11 Tips to Increase E-com Traffic and Sales

Higher traffic may translate to higher sales but its not always the case with e-commerce stores.

Improving your traffic and sales require careful placement of design and content on your website. Let us break this article in to two parts. One part will talk about improving the traffic to your e-commerce website and the other will talk about improving your sales.

Part A: How to improve your e-commerce traffic.

Traffic is the bloodstream of any online business. The more traffic your website has, the better are the chances of making a sale.

You can implement many paid and free ways to improve the traffic of your e-commerce website. But before that, you should make sure that you have a good product and ample marketing materials to supplement your efforts.

1. Use Paid Traffic

Paid traffic means using PPC(pay-per-click) ads, or other paid advertisement methods to promote your e-commerce website. You can use google Adwords or Facebook ads to target your users.

Paid advertising has a lot of benefits but its only good if you have enough information about how to target your audience and use these ads wisely. Otherwise, your money would drain like water without any results.

You can either use one or both of these platforms to advertise your products. However, if your niche is quite creative you should always go for Facebook ads.

For people who are low on budget and still want to give paid traffic a shot. They should consider using Facebook ads for initial practice, until they understand the in and out’s of paid advertising.

2. Using Social Media to Improve Traffic.

Using social platforms like Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube can yield mind boggling results for you. Social media platforms are among the most effective and popular method of gaining taffic. Especially for e-commerce business.

You not only attract people towards your business, but you also stand a good chance to build an audience. For most people, this audience is very helpful in the long run. Especially if you want to spread a message or start a new business.

The achieve this, all you have to do is create a page for your e-commerce business and post content to it regularly. You have to make sure that the content is relevant to your audience and is shareable. That’s because you’ll get a lot of free promotion for your page if your audience likes your posts.

You can view this article to know how to start and build a facebook page for your business.

As your followers and audience start growing and reach a huge number you can even use your social media pages for earning money or promoting your other businesses.

3. Offline Promotions

An old yet effective method to drive traffic to your e-commerce website. Offline is not the trend for sure, but it is still effective for businesses.

Some places where you can promote your business offline is:

• Local Newspaper ads.
• Have a decal on your car or hire a taxi advertisement service.
• Get Custom Signs and Banners for your business.
• Host giveaway and other promotional events.
• Word of Mouth Publicity. Attend conferences and trade shows to tell people about your business.

4. Update your Blog Regularly.

A regularly updated blog signals search engines that your website is updated with fresh content on a consistent basis. This makes your e-commerce site more relevant and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines.

Consistent updates don’t mean just changing a few words or making design tweaks daily. It means updating your blog with useful and relevant content for your audience and target market.

People search for different queries in search engines and if you have enough content on your website and a nice updated blog it will already rank higher in search engines. Thus making it more visible to prospective customers.

Starting and running a blog is easy. If you think you can’t update your blog on a regular basis or lacking writing skills, you can always hire a professional copywriter.

5. Publish Videos for Your Business.

Video content is on the rise and has become the top choice for marketers. Users are more interested and engaged in watching videos. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million pictures. That’s the content.

You can produce videos about your products, how to use them and showcasing their benefits. Setting up a you tube channel is easy and it should be done. Video content is easy to consume for your audience.

If you are camera shy or don’t know how to produce videos, you can hire a professional video developer from fiverr or Upwork initially.

6. Improve the Product Descriptions on Your E-commerce Site.

Product descriptions are among the most basic and most important aspect of an e-commerce store. They help you with the SEO of your website.

Yes, that’s true.

Just imagine, how would a product on your website compete with other large e-commerce giants on search engines. All you have for your product is some specifications and features.

Incorporating some keywords and creating a nice product description around them improves the traffic to your online store magically.

You should consider hiring an expert product description copywriter to get this done perfectly.

Part B: How to Improve Your E-commerce Sales

Sales are the ultimate desire of an e-commerce store owner. You can use the following steps to improve your e-commerce sales.

1. Paid Traffic

Once again, you encountered ‘paid traffic’. This is an effective medium to test your website and sales funnel.

Seriously, before you start rolling in huge amount of traffic, you need to test your e-commerce site for its effectiveness. And, paid traffic is an easy and safe way to accomplish this.

You can spend a few dollars on ad words, bing ads or Facebook ads to test your sales funnel. How visitors are responding to your website and how was their experience.

Paid advertisements allow you to target a specific audience so you can stay assured that the results of your test are worthy.

2. Make the Checkout Process Simple and Easy.

Visitors decide within 2.6 seconds whether to continue or leave your website. That’s a very short span. For e-commerce stores this time frame is a bit longer, but you still have to grab the attention of your visitors.

Make the process of filtering, selecting and buying the products easy. Don’t cram your visitors with multiple forms, loads of irrelevant information which would make their experience worse.

Nobody likes to be confused while spending money. If your visitors are confused, they would leave your website immediately. They are spending their hard earned money on your e-commerce website so your process has to be friendly and worthy for them.

Even a single mistake can cost you a sale. The article from Neil Patel’s blog briefly describes how to set up a nice sales funnel.

3. Sell Benefits Over Features. Use Product Descriptions

People by benefits not features. Consider these two product descriptions below:

A chair, 2 ft tall, hydraulic lift mechanism, added cushion, black, $5000.

and

Whether you’re a gamer or a workaholic you need this DXRacer chair. With a higher backrest, it supports you entire back and neck when you just need to rest your head back or take that power nap to get kicking again. Reclining down to the most desirable and comfortable position was never easier. Whether your computer is set on a high table or at a lower level, you can easily adjust your height with the gas spring at the bottom rather than slouching your neck uncomfortably, while working or playing. The conventional tilt mechanism allows your back the agility it deserves while you’re spending those long hours, working. 3D adjustable armrests can move up and down, forward and backward and even sideways, giving enough room to play around with. Your arms and shoulders don’t need to feel constricted anymore. For a heightened level of comfort, grab this DXRacer chair now!

Which of these product descriptions appeals you more?

Obviously, the second one. It describes the features of the product rather than benefits. People like to know how a product will help them. So selling features over benefits is important to improve your sales.

4. Shorten Your Forms

Smoother user experience results in better sales.

Imagine you went in a store to buy a pair of shoes. You asked the retailer the price of those shoes and wanted to buy them and just move out of the store- quickly.

But, the retailer wants to know your name, address, profession, your SSID, your phone number, mother’s name, father’s name, color of your socks and how many stars are there in this galaxy……

You’ll just tell him to shut up and take your money. If you can’t interrupt him, you’ll just leave the store, never to return.

The same is the case with your online e-commerce store. In an offline store, the seller has the option of talking face to face to the customer. Thus reducing the margin of error.

But in online mediums, you cannot see your prospect face-to-face.

If your sales process looks like a nuisance to the prospect, he”ll immediately hit close button on the top right.

A person is on your store because he wants to buy. Don’t make him change his decision. You’ve already done 50% of the selling. Don’t lose upon the last 50%.

Make your forms short. You can view how high converting checkouts work by shortening the forms here.

5. Improve the Design of Your Website

Presentation matters a lot these days. With a ton of web designers and UX developers out there, you cannot make an excuse about the design of your website.

Nobody would like to buy from a shabby looking website. Hire a designer or a web development agency to improve the overall design of your e-commerce website.

If you are using platforms like shopify you can find a ton of information on the internet to increase e-commerce traffic and sales.