How to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store for Free?

Create Ridiculously Good Content

Creating good quality content plays an important role in attracting the right type of traffic to your eCommerce website, engaging its users, and driving them down the sales funnel. Besides, there’s an increased possibility of people sharing your content if they find it beneficial.

How Good Content Increases eCommerce Traffic

Long gone are the days when internet marketers could expect seedy under-handed tactics to work. Customers are smarter and make more informed decisions than before. There’s a good chance they’ve done their research before they even come to your store and have made up their minds as to whether to buy your product or not.

How can you play a role in influencing their decision? Effective content marketing gives you a great opportunity to do just this. For instance, your blog can become a place where your target audience gets access to useful and helpful information that enables it to make the best possible decision.

Your blog can also play a role in increasing your authority and the trust your audience places in your brand, driving it to make purchases. More importantly, it can encourage your customers to tell others about your business and there’s nothing quite like personal recommendations. Word of mouth can be an extremely powerful way of marketing, and this is exactly that. Besides, it’s a great way to get high-quality free eCommerce traffic.

How to Create Content That People Share

The best way to create valuable content your potential audience finds interesting is to browse popular websites and forums that relate to topics you want to write about. For example, if you sell musical instruments through your eCommerce store, visit popular blogs, forums, and websites where people get the latest news, discuss trends, and talk about music and musical instruments.

Then, you can find out what your audience is interested in and identify the topics that are doing rounds at any given point in time. This will give you a solid start surrounding what to write about.

To make sure people share your content, request your audience to do so. Ask viewers to share it on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Ask them to leave a comment. The more engagement your content has, the higher the chances of it ranking well and getting found, which means one thing – more free traffic.

Pay Attention to SEO

eCommerce traffic statistics collated by Semrush highlight the importance of search engine optimization for online stores. For instance, while there has been a drop in informational and navigational keywords over the years, there has been an increase in the number of keywords for commercial and transactional searches. Consider these numbers:

• Online stores receive around 33% of their overall traffic from search engines.
• Around 50% of web users carry out research on Google before making online purchases.
• Close to 60% of consumers use Google to research online and in-store purchases.
• More than 50% of web users use Google to discover new brands.

If you have the required expertise, SEO is among the best free ways to increase traffic to your eCommerce website. Even if you don’t and decide to use the services of an SEO company, it can be a worthy long-term investment. This is because search engines continue to remain an important source of traffic, and by targeting the right intent-based keywords, you stand to attract highly qualified organic traffic geared for making purchases.

A good search engine optimization strategy can get your website to rank well on search engines for targeted keywords. This involves paying attention to different aspects.

• Make sure you choose the right keywords.
• Optimize all your product pages (URL, title tag, copy, metadata, and image alt text).
• Create quality content.
• Keep your website’s architecture clean and simple.
• Optimize page loading speed.
• Ensure relevance between redirects.
• Use internal links suitably.
• Make sure your website is responsive.
• Do not use duplicate content.
• Get quality backlinks.

Turn to Social Media

Another good way to drive traffic to an eCommerce site is to harness the potential that different social media platforms have to offer. Various online platforms like ‎Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Later give you the ability to create and schedule posts for the top social media platforms, which you may use to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.

While social media platforms can serve as rather effective free eCommerce traffic sources, you need to know which ones are best for you and how to go about the process.

• Research your audience. For, identify your target audience based on demographics like age, gender, income/education level, and location. Take time to learn about their needs and expectations.
• Find the right platform/s. You need to know which social media platforms your target audience uses the most. For example, do you plan to target older professionals who tend to hang out on LinkedIn? If you’re targeting the much younger 18 to 24 years age group, TikTok and Snapchat might work well for you. If you, on the other hand, run a visual-based business, you might benefit by using Instagram.
• Identify your goals. What are your goals? Is it to improve brand awareness, increase sales, or build a community? Once you identify your goals, rely on one or more social media platforms to achieve them. For example, Instagram is a goldmine for visually stunning brands, and LinkedIn holds the potential to connect B2B prospectors with valuable leads. When it comes to building relationships, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can be your go-to platforms.
• Take it easy. Spreading yourself thin across every platform can lead to social media burnout. Ideally, you should start small, master one or two platforms, and focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience.
• Remain consistent. You should look at building a thriving social media presence as a long-term investment. To get your audience to view you as a reliable partner, you need to post regularly and engage with your community.
• Stay flexible. Remember that social media landscapes can shift, so what works today might not tomorrow. This requires that you monitor your results, stay flexible, and be ready to tweak your strategy.

