5 Tips to Increase Traffic to your Online Store

One of the most commonly asked questions by new online business store owners is how do you drive traffic to your online store. It is not as simple as opening up a website and all of a sudden you start getting sales. We all could wish that it goes that way. But the fact is, there is quite a bit of leg work to do when it comes to e-commerce. Fortunately, there are a few effective ways that you can apply to your business strategy to be able to increase your online traffic and ultimately help improve your store sales.

1. Be Social Media Active

Social media is a major component in today’s marketing strategies. With millions of users interacting on multiple social media sites and applications, this platform is the perfect tool to promote your brand and enhance customer experience.

According to a recent study, more than 70% of shoppers make decisions on what they should buy based on what they see on social media. This person-to-person influence on these social media platforms is something to be taken advantage of by business owners.

To effectively promote your business or store on social media, you should take the opportunity to make meaningful conversations with your potential consumers about your products or services. By posting new product line-up, customer reviews, sale items or seasonally appropriate content, you get to attract possible buyers to your site.

Aside from this, it is also important to maintain good interaction with social media users. You cannot just be idly looking at their comments on your posts or when they share something about your product. It is essential that your clients feel that you value what they are saying and that you give them a good customer experience.

2. Create Visually Appealing Content

One of the first things that people notice when exploring a site or social media page is how it looks. In any business, of course, the most important thing is how good a product or service is. But how you market your business in terms of visuals also plays a very important role.

Imagine seeing a sponsored ad on Instagram on food. If the photo on the advertisement is visually appealing, it makes it look more delicious and would possibly attract the viewer to click on the profile of the ad and allow that person to view even more appealing content from the business page. Now it is a different story if the sponsored ad had a bad photo. Most likely, the user would simply just continue scrolling on the app and completely forget about it. He might not even remember which business the ad is from.

That being said, creating visually appealing content whether it is on your site, social media pages and online advertisements are very important. This just does not refer to photos and images but to the overall design and look of your page. Enticing graphics and text designs also contribute to the aesthetic of a site which in turn makes users dive into your site more and explore what you have to offer – creating interest and possibly generating sales.

3. Take Advantage of Email Marketing

According to a popular online marketing company, “People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers”. Customers usually want to know if a store goes on sale or if they will be launching new products. Email marketing makes it easier for businesses to do this. With free email marketing programs available online like MailChimp and Hubspot, it is more convenient than ever to do this. You can automate the distribution of information like promos and newsletters to your email list and just sit back, relax and wait for potential customer traffic to your website.

4. Tap Influencers

There are a ton of influencers waiting to create content that can be suitable for your product or service. And while this may not apply to all types of business, with the inspired creativity and good content idea, influence marketing can boost both traffic and sales for your online store. Of course, influence marketing comes with a price most of the time.

If you have a budget, find a reliable and creative content creator that you like that can produce great and possibly viral content for you. If you have a small budget, you can even tap influencers who are willing to work with businesses in exchange for merchandise or service. There are endless possibilities in terms of how you can make deals with influencers and what type of content you’d want out online through these creators.

If you are having difficulty reaching out to influencers, you can also get in touch with influencer platforms like Upfluence and Traackr, which also offers influencer campaign analytics that measures the effectiveness of this particular strategy.

5. Utilize Unconventional Platforms

While there are more well-known online platforms for promoting your brand and your product like social media applications or online advertisements, there are other unconventional platforms that you can also use to market your business. This could even give you a competitive edge since your competitors may not even think of using these platforms for marketing purposes.

For example, forums like Reddit can be used to directly interact with potential customers by posting comments on topics where your business may be related to. Aside from that, discussion groups on Usenet Newsgroups according to sites like UsenetReviewz.com can also be utilized to reach a wider and more niche market. Usenet, for instance, has hundreds of special interest groups where you can connect with potential buyers or even do simple market research to know what your niche market may need.

Conclusion

While you can’t give online consumers the same experience they would have when visiting a physical store, you can still provide them with the best possible customer experience online through active interaction, well-produced content and other means of showing them how great your product is.

The key, as always, is putting your customer first – thinking about how good your product should be for its buyers, what influences them, what attracts them and how they should feel from the moment they encounter your brand to the moment they receive your product or service.