See what else GoDaddy Pro is doing to help web professionals prepare clients for the holidays.
Once you have an ecommerce store up and running, it's all about seizing opportunities to steer shoppers your way. One of the biggest comes through driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an online store.
See, the ability to make money with an ecommerce website is directly proportional to traffic. And there's no arguing that traffic tends to spike around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But the digital space is a crowded marketplace and competitive. Without the right strategy, driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an online store cab be a real challenge. Luckily, we're going to highlight evergreen tactics to help with the holidays and beyond.
What you need to know about boosting ecommerce traffic
The process of getting your first customer and your thousandth is the same. The challenge comes in getting traffic that will result in sales and profit (which is what every marketer wants). The best part is that you can convert your traffic to customers at a sustainable cost with the right strategies.
Some of the questions to ask yourself at this point include:
- Is your product good enough for your target audience? In other words, does your product pass their cost-benefit analysis?
- What is the market size? Is there a group of people spending money purchasing the same type of product?
- Do you have a compelling copy/product story? You need to have a compelling copy or product pitch that your target audience can resonate with and convince them to buy.
- What’s the low-cost way to reach your audience? Customer acquisition must not be costly. With the many ways to reach the target audience, you should keep customer acquisition costs low.
Can you drive traffic without ads?
Increased use of mobile devices and the Internet of Things have changed how people do business in the last few years. According to Forbes, ecommerce is growing at a rate of 23% every year, and the trend is expected to rise.
A common misconception among some marketers is that you can rarely outdo your competitors without spending a huge sum of money on ads. However, the truth is, you don’t have to break your bank or feel at a disadvantage if you don’t have an unlimited advertising budget.
There are multiple ways of driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an ecommerce store on a budget, as you will see below.
Tactics for driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an ecommerce store
Spending money on ads without a plan on how things will play out in the long run will not bring the expected traffic. That’s why you must have a well-thought strategy for driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday to an ecommerce store.
To that end, here are a few all-time strategies:
Conduct audience research
The best way to know how well to reach potential customers is to research them thoroughly. In most cases, your target audience has similar characteristics. It can be that they belong to a particular demographic or engage in similar behavior.
By researching the potential customers, you’ll get a better idea of how to capture their attention and convert most of them to customers. More specifically, audience research is an excellent way to identify your target audience and their online shopping habits.
The best place to start with your audience research is looking at your current customers. After all, your potential customers will most likely have the same characteristics as those who have already bought your product.
The information you will be able to gather about your current customers will depend on your business models. The catch is to collect as much information as you can without bugging your customers.
Your website is an excellent source of customer information, so be sure to check it out. Also, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have built-in analytic tools that you can use to get more info about your customers. Although not everyone who interacts with your social media accounts will be a customer, it gives a better idea of who is interested in your product.
Some important demographics to include in audience research include:
- Geographic location — Knowing where your customers are located will help determine where to target ads.
- Age - Having an idea of the general age of your customers will come in handy when creating the marketing strategy.
- Stage of life - Are you targeting students, newlyweds, parents, etc.?
- Interests — Where do your customers spend their free time? What are their hobbies? What kind of music do they listen to most? Ideally, make an effort to know what your customers like besides your products or services.
- Spending patterns — what’s the average income of your customers? Knowing this will give an idea of their spending patterns and how they approach purchasing products like yours.
That’s it. Now you have customer data. Use this information to target people with similar characteristics.
Grow your list
Another best way to increase ecommerce traffic is by building lists. And by lists, we don’t just mean email lists. We are in 2021, and you need to build lists across multiple platforms to connect with leads, prospects, and customers.
For instance, you could build:
- WhatsApp broadcasting lists
- A list on Facebook messenger
- Email list
While you want as many people as possible to visit your site, it’s worth noting that only a few of them will lead to an instant sale.
To make real sales, you need to capture your visitors to a list and communicate with them regularly and nurture them through your channel.
Building lists is an excellent and rewarding process that will help drive traffic to your site. When you have increased traffic, higher chances are you will have increased revenue as well. Most marketers will achieve this through email lists alone. Think about what you could achieve when you grow your list on other platforms like Facebook Messenger.
Now that you know the benefits of growing your list, let’s look at a few ways to grow your list:
Add a scroll Box
One way to turn web visitors into subscribers is by adding a Scroll Box. This way, when a visitor scrolls down your page, they will get a polite CTA asking them to provide their email address or subscribe to Facebook Messenger.
Include opt-in forms at your store
You should make it super easy for your visitors to opt into your list. Add opt-in forms across your store to make it easier for your visitors to opt into and not go around searching.
Some of the best places to add opt-ins include:
- The sidebar of your website
- Underneath the content blog
Optimizing your site for SEO
Search engines are an excellent for driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an ecommerce store. People who find it through search engines like Google are actively searching for products or services similar to what's at the store, making it a great source of relevant traffic.
