How to drive more e-commerce store traffic without buying ads?

When you are willing to establish an online e-commerce store, it is important that you are passionate about it. This passion will be reflected in the quality of your business. For an online e-commerce store to prosper it needs traffic to be driven to it from various sources. Without traffic, you won’t be able to sell anything. Also, quality traffic is the key. There’s no point in attracting the wrong customers because they’re simply not going to buy what you have to sell. The quality traffic, however, needs to come from people who will be interested in buying the product or service and in order for this to take place you need to target people within your niche.

Back in the days, the competition was minimal, technology was not as affordable as it is now and the access to the product was limited, so it was comparatively easy to attract customers to an online e-commerce store. But nowadays, with the multiple numbers of enterprise e-commerce platforms available, attracting the customer to your store has become a tedious task. Customers don’t shop the same way as they used to do earlier. They go through multiple stores in order to search a product. They ask for recommendations on social media. They use their smartphones to read product reviews while in-store and pay for purchases using all sorts of payment methods. Retailers must figure out where their audience is and how to attract them efficiently without killing their marketing budget.

Driving traffic to your online e-commerce store helps bring in capable buyers to land you that sale. Many spend their time perfecting the appearance of their stores and fail to do what really matters: Marketing. There are plenty of ways to drive traffic and gain customers without spending a penny.

Content Creation:

As far as the online e-commerce store is concerned, content is of utmost importance. Content is what will ultimately establish your credibility in your particular market segment. Content not only serves in creating traffic through search engines but also helps in converting that traffic into sales. As content interacts directly with the audience, it builds a direct connection with them, thus leaving a greater impact. Content in form of articles, blogs or even video presentations, will allow you to build a healthy relationship with your visitors and give them a reason to visit you in the future.

Social Media:

Social media has been impacting the lives of people for several years, it has connected people worldwide and made the communication easy. It has also allowed sharing important moments in one’s life and allowed customers to develop more intimate relationships with businesses and service providers. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc helps to build a trust between brand and the customer. About 90% of consumers trust the opinions and reviews provided to them online by their peers. Also, social media gives you greater insight into the mind of your e-commerce customers. When you use website’s analytics properly, you can determine where your customers are coming from, why they are coming to your site and what types of posts or comments are creating the most customer engagement.

Referral Programs:

An online e-commerce store is bound to benefit from the referral program.We often value the opinions of our friends, family, and others in our network when it comes to buying a product. Nearly, 81% of consumers have a greater impact on the recommendation from a friend or family member on their buying decisions.

Promotional Emails:

The successful online retailers are aware of the fact that one of the most reliable and profitable methods to boost online traffic is through email marketing. Email marketing is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients. Email marketing accounts for approximately 23% of sales. Promotional emails build loyalty and keep customers coming back for more.

Reward Program:

Reward Programs encourage shoppers to return to stores where they frequently make purchases.They help you build customers loyalty. Surprising customers with offers, freebies, and benefits they don’t expect can be a marketing advantage that boosts customer engagement and drives sales.

Demo Videos :

Visual content captures your visitor’s initial attention, it also keeps the visitors on the content page for a longer time to consume the content and communicates the essential information about your product. Thus, resulting in more sales and conversion. Use of e-commerce video has improved conversions by 85%.

Offer free shipping:

Free shipping is one of the best criteria for making a purchase online.It is estimated that 47% of shoppers would abandon a purchase if they got to checkout and found out free shipping wasn’t included.

Summary:

The objective of this post is to teach you how to drive traffic without spending a dime on ads. Huge budget is not mandatory for any online e-commerce store to be successful. What matters the most is the development of effective marketing strategies to bring visitors to your store. Doing this can increase your conversion rates and build your reputation. However, the only way to find out if a traffic acquisition strategy will work for you is to try it, decide what “success” would look like, and then analyze the results.