12: How to Increase Traffic and Conversions on your eCommerce Site

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, we didn’t put all of these strategies together over a weekend. It’s been a slow steady, incremental layering of tactics combined with a whole lot of trial and error. A marathon rather than a sprint. However, the combined effect of having these systems in place has helped us dramatically increase eCommerce traffic and conversions, which continue to grow upon themselves. In this article, I’ll lay out a complete playbook of strategies we use to promote our online store at www.soyoung.ca and increase eCommerce traffic and conversions.

 

I’ve grouped the strategies to increase eCommerce traffic and conversions in terms of where they fall in the marketing and sales funnel sequence. For those unfamiliar with the concept of “the funnel”, top funnelactivities are designed to attract new visitors who are unfamiliar with our products to our website. Mid-funnelactivities are designed to build a relationship with the user, who is still warming up to our brand. Bottom funnel activities are intended to convince people who have an interest in our products to actually make a purchase.

 

Top Funnel Strategies to Increase eCommerce Traffic and Conversions 

While SEO is the best way to get traffic, it is generally only going to deliver substantial traffic when you are selling an extremely specialized product that has very little online competition. For everything else, you will need another strategy to increase eCommerce traffic and conversions. As the purveyors of lunch boxes, backpacks and diaper bags, there was no way we could compete for these valuable keywords in organic search, so here is what we do to get new visitors to discover our products:

Paid Blog Placements

Being featured on the blogs of influencers is a great way to generate traffic and build instant trust in your products. While we do a fair bit of PR and get free coverage on many sites, some of the biggest hits we’ve gotten have been paid placements with well established bloggers who align with our audience. While not cheap, in some cases we have seen our traffic temporarily increase by a multiple of 10 with a single mention on a blog. This can be a very effective way to drive traffic and reach a new audience.

Facebook and Google shopping ads

There are a lot of ways to do banner advertising online, however we have found that Facebook and Google Shopping are most effective for reaching people who have no awareness of our products. Facebook allows for very tight targeting allowing us to reach exactly the type of profile that we have found are most interested in our products – mainly mothers of children between the ages of 3 and 10 with some university education. The “lookalike audiences” feature in Facebook allows us to upload lists of our past customers so that Facebook can use its algorithm to find similar targets. It’s been a very cost effective way to generate valuable new traffic. Google Shopping is great because, given the visual appeal of our products, prospective customers see an image of our designs in response to a specific search query.

 

Mid Funnel Strategies

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to pay for traffic to your site, then fail to capture the opportunity to continue marketing to that visitor. Rarely will people purchase a product they have just stumbled upon, so you need strategies for keeping them in the loop once they’ve visited your site and have an idea of what your brand is about.

“Win this” email call to action

In order to capture email addresses, you need an opt in offer that is compelling enough for a first time visitor to fill out. While we have used coupon codes in the past, the most effective strategy we’ve used is a pop up offering the potential to win a substantial prize: 5 of our products valued at over $300 to anyone who subscribes . We use a third party service called Opt-in monster to create pop-up with an “exit intent” trigger. This is a popup that appears as soon as the user’s mouse scrolls up to the top left corner of the screen (the movement that they would make before entering a new URL or hitting the back button – thus the term “exit-intent”). [ Try it out: go to www.soyoung.ca and spend a second on the home page. Then move your mouse up towards the back button in your browser – then see what happens next!]  It is extremely effective and has multiplied our opt-in rate for newsletters. Marketing the contest to our social media followers has also been a great way to convert those followers into newsletter subscribers.

Retargeting

You may find it annoying when you see ads for a website that you recently visited following you around the web, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that is an extremely effective form of advertising. If you have spent money to bring a visitor to your site, and they don’t fill out a subscr