However, to benefit from this traffic, you need to appear on the first page of search results. Optimizing your website for SEO is the best practice to ensure you appear higher on search results. More specifically, better SEO will help increase domain authority, trust, and relevance. Here are the steps to optimizing your website for SEO.
Keyword research
Keyword research forms a crucial part of SEO. Before you include any keywords in your marketing plan, conduct keyword research to determine what terms people use to search for the kind of products you sell. Keyword research tools will help in this process.
To start the process, make a list of topics that you want to rank for when searched on Google, ones that are relevant to your business. You can use Google to expand your list if you have challenges coming up with the terms. Just search a term that you have and scroll at the bottom of the page for related suggestions.
However, when conducting keyword research, ensure to include both head terms and long-tail keywords. Unlike head terms, long-tail keywords contain more than three words and are more specific. They are useful, especially for people in a more advanced stage of the buying cycle.
Another thing to do during keyword research is to look at what terms your competitors are ranking for. This is helpful both ways. First, it will help determine the most important keywords, and secondly, it will help you know what keywords your competitors are not ranking for but have a great opportunity for your business.
On-site optimization
On-page optimization goes beyond placing a few keywords randomly on your website. Although this practice was important a few years ago, currently, the case is entirely different. Yes, keywords still matter to date, but relevancy is more important today. More specifically, here’s how your web pages need to be:
- Unique — Google considers duplicate pages low-value content. That means, duplicating from other sites or within your site will hurt your SEO. Ensure your descriptions are unique and tell the story about your specific product, and you will be good to go.
- Aligned — Ensure that users find what they are looking for when they visit your website. Use keywords that match with what you are offering, and you won’t hurt your rankings.
- User-friendly — Organize your content neatly in a way that users can navigate easily.
Use power words in your headlines
Sometimes you may rank on the first page of search engines, but you are not getting traffic. The main reason for this is that people are not opening your link.
That’s why you need to use powerful words in your headlines. Using Google’s Search Console report, you can see CTR (click-through rate) for different keywords or terms. If you are using terms with a low CTR in your headlines, replace them with other keywords.
Go mobile
Optimizing your ecommerce store only for desktop devices will lead to a poor user experience, making your visitors leave your site. The result will be entirely different if you optimize your online store for mobile.
Google favors websites that perform well on mobile over those that don’t. If you are yet to make your site mobile responsive, you better do it quickly to ensure that users can browse your site easily and be favored by Google.
Build a content marketing strategy
Another all-time strategy to drive traffic to your ecommerce store is building a content marketing strategy. Having a content marketing strategy helps build relationships with your customers and target audience, improves SEO on your website, and allows for more content to promote on social platforms and in ads.
That being the case, here are the procedures to follow to ensure you drive traffic with your content marketing efforts:
- Optimize your content for SEO: Writing fun and informative content is good. However, you need to optimize your content for search as well. Otherwise, no one will see it.
- Don’t settle on blogs alone: Although blogs form a critical part of content marketing, you shouldn’t ignore other formats as well. This includes infographics, videos, podcasts, webinars, and eBooks.
- Focus on your customer interests: Your content should not be all about you and your products. It should center on your customer’s needs and interests. By offering helpful content, people will view you as a reputable source of information in your industry, significantly improving your rankings.
Use social media to boost traffic
Most people use social media as part of their everyday life. In fact, about 2 billion people are active on each social media platform, making it an effective channel for driving traffic to your ecommerce store. There are two ways to drive traffic to your online store using social media, including:
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a free way to advertise your product or service on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Since it takes time, you need to identify a platform good for you, depending on your target audience.
Here you can promote your website, share links to your content, share images, interact with your customers, and be social.
Paid social ads
It is important to understand that social media techniques only target people who already follow you. If you are looking to reach a new audience, you may want to consider paid social ads. I am sure you’ve come across things like “sponsored ads” on Facebook. Depending on the platform, you will pay only for the traffic you get from the ads.
Engage with influencers
Another way to drive traffic to your website is to engage with influencers. In fact, this is a great way to tap into a whole new audience.
Influencers are individuals with high credibility in specific industries and have a large following on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Buyers trust their word when it comes to shopping experiences.
If you decide to go this route, research various social platforms and popular accounts related to your industry.
After this, talk to them about your products, why they are useful, and how you can both work together. You may want to send them product samples and offer special discounts they can distribute to their followers. Another option is to create an affiliate program to automate the program, especially if you plan to work with different influencers.
Influencers will, in return, share your product in Facebook and Instagram stories or tag you in a post, which will help with driving Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic to an ecommerce store.
Get the GoDaddy Pro workshops checklist for WooSesh 2021
If you’re attending the GoDaddy Pro workshops at WooSesh 2021, make sure to download our checklist for the event. It provides a step-by-step walkthrough for dialing in your WooCommerce store and will help you get more from your WooSesh experience.
