Guest post by Nicole from StoreYa
Traffic is the lifeblood of any ecommerce business. What’s an online store (or an Amazon listing) without traffic? An offline store! We’re all looking for more traffic. More traffic means more sales. More sales mean more profits. More profits mean money in the bank. However, it is not any old traffic we need. It’s targeted traffic you should be optimising for. Traffic that is more likely to buy what you’re selling. Traffic that hops onto your product pages waiting to be converted.
We’ve put together a list of our top six secret hacks to get more traffic to your store in 2018.
1. Market One-On-One With Facebook Messenger Ads
Messenger ads are remarketing on steroids! Messenger ads are the best traffic driving tool to come out of 2017 and are set to dominate 2018 allowing ecommerce advertisers to get back to personal service. And the stats don’t lie! The engagement metrics for Messenger ads are phenomenal, with Hubspot case study resulting in an over 200% increase in clicks vs traditional email marketing.
The secret to Messenger’s traffic driving success? Messenger ads allows you to market your products to people who already know your store and have engaged with your brand in some way right to their inbox where there is less clutter, creating the feeling of one-on-one marketing and personal service.
2. Leverage Influencer Marketing to Drive New Target Audiences to Your Store
Influencer marketing has blown up in a big way. It allows you to market within your niche in a very segmented way, therefore driving targeted traffic to your store while additionally growing your social following and puts your products front and centre without the newsfeed noise of traditional Instagram advertising.
Think about it as taking really good customer reviews straight to the phone of your untapped potential customers, therefore establishing a sense of trust before they have even clicked to your Amazon Listing as in the example below.
Check out our Beginners Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing for Online Store Owners post to see how you can break into the influencer game and take advantage of these awesome engagement metrics.
3. Optimise Your AdWords Optimisation
Ah, Google AdWords, a traffic-driving must for any ecommerce entrepreneur. But, that is, when monitored and optimised correctly. The thing is, it takes some expertise and patience to constantly tweak your search campaigns to ensure you are getting the best-targeted traffic possible for your advertising budget.
But don’t panic, there is light at the end of the tunnel! By automating as much of your optimization process as possible, you will save tons of valuable time you could be spending on your other PPC campaigns, while ensuring good ROIs at the same time. There are some great automation rules within AdWords that will adjust your bids and edit your campaigns as explained in the video below:
Or you can take it even further by hiring an agency (if you have a big budget) or by using cost-effective apps like our own Traffic Booster whose algorithm manages your AdWords and Google Shopping campaigns dynamically to ensure you are getting the best-targeted traffic possible for your spend.
4. Use Email Marketing to Re-Target Previous Shoppers
Email marketing can not only be one of the best traffic-driving tools for ecommerce sellers, but it is also one of the cheapest. The trick to driving all that juicy, highly targeted traffic is in how you segment your mails. To bring in the most traffic you can’t just send out one promotional mail to your entire mailbox, you need to segment your audience.
One of the most successful ways of doing this is by running personalized retargeting email campaigns, sending specific products to customers who reached different stages of purchasing and will, therefore, be more inclined to hit that email button back to your store. Of these, abandon cart emails have proven to be huge traffic drivers and can recover about 12% of lost traffic according to the Kissmetrics study. Email platforms such as MailChimp or GetResponse will help you set these up so that they run automatically, driving traffic back to your store and product pages with minimal hassle.
5. Become the Authority in Your Niche with Content Marketing
This is a long-term strategy, as slow and steady as SEO, but a vitally important one. Being an authority in the niche means that you are the go-to, the expert, the most trusted source of information within that niche and that will bring traffic. How? Through content marketing. We all know just how powerful blog guides can be for this, but it’s video content that can have a big impact on online stores and Amazon listing traffic. Guides on how to use a product, guides on holiday gift guides, or videos of customers using and enjoying your goods through Facebook and YouTube are big traffic drivers.
And no, you don’t need to fork out big spend to produce fancy videos to push your products. Here’s an example that generated 3 million views on Facebook to show you just how powerful ‘homemade’ videos can be to drive traffic and sales.
6. Be a Super Helpful Know-It-All
And lastly, following on from the last hack of being an authority, is to take your extensive knowledge within your niche and spread it around. By being helpful you can drive a lot of traffic to your product pages or online store, and the best part, it’s for free!
So how you may ask? Well through online forums. The trick is to not spam with links, but to help people with their queries as much as you can. A brilliant example of this, is Quora. Not only does it have awesome results on SERP pages when people type questions into the search, but if your answers are great and get upvoted to the top, you can get a good amount of traffic from it. Here’s an example when you search “the best juicer”.
Other forums where you can help people within your niche include blog forums, Facebook groups and sites like Reddit. But remember, you don’t want to be a spammer, just posting URLs to Amazon product pages. You want to offer sound advice, so add a link only if it is highly relevant and become the go-to person in those forums for advice — the traffic will come.
And, there you have it, six hacks to get more traffic and make more sales in 2018.
Special offer
StoreYa is offering a deal to all RepricerExpress blog readers on their app, Traffic Booster. Get the “Premium” plan for $50 (normally $100); they will add $50 for your first month. This plan includes the set up + management + optimization + ads budget. Start the new year with a boost in traffic and sales!
