One of the best things about running an internet ecommerce store is that you are no longer regionally isolated; your potential for customers is global. This is both a blessing and a curse as far as your bottom line is concerned. You have the potential sales from everyone on Earth, however, that same global population could also represent competition. When you open up an ecommerce store, you’re going to want to have a marketing plan for driving traffic to your little slice of the web.
Now that you’ve gotten your store off the ground, whether through a hosted enterprise ecommerce solutions platform or through your own means, you need to start pulling people your way – but, how do you do that?
Here are three tips for driving traffic to your ecommerce website:
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads
There are a lot of PPC options out there, but it generally refers to the top two or three ads that appear at the top of your search results. They may not be as eye-catching as other types of internet advertisement, but they put your brand in front of a lot of eyeballs. If you’ve written a good keyword-targeted, human-focused display ad, PPC ads can usually incite a high click-through rate. You should create landing pages for each category PPC ad you want to run and then A/B test the results to see which one nets a higher conversion rate.
According this Interactive Advertising Bureau report, search ads accounted for $9.1 billion, or 39 percent of the total internet advertising revenue during the first half of 2014. If that doesn’t convince you, here are a couple other reasons PPC is worth your time:
- You only pay when an interested person clicks one of your ads.
- You set your budget to control costs, so you never stumble across any unforeseen expenses.
- You can reach a highly targeted audience at a specific time and day with a specialized PPC campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a great avenue for highly targeted marketing campaigns and also a lot easier to track ROI compared to some other marketing strategies (SEO, for example).
Retargeted Facebook Ads
The beauty of online shopping, from a consumer’s perspective, is the ease in which one can compare prices of the same product. In that vein, a consumer will likely not purchase something from you on their first visit to your ecommerce store. With a retargeted Facebook ad, you can redirect a potential customer back to your store after they’ve already visited it once before.
Using Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature, you will install a simple piece of code into your website that will place a cookie on the computer of those who visit your site. When this cookie is installed, it will send information back to Facebook about which pages were viewed on your website by a particular user.
For example, say a user visited your ecommerce store, poked around and added a few items to the cart and at the last minute changed their mind. With a retargeted ad campaign, those pages they were just looking at will pop back up on the dashboard of their Facebook homepage. According to CMO.com, website visitors who are retargeted with a display ad are 70 percent more likely to convert on your website.
Create a Blog
One of the best things you can do for your online business is to actively maintain a blog. Keeping an informative blog sets up your position as an influencer and expert in your field.
People will buy products from people that they either know or trust, and in order to become a trustworthy source on the internet you need to simply begin creating or curating content that helps and/or informs people. When your store has an active, SEO-optimized blog, you will not only begin to see traffic rise, but also your sales! In order to maximize the benefit of a blog, you’ll need to write content based around the products you sell. For example, if you are a homebrew tea company, write blogs about the health benefits associated with drinking tea regularly!
Driving traffic to your business is hard work, but there are so many tools and resources available on the web to give you the best chance of success!