Is your online store up and running? Yes… Now, what are you anticipating? It’s been rightly said by the CEO of Walmart, Joel Anderson, “You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed, you have to create traffic.”
Being an eCommerce business owner you definitely look for new ways that increase traffic and boost the visibility of your online store. But the bitter truth is you need to test and refine your strategies to learn what is the best for your online store.
Considering this, we have listed best growth hacks to increase your eCommerce traffic
- Pick the right site architecture for your store:
After choosing the right platform to build your store comes the site architecture. You are also aware of the fact that eCommerce stores has a lot to shelf from clothing to footwear, home appliances to electronic items. However, such sites should have a smart and user-friendly navigation giving proper guidance to its users. For instance; an Ecommerce store like Asos has everything on the rack to entice men and women of today’s generation. Therefore, it uses a flat site architecture to manage each category in the hierarchical fashion making users’ journey easy.
There are two types of site architectures: Flat and Deep;
Flat is simple and easy to understand whereas deep architecture is cumbersome. The above diagram says it all. From the users’ perspective as well as SEO viewpoint, flat is the best site architecture to make the site navigation smart and easy.
- Create strong SEO strategy:
This point is in continuation with the 1st and 2nd point. The popular eCommerce platforms support a strong SEO schema helping businesses in increasing their Google ranking while site architecture is one of the SEO strategies to make the site user-friendly.
SEO is a broader term that includes use of specific keywords, link building, internal linking, on-page SEO, off-page SEO to boost the domain ranking of the site in the Google search results. Each technique mentioned above is very important in site optimization.
When it comes to link building many SEO professionals advice to walk the guest posting way. This helps in increasing the external links which ultimately improves user-engagement ratio of the site.
- Content is the king:
Content Marketing is extremely important for eCommerce stores to improve user experience, increase user-engagement and strengthen SEO. Content can be in any form; it can be in the form of videos, images, blogs or articles, snippet, etc. Videos are trending. The reason is users can be influenced easily through visuals rather than by reading blogs. No wonder, creating a video is expensive and time-consuming because of the efforts it takes to stitch images in each frame giving animation effects.
Blogs and articles on the other hand, provide fruitful and in-depth information about the product to the users. It is equally useful in solving users’ query which is indeed the best practice to increase the traction to your website.
- Marketing on social media platforms:
B2B and B2C digital marketing are increased in huge number in major social media channels. There are a number of potential users who prefer buying from social media channels rather than from the websites. Major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Quora, facilitates eCommerce owners with enthralling features that help them boost their traffic. For instance; you can make use of Twitter search, group chats, twitter discount coupons to influence the potential users and increase the traffic to the eCommerce websites.
When it comes to customer support, potential users prefer social media platforms rather than phone or emails. And, Quora is the best Q+A social platform for users. It allows you to solve users’ queries by penning appropriate solutions that is more feasible to them. Such activities in Quora definitely increase the targeted traffic to your site.
- Push emails to your users:
Email marketing is another effective way to increase the traffic. Those who are thinking it is dying, they have to reconsider their marketing strategies and include it at the top. There are vivid types of users whom you sell your products. Therefore, using buyer personas in email marketing helps you to categorize your audience and you can easily draft enticing content in a beautiful template with a call-to-action button.
Apart from user acquisition, it is one of the best ways to retain old customers. It is said email marketing is the healthy way of repeating business and 80% of retail professionals agrees on that.
- Include Giveaways to influence users:
Giveaways can help you defeat your competitors, do you know that? Yes, it is proven. There are various things that excite users. Thus, if you offer them for free, they can halt to your site and click subscribe. You only need to identify that and you are on with your game.
There are various ways you can go for to make your giveaway a success. Giveaway boosts your traffic while the contest is on as it is a win-win situation for users to grab that exciting prize which you have offered. Hence, it’s a golden chance for you to get the relevant information like email address, users choice, etc to build up your connection.
-
Make mobile your best friend:
It’s said if you ignore mobile you are in peril. This statement perfectly fits in today’s scenario. You may know that 90% of users time is spent on the mobile internet. Also, 2.4 billion use smartphone by 2017 and by the year 2018 almost 1/3rd of the population will turn into smartphone users. Therefore, making your website mobile-friendly will benefit your store to the extreme.
You can take the example of Amazon. Amazon was just a book selling online store and now where it has reached. With the introduction of mobile technology, this gigantic store adopted a purely mobile strategy to acquire users. It mainly focuses on users and user experience which helped the company to grow and scale.
- Ask users to share experience:
User Experience is counted in the top list when the discussion is about eCommerce and consumers. It is essential to ask your users to pen their shopping experience with the store. There are users who read reviews first before thinking of shopping from that store. It says 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Continuing with the example of Amazon, after shipping the product, Amazon shoots the email of a feedback link to its users asking them to share their shopping experience for others to know. It is one of the important strategies of Amazon to boost its online visibility in the Google search engine.
- Create landing page with clickable event:
Landing Page is another effective marketing strategy that not only helps in increasing the traffic but also in building brand awareness and trust among the users. If you are asking yourself this question, “Why should I need a landing page for my website?” then there are various reasons. Not denying the fact that your homepage can easily get a tremendous traffic but there are a good number of users who won’t be ready to purchase or invite people to your homepage during the first visit.
There are a couple of ways to get leads through a website based landing page. The first one is through Pay Per Click (PPC). In Google search engine your landing page can rank higher than your website homepage by using well-defined strategies. Hence, your PPC cost is lower while your targeted traffic increase through a single click per user. The other way out is you can build a beautifully designed landing page to your store defining the purpose and benefits that entice users to click on directly the action button.
- Personalization:
In the email marketing point we discussed buyers’ persona as in how using this technique you can draft a crisp content and push it your users. Yes, this way was a personalized marketing campaign to boost the traffic through emails which you can apply in your store as well. But before that, you need to perform a thorough analysis of your users’ journey. This lets you come to a conclusion what all things are to be added that attract your users.
You can personalize your store per language, per regions, per country, etc. Also, you can include users’ interest by analyzing the user behaviour metrics and help them tour the products that interest them. According to new Monetate study, 79 percent of organizations which have increased targeted traffic adopted personalization strategy compared to the 31% of those who achieved the targeted revenue and 8% of those who missed the revenue goals.
Summing Up
That concludes the 10 growth hacks to increase the targeted traffic to your online store. There are a few growth hacks which you cannot execute without the help of an expert eCommerce website developer. However, GoodFirms - a research and review firm brings out the list of top Ecommerce development companies by performing a thorough research and helps you in picking the best technology partner filtering your requirements.