eCommerce sales have exploded, and merchants are experiencing the growing pains of that explosion. Not the least of which is the rapid development and evolution of digital technology.

But does that mean every other eCommerce business will thrive and observe a surge in their sales?

Unfortunately, this will not be the case.

eCommerce sales are expected to surpass $740 Billion by 2023 in the United States alone. Isn’t this great news for online retailers?

Well, with hoards of choices available to the consumers today, it becomes challenging to get their attention and make them purchase a product from your store.

In case you’re thinking that the ones with a high budget for online ads will only prosper, you’re wrong!

This is absolutely not what’s going to happen.

Thankfully, an advertising budget is not the only way to get traffic to your website.

Some expert tips and tricks can be followed consistently to increase your website traffic and convert those users into customers.

Be Consistent in Optimizing Your Store

Whether you’ve just launched your website or are running a well-established web store, you need to optimize your site for sales.

Every other visitor to your site is different, and hence there are many unique ways to reach each of them and get them to purchase your products or services.

There are several ways to drive organic traffic to your store. But before you implement those strategies, it’s necessary to have a website that’s ready and reassuring for your potential customers’ needs.

Here’s a quick list of things to consider in order to prepare your website in order to meet today’s buyer expectations:

  • Talk To Your Buyer Persona: No fluff, just focus on the stuff that your potential customers are looking for. Speak directly to them through your website with the content and visuals. Make it compelling, informative, and address their pain points.
  • Deliver Product Clarity: Not being clear of what you’re selling on your website is the biggest blunder you can ever commit! Don’t ever make that mistake. Make it clear from your homepage itself what products/services you excel in serving.
  • Avoid Uncomplicated Structure: Focus on making the user’s journey on your website a treat for them. Easy navigation, precise product categorization, prominent call-to-action, and organized content are some implementations to keep in mind.
  • Appealing Product Photographs: Online shoppers are keen to check the photograph and videos of the product on your website. In fact, 83% of US smartphone users find product photography extremely influential to purchasing decisions.
  • Frequent Quality checks: Be it a small or large eCommerce business, you must schedule quality control of your website at regular intervals. Monitor the products in stock, product descriptions, the addition of reviews, and accurate user flow to stand behind a successful eCommerce store.

Now, since you’ve learned about how you can keep your website ready for traffic. Let’s dive deep into some significant ways to drive traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

93% of web traffic comes from search engines.

There’s a reason why 61% of online brands keep organic SEO presence as their top priority to drive traffic to their website.

SEO is all about publishing keyword-specific and informative content for potential consumers. Tools such as Google Trends, SEMrush, and Ahrefs help you explore the industry-specific keywords you can target.

If you’re running an eCommerce store, you must pay attention to product keywords as well.

You need to channelize your efforts to rank on the first page of search engines. And landing a seat on the first page through SEO might take time, so be patient.

Product Specific Keywords

Find product-specific keywords to focus on for your eCommerce store.

Try Referral Marketing

Ever heard about referral marketing?

Do you remember some businesses encouraging you to tell your peers or connections to buy their products or services? If yes! That’s what referral marketing is all about.

Usually, referral marketing is conducted by word of mouth or text. And building a referral program is relatively easy as well.

eCommerce merchants can leverage referral marketing as a tool to raise awareness and spread reach about their products/services.

Referral Marketing Example

Spotify uses referral marketing to encourage new customer signups.

Referral marketing is precise in targeting the appropriate audiences with an involved trust factor to accelerate the reach and, ultimately, traffic to your website.

Cross-selling & Upselling

A book on Marketing Metrics aptly puts it as “The Probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. Whereas, the probability of selling to an existing customer lies between 60 to 70%.”

Small eCommerce businesses mostly ignore the power of upselling.

Most merchants under the false impression of it not being worth the effort, but that’s not the case.

Upselling can help you increase your revenue by 10-30% on average. Moreover, upsells are 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.

When tested on upselling and cross-sell features, Amazon, the mecca of eCommerce stores, saw an increase in their sales by 35%.

While adapting these features is essential, you must note not being pushy (customers definitely won’t be impressed with constant poking.

You can make use of pre-built extensions for eCommerce stores available online.

Cross-selling & upselling

You might be also interested in the section for upselling marketing.

Email Marketing (Automation)

You obviously are building a healthy subscriber list for your email campaigns. But how do you make the most of it?

The answer is by sending promotional emails and abandoned cart emails.

Yes, you can recover 30% of abandoned carts with abandonment emails.

If you think that email marketing is outdated in the world of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, you’ll be astonished to know that email marketing channels hold the highest ROI, generating $40 for every dollar spent.

Maintaining a mix of weekly promotional and educational emails can do wonders for building loyalty and keep customers coming back for more.

Email Marketing

Promotional email by Uber

Influencer Marketing

In today’s time, influencers yield a lot of power (especially on social media).

If you can get an influencer to endorse your brand or products, you can tap into the audience at the influencer’s disposal, which may be far more vast than your own following/reach.

Head on to any social media platform (where your buyer persona resides), begin researching for popular accounts related to your industry.

Influencers are people or social media accounts with credibility in their industry as trendsetters with a large follower base.

Once you recognize the list of influencers, you can reach out to them and discuss how both of you can work together. For example, if you’ve tangible products, you can send them a few samples and ask them to promote them on their social media or host a contest for free giveaways.

There’s a lot more that can be done through influencer marketing to increase brand awareness and, ultimately, traffic to your social media accounts and website.

Influencer Marketing

Post from Zoe Sugg’s Instagram account (example of Influencer marketing).

Conclusion

eCommerce in 2021 and further years will further embrace new and evolving technologies such as voice commerce, omnichannel experiences, headless commerce, and much more.

Before you dive into modern technologies you can leverage to meet the expectations of modern-day customers, it’s imperative to fine-tune your website.