The most important question to ponder when opening an online store is: how are you going to drive traffic to your store?
You know. what is the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way for people to find out about your products?
Even after you’ve served your 1,000th customer, this question will remain constant when you draft your online marketing plan or e-commerce strategy.
There are two common approaches to growing your e-commerce traffic.
One involves short-term tactics that can give your traffic an instant boost, although you can expect the surge to drop almost as immediately as it came.
Another approach involves a long-term strategy that will employ more work and effort but with more permanent returns.
Which approach is best? The answer depends on the type of product or service you are offering. However, most successful online marketing strategies involve a combination of both short-term and long-term techniques.
Short-Term Tactics to Boost Your Online Store Traffic
1. Make Use of Your Instagram “Link in Bio”
The term “link in bio” or “bio-link” emerged out of Instagram having only one clickable link on your entire feed or profile.
The website URL on your profile is therefore the most valuable link on Instagram because it is the only link that jumps out of Instagram to a new page elsewhere on the web.
Make sure to put your store’s link here. Some accounts link just their home page or landing page, however, most customers expect your store’s link to be on your bio-link.
If you have more than one important URL that you want to share, there is a way of hacking Instagram’s one-link only rule.
Sites like Desygner allow you to create a page that can host multiple links. Desygner acts as a launchpad to everything you want to connect your audience to.
The launch page is easy to build and straightforward. Just add your links and then put your Desygner page URL on your Instagram link-in-bio.
Pro Tip: You can create a Desygner page that will connect to different sections of your online store. For example, if you're a fashion brand you can create different links for the Tops, Bottoms, Jackets, Shoes, or Accessories sections.
2. Create Visually Striking Instagram Ads
Some start-up owners don’t want to spend on ads because they feel like their budget is better allocated elsewhere.
However, if you cannot afford to wait for your followers to grow organically, you should set a portion of your budget for ad spending. You can buy ad space on Google or Facebook but these aren’t as catchy as Instagram ads.
Instagram ads, whether as posts or stories, have higher recall thanks to their visual appeal. Plus, when you post creative and striking images or videos, people are more likely to click on your ad without thinking if the post is sponsored or not.
Case in point SHEIN:
Pro Tip: Use a creative editing app (like Instasize) to help you figure out your brand’s look and feel. A solid app will let you edit colors, filters, borders, and in-art copy to create uber-clickable Instagram ads.
3. Run Time-Sensitive Contests and Other Promotions
You can also run a contest, promotion, or giveaway to hike up traffic to your online store. Just remember to put a time limit.
Running a contest with an imminent deadline creates a sense of urgency that will push people to take action. So pick a good prize, come up with your mechanics, and witness your web store traffic grow almost instantaneously.
(Source: Vyper)
Creating a contest can be tricky and time-consuming if you’re doing it all from scratch. Fortunately, sites like Vyper have been helping all kinds of small to large businesses grow their reach by automating the process of hosting a promo or giveaway.
Long-Term Tactics to Boost Your Online Store Traffic
Now that you know some of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your store, here are some of the more “evergreen” techniques that you should use to constantly build your store traffic over time.
1. Use Advanced Search to Improve Your Engagement
No matter what social media platform you’re on, make sure to explore the Advanced Search options so you can track exactly who is talking about your brand.
These deep searches, whether through certain keywords or hashtags, will give you a clue as to what people are saying about your product or service.
Now after doing an Advanced Search, you can reply to the posts and leave links back to your online store when it is appropriate.
Make your comments conversational, use emojis, and overall just set a welcoming tone so that users will immediately check your profile and your store after your interaction.
This method will take a lot of time and has to be done constantly for it to reap favorable results. There are a bevy of social media management tools to help you streamline your workflow.
If you’re on Twitter, you can use Followerwonk to conduct in-depth searches of Twitter content and break down your audience according to location, interests, and more.
2. Harness the Power of Email Marketing
The email inbox is a prime spot to promote your online store. Whether you’re sending a newsletter or a promotional email, users who read from their email inbox have a high chance of clicking on your store URL.
Making an effective email campaign is simple. To be successful, you just have to be consistent. A great email consists of the following:
A compelling image
Short but on-point copy
A call-to-action button
Once you master how to craft such emails, you can schedule your campaigns as often as you like. Just choose an email sending platform like Mailchimp or Sendinblue to suit your working style.
3. Write Consistently Good Copy
Don’t underestimate the power of great writing. Be consistent with your writing style, from your social media captions, blog articles, email newsletters, and even in your responses to people’s comments and posts.
Your writing style reflects your brand’s personality. Well-written copy can lead to direct action such as driving traffic to your online store.
When writing your product descriptions or captions, make sure to always highlight the benefit or value that people will get from you.
If you want to have a better idea of what captivating copy is like, here’s a list of 1,000+ Instagram captions and calls-to-action that have gone from good to great.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully the tips outlined in this article help you level-up your content to drive more traffic and sales for your business. The tactics above are a fantastic starting point. But, remember that you can combine different tips and solutions, whether short-term or long-term, to find out what will work well with your brand. When it comes to digital marketing, there's no one size fits all approach. You'll need to keep testing different tactics to find out what delivers the results you're looking for, Good luck!
This is a guest post from the team at Instasize. Inistasize provide premium photo and video editing tool to help creators and entrepreneurs step up their social media game, grow their audience and win more customers.