5 High-Impact Strategies for Getting More Traffic

“How do I drive more traffic to my online store?”

That thought crosses the mind of every ecommerce entrepreneur at some point.

Maybe you’ve just sunk time and effort into painstakingly setting up your store, only to open up shop and wonder where your sales are. Maybe you’ve seen steady growth over the past 6 months, but just hit a plateau. Or maybe you’ve built a million dollar business and now you’re setting your sights on your next big goal.

Whether you’re trying to attract your first customer or your 10,000th customer, generating more traffic to your online store is a crucial part of growing your business. If your site is properly optimized for conversions, getting a jump in traffic could mean more customers and more sales.

To help you increase traffic for your online store, we’ve put together a list of 5 proven, high impact tactics for driving more traffic to your online store.

1. Run Paid Social Media Ad Campaigns

To increase website traffic for your online store, you need to be able to get your business in front of your ideal customers. With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted campaigns that serve tailor-made ads to the customers who are most likely to click through and purchase your products.

If you’re thinking about running paid social media ads, here are some platforms you should consider:

Facebook Ads

Image source: Facebook

With 1.65 billion monthly users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and filled with opportunities for you to reach new customers and drive them to your online store. Facebook’s robust advertising platform allows you to target users based on their interests, behavior, location, and more.

Using Facebook Dynamic Ads, you can even serve automatically-generated ads to customers who have previously visited your website, featuring the products that they’ve already looked at or added to their carts. These powerful ads can help you bring users back to your website, so that you can make the most of the traffic you’re already getting.

Instagram Ads

Image source: Adweek

Instagram is an incredibly popular platform, especially among Millennials. In fact, 73% of its half a billion monthly active users are between the ages of 15 - 35, making it the perfect choice for businesses whose target audiences skew younger.

With its recently expanded tools for business owners, Instagram is quickly becoming the platform-to-watch for social media advertising. It’s actually pegged to rake in a whopping $2.81 billion by the year 2017 on mobile ad revenue alone, beating out both Twitter and Google.

So, even if you’ve already built an army of followers on Instagram, you aren’t really using it to its full potential until you’ve tried its advertising platform.

Pinterest Ads

Image source: Pinterest

Pinterest plays a key role in the purchasing decisions of its users: 93% have used it to plan purchases and 52% have purchased something online after seeing it on Pinterest first. It’s also extremely popularity among niche groups like DIY crafts, home decor, and fashion which is ideal for businesses hoping to make in-roads with these markets.

Pinterest is home to Promoted Pins, a form of paid advertising that pushes your Pins to the top of your customers’ search results, helping you stand out from the crowd. Promoted Pins blend in with the rest of Pinterest’s content, making them a great tool for capturing your customers’ attention and pulling them to your online store.

2. Use SEO to Increase Your Store’s Discoverability

Can your customers actually find your store online?

When customers search for your products online, you want your store to be one of the top results for that search, especially since ⅓ of all clicks go to the first organic result on Google. That prized top position is a key ingredient for generating sustained, qualified website traffic for your online store.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of fine-tuning your website to increase its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.

SEO is a fine science and only works when you put in time and effort into learning the rules that govern search engines like Google and Bing, so that you can apply those rules to the structure and content of your site.

3. Reach New Audiences with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the process of building relationships with influencers to get your online store in front of new audiences.

With influencer marketing, you can harness the creativity and reach of relevant influencers in your industry while leveraging the trust that they’ve already formed with their audiences.

New video on my channel featuring this glorious @skii facial treatment essence! Click the link in my bio to watch ❤️ #ad #myEssence

A photo posted by Estée Lalonde (@esteelalonde) on Jul 24, 2016 at 6:40am PDT

 

Image source: Estee Lalonde on Instagram

Bloggers and social media celebrities like Estee Lalonde are highly trusted by their followers, so getting them to feature your products is an effective, organic tactic for increasing your traffic. According to Nielsen, 92% of customers actually value word-of-mouth recommendations from people they trust over any other form of advertising.

4. Drive Excitement with Contests and Giveaways

While many of these methods may seem like long term solutions for increasing your traffic, there are ways to give your business a short term boost in numbers as well.

With viral contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes you can quickly drive more traffic to your store by offering exciting prizes in exchange for your customers’ participation. Prizes and rewards are powerful incentives for getting both current and new customers to actually visit your store.

Image source: Gleam

Using tools like Gleam or Woobox, you can embed giveaways into landing pages or blog posts on your store. These contests can even use social sharing as a method of entry, giving your sweepstakes a higher chance of going viral and spreading around social platforms. Once participants are on your store, you can use different techniques to guide them to your products, like exit intent popups featuring coupon codes.

5. Attract Customers with Content Marketing

Content marketing is about more than just having a blog.

By creating interesting, informative, and engaging content, you can organically attract customers to your online store. From videos and podcasts to guides and ebooks, there are endless opportunities for your business to branch out into the world of content and capture new audiences.

Original content helps position your business as an industry thought leader and build a lifestyle around your brand. Your business’ content strategy can include anything that your customers might find relevant or interesting—don’t limit yourself to posts or guides that include or focus on your products. Instead, consider any and all topics and resources related to your business that your customers would find useful.

Image source: Google AdWords

Content marketing also gives your store the chance to conquer search results beyond product and brand keywords. Using free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Keyword.io, you can identify new opportunities for your business to rank in search results and get in front of larger audiences.

Get More Traffic, Get More Customers

With these tactics in your ecommerce marketing toolkit, you should now be able to generate more website traffic for your online store.

More traffic to your online store means more opportunities to turn those casual shoppers into paying customers. Once you’ve increased your traffic, consider trying out Conversion Rate Optimization as a next step.

Have any questions about how to increase website traffic for your online store? Share them in the comments below!