You know what generally helps drive more sales for your ecommerce business?
Traffic!
No matter what you’re doing now, I’m willing to bet there is more you could do to drive additional traffic to your site.
Fortunately, my friends over at Freeeup know all about helping ecommerce businesses grow. That’s why I’ve asked them to let us in on their top 5 recommended traffic generation strategies for this year. Enjoy!
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There’s never a bad time, but the end of year / new year are an especially good time to think about ecommerce traffic generation strategies. The holidays are over, your yearly review is done, and you’re planning out how to grow your business through the next year.
And ecommerce traffic generation strategies is an area that you definitely do not want to ignore.
Simply put, to grow and thrive, you need to draw more people to your store. This means using the top ecommerce traffic generation strategies available to you, starting today.
(1) SEO on Product Pages and Blog Articles
SEO is essential to the success of any ecommerce store. Whether you’re on a marketplace like Amazon or have your own online shop on Shopify or any of the other several ecommerce platforms, you need SEO.
SEO is what brings your pages in front of your target audience rather than getting lost in the wild sea of the internet or being seen by the wrong people.
And more than that, you need good SEO.
All ecommerce business owners know at least a little bit about SEO. But there is so much to SEO that it’s impossible to really know what you need to be doing for your product pages and blog articles.
Imagine what happens when people who are not interested in your content see your pages. At the very least, they ignore you. They may even grow annoyed because they’re not seeing what they want. This creates a false negative impression of your brand that can damage your reputation. It’s so completely unnecessary and also totally avoidable.
Be purposeful about what you want to achieve in terms of who you want to come to your store and buy your products. Then work with an SEO professional to plan out your on-page traffic generation strategies, then implement, track and tweak the optimizations.
(2) Influencer Partnerships through a Referral Program
Influencers are the people that everyone else listens to. They are the strong voices that hold the respect and attention of the masses. You need them to promote your brand if you want consumers to give you a second thought – or even a first glance for that matter.
Influencer partnerships are a newer form of ecommerce traffic generation, but based on a solid, age-old concept. It’s a personal referral, an endorsement, from someone trusted to give an opinion about a product or service. They just live on the internet now instead of on TV or the radio or down the street at the local grocery.
This year, you need to start reaching out to influencers in your niche to introduce them to your brand and offering so they can in turn reach out to their audiences with useful feedback.
Make sure that you plan out a system for finding and learning about the influencers who hold your target audience, contacting them, and making it worth their while – with a nice referral program – to give your stuff a thorough review.
A great way to get started is to hire experienced digital marketing freelancers to do the research, outreach, scheduling and referral setup. They know how to get everything in place, and it frees up your time to focus on building relationships with the right influencers to carry your brand forward.
(3) Building a Social Media Community around your Niche
Just as influencers today live online, so do your customers and potential customers. Customers being what they are these days with so many options available, you need to go to where they are to reach them and bring them into the fold.
Creating a social media presence and building a community for your brand is one of the most important ecommerce traffic generation strategies to employ.
People go to social media to browse and seek the opinions of others all the time. When you’re there with the information they want, you instantly get a foot in the door. There’s a whole new world out there that you can tap into to bring loads more traffic to your store with a modest investment in some good visual content and someone to look after engagement.
And remember that when you manage your socials just right, you stand a much better chance of getting conversions.
(4) Referral Program for Past Shoppers
Incentivizing shoppers may be the oldest trick in the marketing book. And it has lasted through the test of time because it works. People always love a good deal, and if you can offer them one, they’ll immediately be more interested in purchasing from you than anyone else.
Plan out how you can feasibly offer bonuses to people who bring a new friend to your store. Think about what you can afford versus the potential sales that you’ll generate, and what is of enough value to shoppers that they will make a real effort to refer more people.
Why is this a great idea? You’ll be cutting into your profits at first, but you’ll be gaining new, paying customers for each bonus you give away. Plus, you’ll get those old ones to buy from you again, too, when the bonus is a discount towards a future purchase.
(5) Facebook and Instagram advertising
Don’t be afraid of paid advertising. It can be very good for your business, even if you’re just starting out or bootstrapping your way through the ecommerce jungle.
PPC can be the most daunting of all the ecommerce traffic generation strategies out there because of the cost. But it doesn’t have to cost you a lot. Done correctly, it is a wise investment in growth that pays off quite quickly.
Facebook and Instagram are two platforms that are ideal for any ecommerce business. Facebook has a huge user base of all kinds of consumers and a wide variety of advertising options. Instagram has a great user base of highly visual consumers who are just now getting into shopping on the platform.
Build a presence on these channels and start advertising your wares. With experienced virtual marketing assistants handling the details, it need not eat up your entire advertising budget, and it can really pay off big.
Final Thoughts
Don’t be afraid to invest in a few ecommerce tools to support your traffic generation efforts, either. You may want to start with the free options as you build your strategies. When you have a solid machine built out and running smoothly, making the investment in automating certain processes will boost your business even further.
With careful planning and implementation by experienced people managing each area, you can effectively run these 5 ecommerce traffic generation strategies to push your business to the next level in 2019.
About Connor Gillivan of Freeeup
Connor Gillivan is the CMO and co-owner of FreeeUp.com, a rapidly growing freelance marketplace making hiring online simpler. He has sold over $30 million online, has hired hundreds of freelancers to build his companies and is a published author. He currently lives in Denver, CO.
Hey Connor, good write up!