As a new online store owner, you’ll find maintaining consistent sales and earning a stable revenue challenging, given the highly saturated markets. Every niche has multiple competitors, making it hard to direct traffic to your website and generate sales.
To survive in this competitive market, you must increase your store’s number of visitors: the higher your website engagement rates, the greater your chance of potential sales.
Continue reading to learn about some effective strategies to increase website traffic.
Social Media Advertising
Social media is a great way to leverage traffic to your website. Given the 4.89 billion social media users out there, you have to leverage this medium to reach the masses.
A major reason for social media’s popularity is its algorithm that recommends content based on user preferences and behavior. This tailored content keeps scrolling through the platform. You can benefit from this algorithm by creating social media profiles for your online store and posting content that aligns with current trends. An active online presence, good post engagement, and daily content will make the algorithm prioritize you, and the more people see your content, the more likely they will remember you.
Social media platforms also have unique inbuilt content-building tools, for example, polls on X (formally known as Twitter) and reels on Instagram. Proper utilization of these tools also helps boost your content.
You can also opt for paid advertisements to create product campaigns for your target audience. The algorithm uses the data to market the campaigns directly to your demographic.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is an upcoming way to advertise your products and services and drive traffic to your website. In it, you work with individuals who have gained popularity through social media and have established a loyal online community around their brand. Individuals look to influencers for help and inspiration in certain aspects of life. This trust allows influencers to recommend or market various products and services to their followers that they believe will benefit them.
More well-known influencers have greater reach but can be expensive to collaborate with. Instead, you should partner with an influencer with a similar audience as your demographic. Even if they have limited reach, you will still receive quality traffic to your website since all the users will be interested in your products or services.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO
When users need information or a particular product or service, the first place they go is often search engines like Google. The most visited sites on these search engines are the ones that rank high on the search engines’ result page (SERP). You can also give your website a high SERP ranking by implementing SEO tactics.
To rank high, your content needs to be informative and original. You can improve SEO by integrating popular and relevant keywords into the content. Users enter these terms into the search bar to get results. The keywords should be relevant to your content but not overused, or competition will be fierce. Conduct keyword research using specialized tools such as SEMRush and Google Trends to see where you must improve the content. Backlinking to credible sites also helps improve your SERP rating.
SEO is a vast field on its own and it can be challenging for business owners. It’s best to invest in website design services that create search-engine-optimized sites from scratch. You can later hire an in-house individual to build upon that foundation and create search-engine-friendly content.
Email Marketing
In email marketing, you send potential customers newsletters and promotional emails. These inform customers about new products, services, and deals, and entice individuals to visit your website.
To send emails, you must first create a list of emails of potential customers. You can do this by asking them to make an account on your website, ask them to fill out forms at checkout, or add a pop-up to the website for signing up to a newsletter. In this way, email marketing brings in traffic from customers who already recognize your brand.
Consider investing in email automation software that allows you to segregate emails according to demographic and send them different emails with more personalized content based on the demographic preference. If a user shows continuous interest in your website but still does not make purchases, you can use website cookies to track their activity and send them even more personalized emails. Email marketing remains cheap despite these additional technological expenditures, giving it a high ROI (Return on Investment).
If your emails are not providing you with the traffic you need, consider including time-sensitive coupons. Coupons will encourage users to visit your website and see what services and products you offer, even if they do not plan on making any purchases.
Pay-Per-Click or PPC Advertising
In PPC, you do not need to optimize your content to have your website rank high on search engine results. Instead, you can pay the search engine to advertise your website at the top. One of the major advantages of PPC ads is that you only have to pay when a user clicks on the website.
However, it is vital you correctly choose the advertisement keywords. Common keywords will have high competition and may exceed your budget, while niche-specific ones will likely be searched by users and bring in limited traffic. So, for optimum results, it is essential to conduct keyword research. You can look into competitor sites and take note of the keywords they utilize.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is word-of-mouth marketing. In it, you offer your older customers benefits if they can spread the word about your brand through their networks. You can ask your customers to share your social media accounts, repost your posts, and provide you with friends’ emails. In return, they can receive small gifts and discounts from your e-commerce business.
Referral marketing can be a highly effective tool in increasing traffic. People are more likely to trust the information they hear from people they have contact with rather than random reviews on the website. This means that the traffic you incur through referral marketing will also have high lead conversion rates.
Endnote
Regardless of how well-designed your online store is, you cannot make sales if you do not drive the right traffic to it. By integrating the above-mentioned marketing strategies, you can hope to spread the word about your products or services and pique user interest. Even if the traffic you generate does not convert into sales, you constantly create a brand image for your online store. Slowly, your shop will become more recognizable, which will convert into sales.
