How to Increase Your Traffic & Sales To Your E-Com Store!
If you own an E-Commerce, I am sure you would have explored different avenues to increase your site's traffic to increase your sales numbers, expand, and keep growing as a business.
The number one for this is Paid Advertising, be that on Facebook or Google - however, as we have discussed these quite a bit already on our blog, what other methods can be used?
(If you want to read about Facebook Ads, click here)
It's worth bearing in mind, that the methods below aren't a guaranteed fix and it'll depend on your business and what will work best with your current and target audience.
Let's get into them...
LOYALTY
It is much easier (and cheaper) to keep a customer than acquire a new one, so the first tip for increasing the traffic and sales to your site, is to reward your current customers.
These users will already know about your products, the quality and the excellent service you give so they should be more than happy to shop with your store again, but they might need some enticing.
You should develop a loyalty programme that attracts your current customers to join up by giving them desirable benefits. These benefits could include discounts, early access to sales, free merchandise or free delivery - it depends really on your store, your customers and what would work best with them. The benefits should be at a level where its enough to entice them to repeat custom but still be profitable with those transactions.
Other benefits of a loyalty programme could be:
Attract new customers by showing them the benefits and exclusivity of your loyalty scheme.
Takes first-time buyers into repeat buyers which is crucial for growth.
REFERRALS
Leading on from looking after your current customers with a loyalty programme, an additional way to leverage your existing customers and increase your traffic/sales is to incorporate a referral scheme. By allowing your customers to do the hard work, the referral strategy (once set up) can be an effortless way of getting new customers to shop with yourselves. 84% of consumers confess that friends or family's recommendations heavily influence their buying behaviour, so not tapping into that to garner customers is criminal.
It is crucial to mutually benefit the referer and the person being referred to achieve maximum returns from a loyalty scheme. An example of this could be 'hello fresh'. Hellofresh has a referral scheme which sees the referer receive a discount also as the person being referred. You would see a much better return rate with this method, as otherwise there isn't going to be any benefit to your customer for recommending your product/service to their friends and family.
Some other tips are:
Make sure your product is bang on. No-one is getting recommended a product that isn't good or poor service, before beginning a referral scheme ensure these are looked at first.
Automate your referral scheme, reach out to your current customers automatically. This will save you time and put your new customer acquisition on auto-pilot.
AFFILIATES
With the rise in social media, we have also seen an increase in people generating a big following. Affiliate marketing taps into this user's network to develop your sales and promote your brand/products.
As an E-Commerce store owner, you will operate in some niche; we'll use women's clothing for this example. You could then contact users on Instagram with a good following (not the only metric to look for, we will go over a few more below) of users in your target market. For example, you may look for a female influencer with a demographic following of females aged 18-30. From here, you can gift that influencer with an item of clothing in exchange for them posting about it, or supply them with a discount code for their audience to use in which they will receive a small portion of each time. The second method is perfect as you will only ever spend money on the marketing technique when you get sales which are a win-win.
Heres a few more tips and benefits
Following isn't the only metric to look out for, you can request to know their demographic, engagement rate etc. These will help you a lot to make a more informed choice on affiliates to use. A user with 100k following but a low engagement rate might not be as useful to use as a user with 20k following but an excellent engagement rate.
Creates could social proof, as it is a third-party validation that is getting you sales!
Easily scalable, as you can partner up with as many affiliates as you like.
BLOGGING
Blogging can be a great way of generating additional traffic and sales to your site as it allows users to research more about the product or industry before purchasing. It also creates a sense of authority to your audience, for example, you may run an SEO Business, and put out a weekly blog about all different aspects of SEO, you viewer might not require that service right now, but when they do they will remember your blog posts and remember the value you gave them and be more likely to use you then going forward.
Blogging helps with organic traffic coming through to your site, meaning a more likely hood of that person clicking onto view your product or service.
They can also improve your SEO Ranking by acquiring backlinks from other similar websites.
SOCIAL PROOF & POSTING
Social Media is one of, if not, the most significant driving force for sales through to an E-Commerce store. With approximately 50% of the world on a social platform, the likelihood your audience is on there is 99.9%.
We discussed before how Affiliates & Influencers can help build your social proof as it builds trust with your audience. Still, an additional way of making that trust is by posting relevant and relatable content. Similar to blogging, content creation can be a great way of giving free value to your audience. For example, if you run an online cycling store, you can create content around cycling, be that good routes or great pictures of bikes. This would give your audience value, build your following and create some social proof to help build trust.
Another way to leverage Social Media is by inviting your audience to take pictures of your products when they purchase and to tag you in them. This can reaffirm your potential customers that you have customers using your products and speaking highly of them.
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There are so quick tips to boost your E-Commerce Store Traffic & Sales without using Paid Ads.
Ultimately, a combination of a few of these strategies, SEO & Paid Ads is a great way to create sustained growth for your brand, attracting current and new customers to continue purchasing and using you.
As always, for more information on how Mac Marketing can help you going forward, get in contact below!
mac@mac-marketing.com
Over & Out.