How to Get Traffic to Your Shopify Store?
Owning a Shopify store demands creative and new ideas to drive more traffic to it. This can be a challenge. However, you will always find answers to your questions once you have a clear understanding of the current market requirements and the moves of your competitors. The following should provide you with great and unique ideas to successfully driving traffic to your eCommerce website. Once you master these, you are a winner for sure!
Tactics for Getting Traffic
Shopify App Store
Shopify provides you with more than 1,100 apps for you to add various functions to your Shopify e-commerce website. These apps are extremely useful for automating daily tasks, administration, accounting, shipping, fulfillment, customer service, inventory management and more. These excellent apps provide you with more time on hand to focus on your core business goals. You can also add a customer review, rating system, or a live chat feature, based on your needs. Though these apps cost you money, they are a wise investments with a measurable return.
Some of the top-rated popular apps included in the Shopify store are:
- SALES POP - lets you add a user’s recent purchase activities to improve conversion
- Consistent Cart - to add a consistent shopping cart to your store that’s available for all devices, supercharges your sales and sends abandoned cart emails to reduce the abandoned cart rate
- Ads – free ad exchange to locate quality customers who will buy from you
PRINTFUL, SEND PUSH NOTIFICATIONS, Quick View, Smart Upsells, CROSS-SELL, Targeted Recommendations, Product Reviews and RECURRING ORDERS are some more in this list.
Social Media
Social media is increasingly being used for customer relationship and group discussions. If you are a beginner, an easy way to begin could be via Pinterest, since you will just have to set up a board and invite all customers to participate by posting their comments and likes.
In the landscape of Shopify e-commerce, you can leverage the following apps to reach your customers, engage them and encourage them to share feedback on how to improve your offerings:
- The Facebook Audience Builder tool helps you to automate new customer additions and targets all your ads towards the right audience.
- Shopify2Twitter app displays your sales on Twitter and dynamically links all your sold items into the Twitter feed.
- The Shoppable Instagram Galleries app lets customers use your Instagram pictures to add those items to their carts easily, as they are embedded into the galleries. Instagram also provides you an amazing app called WEBSTA, which gives you the most popular accounts in your niche that would feature your products and help you enhance your popularity.
- The Mobile Messaging & Social Share Bar app by Zotabox lets you connect with your potential customers on Messenger, Skype, phone, or email in just one click. It is one of the stylish and customizable apps for social sharing on mobile devices.
- Reddit gives you thousands of niche options through subreddits and has posts on almost every topic you can think of. You just have to focus on your Shopify e-commerce niche and make use of the abundant tips and discussions related to your products.
Email Subscribers
More than 60% of people who receive emails with offers tend to subscribe to them. Interestingly, email subscription is capable of giving an ROI of about 4,300%, based on the reports of Direct Marketing Association. You can use Shopify store’s Email Popup app to build your mailing list automatically using the customizable, mobile-friendly, responsive templates and uploading customized background images to reduce cart abandonment and generate more leads. Since email marketing is a high-converting mode, Shopify development environment focuses on creating apps like Email Popup and more to help ecommerce businesses make the most of it.
Creating Blog
Creating an original blog with value-driven content can drive traffic through multiple channels along with improving the SEO ranking and social presence of your e-commerce store. It is the best way to build brand awareness and credibility, especially if yours is a new business. Though more than 80% of the businesses have employed various content strategies, only 32% find them effective. Hence, invest some time for proper keyword research and create content of high value. Make use of apps like BlogFeeder, which lets you import your blogs into the Shopify store with just 1 click and automatically sync them. Have your blog and store in the same domain to maximize conversions.
Product Video
You might not have imagined how many times customers wants to buy a product and just because they do not know how it would work or look while in use, they abandon the decision. In such cases, if you can publish videos on how to use your products, it would certainly boost the number of buyers. You can choose to use the popular platforms like Vimeo or YouTube for the purpose. Since YouTube is the second in the list of largest search engines, using it would also bring your some SEO advantage. You can also choose to self-host your videos on your own website. However, if you self-host, you ought to optimize the video, as required, while uploading.
Adding Reviews
Though some of your blogs and articles can be focused on describing your products and how to use them, reliability of your products can be built only through user reviews. It is natural for anyone to look for customer reviews to see how your products do in real life. Integrating reviews to the Shopify store can increase your conversion rates by up to 76%, says online magazine Internet Retailer. There are two reasons for this: the first being reviews acting as a social proof to the potential buyers; and second being the improved SEO ranking.
The great news is that you can use apps like Product Reviews Addon, which automatically sends mails to your list of customers requesting them for reviews, thus saving you time. By showcasing the reviews with pictures, it also helps your products to get noted by potential buyers.
Do Market Research
To expand your ecommerce business, it is essential for you to spend some time researching the demand of your products in the market, which includes researching the keywords, keeping updated with social media trends and geographic validation. At the same time, you should examine if you have the ability to scale-up your business (by adding new products or expanding the line of existing ones) and if the costs involved make it worth doing, depending on the market demand. A clever way to test the demand is to pre-sell or list products as out-of-stock to find how many customers place orders. You can even use Market Insights - an effective tool, which helps you to compare the performance of your Shopify store vs. the comspetitor’s store. It also reveals how customers interact with either.
Entertain Visitors
Engaging visitors is not just about getting email subscriptions. Rather, it is about directing them to the right places that will eventually get you leads and sales. One way of doing it is to send your visitors to all your social media profiles. Create interesting Instagram feeds, being active on Facebook and Twitter, and creating prominent ‘like’ or ‘follow’ buttons on your website homepage are effective ways of engaging your site visitors. Blog more regularly with interesting tips and concepts along with offering promotional offers on special occasions. Use pop-ups in your homepage that link to your various social media profiles or promotional pages. Make use of apps like Promotion Bar, which is essentially a sticky bar that appears on your webpage with highlights of promotions that link to various pages. It helps you to grow your mailing list, promote coupons and offers effectively, thus driving more traffic your way.
Reduce Abandoned Carts
Study of Baymard Institute reveals that around 67.45% of the shopping carts are abandoned before completion of the process. It means loss of a significant amount of business that you just can’t ignore. The best way to make up for those abandoned carts is to use ‘recovery email campaign’. Get the list of abandoned carts and shoot emails to each one of the users, encouraging them to complete the purchase. Make use of tools like Abandonment Protector, which detects customer behaviors and sends automated recovery emails with new offers, if any. With it, you can also send new offers for other customers and thank you emails for orders completed on your Shopify store.
Competitions
One of the most enticing ways to attract traffic to your store is to organize contests of high value. This would make people share the same with their friends. However, you ought to promote the contest by communicating the same to all your subscribers and encouraging them to share it with others. You may also publish the contests in popular social media platforms and persuade customers to post photos, share tips and anecdotes etc. You can boost brand awareness by creating communities for the contests. Utilize user-friendly apps like ‘Event, Offer & News Slider’ that highlight exciting offers and enhance customer experience. You may even leverage the Gleam app of Shopify ecommerce store to set up contests easily.
Conclusion
There are many ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store. You must identify what works for your business though it would require time and effort to perform the required research and trials. Make use of the Shopify blogs and app store to equip yourself with more knowledge and insight to ensure your store aligns with new market trends and developments while focusing on improving customer experience and customer engagement. With consistent efforts and the right Shopify apps, you can surely witness improved traffic to your ecommerce store.
