on their social pages to incentivize customers to share their favourite items on their social media profiles. Doing this will not only strengthen your SEO but also attract traffic to your online store.
To use referral programs in driving traffic to your online store, you must have a great product, offer a simple to understand reward and ensure the rewards you offer are two-sided. This means that when a customer refers a friend, the friend gets a discount coupon, and the customer gets a prize. This way, it will be a win-win situation.
6. Have electrifying contests and giveaways
Contests and giveaways are an excellent way to drive traffic to your online store. Today, small business owners are well-equipped with videos, social media, and live streaming tools to create a message that can go viral. So, the best thing you can do for your business using social media is to host a contest.
Giveaways have rules; for example, for buyers to stand a chance to win a prize, they are required to follow your brand account, like the pictures, and tag a few friends in the comment section.
Now, since you are a small business owner, it would be best to promote the giveaway items for a famous social influencer to host the contest and giveaway for you.
Then, when your business starts growing, and you get a decent number of followers, you can run the event yourself to drive more traffic to your e-commerce store.
7. Promote your brand on Quora
At the frequency of 6,000 questions every day, Quora is currently the leading Q&A online platform. If you are looking for a source for your referral traffic, Quora is the best place to begin. People who need a solution to a problem mostly go to Quora to gather and discuss.
To drive traffic to your e-commerce store, find queries that can attract your target customers and offer educative and informative answers that have backlinks to your site or introduce a product that can solve their problems. Additionally, you can recommend a solution. On the other hand, you can post a question incognito and provide an answer for it.
8. Optimize your store for mobile
Unfortunately, many small business owners only optimize their online store website for desktops and disregard other devices. This later leads to poor user experience, and many customers will end up leaving your website even before making a purchase.
To drive more traffic to your online store, you will have to ensure that your e-commerce store is optimized for mobile. Keep in mind that Google is now mobile, and it will likely rank websites that do well on mobile devices higher.
Is your website mobile-response? If no, consider changing its WordPress theme. This will make the website mobile-responsive. Also, to guarantee easy usability of your website, consider setting up Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on WordPress.
9. Have region-specific marketing campaigns
This is another way of enhancing your e-commerce website traffic. You can establish a geo-targeted campaign by unveiling your top regions, displaying products for that specific region, and showing tailored messages. In addition, find new content to cover in your articles. For example, if your online store deals with travelling gear and most of your customers are from the U.S., consider offering products and create blog posts like tips to travel to the U.S.
Countries that direct the most website traffic include, U.S, India, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
10. Guest posting
By now, you know almost everything about your target customers, including the website and blogs that they find information. Therefore, to drive more traffic from these websites, consider contributing to guest posts to them.
A guest post appears typically as a regular post on the websites. However, it is attributed to you as the writer and have some backlinks to your website as references. Sincerely interested readers will find their way onto your website if you deliver valuable information through your blog and have the relevant backlinks added naturally and correctly.
11. Assess your Call to Actions (CTAs)
A CTA is a prompt on a website that tells the customer to take some particular action. It is a vital element in any website as it acts as a signpost that guides the user. Unfortunately, a large number of online businesses lack a CTA.
Without a clear call to action, customers would never know the next step to take when making a purchase and are likely to leave the website without completing their tasks.
Summing Up
There are many other ways to boost your eCommerce sales and drive traffic to your website.
However, you need to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to implementing these ideas. You will never know if a strategy will work for your business unless you give it a try.
The results you will achieve will highly depend on how you implement the strategy as well as the nature of your niche.