Leverage Email Marketing

While search engine optimization and social media platforms are good sources of attracting web traffic, eCommerce stores should not overlook what email marketing has to offer. When you have a good email marketing strategy in place, you get to connect with your audience in a personalized manner, which can then encourage people to visit your website and make purchases.

Why Is It So Powerful?

While you want traffic to your eCommerce store, that’s not the end goal, is it? The main objective is to get the people who visit your website to make purchases. While blog content can be a helpful way of attracting more traffic, it isn’t the best way to retain customers, at least, not by itself. This is because a large number of people who visit your website through search engines never come back again. That’s a lot of lost traffic.

There could be many reasons for this; maybe they found something better or simply forgot. This is where email marketing enters the picture. This form of marketing helps you retain these customers and bring them back, positively impacting the traffic your eCommerce website gets.

How to Convince Visitors to Give You Their Email Addresses?

When people visit your eCommerce store or blog, there should be a prominent space dedicated to collecting the email addresses of your audience. Sumo is a very good free option if you’re just starting out. Be warned, though, that unless your content or products are up to the mark, most people won’t give away email addresses easily.

An effective way to tackle this problem is to give them something in return. For example, instead of asking your readers to give you their email addresses, offer a flat 10% discount on their first purchase and then direct them to sign up with their email. This is among the best ways to collect email addresses from your audience.

Once you have the email addresses of people interested in what you have to offer, you need to create attractive campaigns and implement them strategically while ensuring that you don’t spam your audience. This is a great way to drive traffic to your online store for free, which then leads to an increase in sales.

Bear in mind that email addresses are highly sensitive pieces of information you shouldn’t disclose to anyone. As a result, you need to assure your website’s users that you will treat their information with the utmost security and you will not misuse it in any manner.

Increase Traffic With Giveaways

Giveaways can be rather effective in getting free traffic to your eCommerce store. After all, people love free stuff and are often willing to go a mile further than usual to get what’s on offer. One good move is to set up a giveaway of something in your store that you are sure people will like.

Several online service providers offer extremely effective solutions for eCommerce stores and other businesses, helping them gain high-quality traffic through giveaways. Some of the top ones include:

• Rafflecopter
• ‎RafflePress
• Woorise
• Wishpond
• Shortstack

The premise behind this concept is rather straightforward. To enter a giveaway lucky draw, your visitors need to perform two or three simple tasks like signing up to your email list or sharing your website on their Facebook or Twitter feed. Web users can typically complete these tasks in a few minutes.

This method gives you the means to effectively drive traffic to your online store through a simple act of giving away a few highly desirable products. If possible, plan to give away at least five to 10 products because this will make your audience more hopeful of winning something and will increase the likelihood of people participating in the giveaway. This, in turn, is bound to exponentially increase the level of promotion as well as the traffic your eCommerce store receives.

Conclusion

Driving traffic to your online store without emptying your wallet is possible. By embracing organic strategies like SEO, social media marketing, and community engagement, you can lay the groundwork for sustainable growth. Remember that while attracting adequate web traffic takes time and consistent effort, the rewards are undeniable. What you may expect includes an increase in brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales.

Sure, it is possible to drive traffic to your online store for free, but doing so requires mastering different strategies and devoting adequate time to the process. If you don’t have an in-house marketing team, partnering with a digital marketing company might be in your best interest. This is because you can then benefit from a steady flow of traffic as well as an increase in sales.