How to Drive more traffic to your website

Let’s look at 6 ways you can drive more traffic to your website. In previous articles, I’ve covered How to turn your website visitors into customers, with an optimal conversion rate of 3% or higher, and how to get your customers to spend more.

Both of these things help you to make more revenue from your website traffic. So it’s really important that you focus on these two things first, before you turn your focus to more traffic.

If you’re website is traffic ready, carry on!

Know your audience

It’s really important to know who exactly your ideal customer is, and this will determine where to find them. So if your audience is 18 to 24 year olds interested in fashion, then TikTok may be the best place to find them. If your audience is moms in their thirties, they might be spending more time on Instagram.

And if you’re looking for people who are renovating their house and looking for inspiration, they may be over putting together, an inspiration board over on Pinterest.

Now, I know that you might’ve just cringed when I mentioned TikTok, I’m definitely guilty of digging my head in the sand a little bit when it first came out. Hoping it was just a fad that it was passed just as quickly as it came. So I didn’t have to learn yet another platform.

Yes. I can see you nodding. Well, it’s time to turn this around and start thinking of TikTok as another opportunity to find potential customers as it has grown exponentially.

And for now, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. TikTok actually received more searches last year than Google. Just think about that for a moment. The most popular search engine in the world was out searched on TikTok so, yes, I think that is deserving of a little bit of attention. So for now, I’m going to make the assumption that you’re already super clear on who your audience is and where they hang out.

But if not, make sure you put some effort and some time into figuring this out as it will make all of your marketing easier and more effective and help you to drive more traffic to your website.

Once you know who your audience is, how do you drive them to your website?

Organic Social Media Strategy

Firstly, you can have an organic social media strategy. I say strategy because just posting ad hoc on a platform is not going to get you very far and won’t drive much traffic to your website.

And no, you do not need to be across every single social media platform unless you have a huge brand with a full-time social media person or people. And this just is not possible to have a quality presence. So do your research and choose the platform or platforms that your ideal audience is using. And then you can focus on building a really solid presence there, you can start with just one and then, add another one once the first one is going well, but don’t feel like you have to do it all.

The algorithms behind the scenes of the social media platforms decide who sees, which posts and they all love consistency. You’re better to post three times a week consistently than every day for a week, and then none, and then twice in a day, and then nothing for a few days and so on.

Once you’ve decided on your platforms commit to a posting schedule, how often you will post every week. I recommend aiming for daily if you can, or five times a week say, if you don’t want to do the weekends, remember you can schedule these out. So you don’t actually have to be sitting there posting it. When posting, think of your ideal customer avatar.

As I mentioned, this is your audience, and this is something that I teach inside eComm ignitor, where you can narrow down your ideal audience to just one person. So then when you’re writing your content, you write it just for them as if you’re having a conversation with a person rather than writing it for everyone helps you with marketing to be more engaging and helps you to connect with your target audience.

Focus on Community

You want to build a community around your profile. So you use language that encourages conversation and engagement rather than just talking at people because that’s just boring. Be sure to use a variety of post types. So you’re not always posting promotional posts. Let them in behind the scenes of your business, and ask them for their opinion on new designs or what products they would love to see you bring out.

And don’t be afraid to showcase yourself, people buy from people. So the fact that you’ve got a small brand is actually a really good advantage for you because you can showcase yourself easier. It’s much harder for big brands to do that. So think of it as an actual selling point. And the great thing about social media is it really allows people to connect with brands on a much deeper level. So let them in.

Now always prioritize your community management and reply to people promptly when somebody is on Instagram and they comment on your post, you should reply. Even if it’s just to thank them for sharing it with a friend and do it in a timely manner. If you’re replying days later, they may have forgotten you by then.

You need to strike while you’re still front of mind and build that connection. Make sure you use your bios to really communicate who you are and what you sell. Tell them what makes you different and use a call to action to drive traffic to your website. Not just shop now. So thinking about Mason hats, we’d go find your perfect hat at masonhats.com.au, rather than shop.

You could say, find jeans comfy, you wouldn’t want to take them off at …..com. See how you could write that for your store, giving them a reason to go through and shop. So the idea behind your social media strategy is to be discovered by more people, connect with them through engagement on your profile, and then provide calls to action for them to go to your website.

Now, if organic content is your main marketing strategy for driving website traffic, it can be a slow burn, but if done right, it can be very effective.

Collaborate

One way to grow your following faster is to collaborate with other users. Instagram has a fantastic collaboration tool where you can actually select a collaboration partner for your posts, and then the post shows on both your feed and theirs.

This is fantastic if you’re working with influencers, and if you are already definitely add this into your contracts because it ensures people can go straight to your profile and check you out rather than them just posting and people not being able to find your brand, This way it automatically shows up on your profile.

They have to request to add you as a collaborator, and you’ll get a notification to see the content before you agree to it going on your profile. So it’s not like people can just add anything they like.

Another way to grow your following is to run a competition. This works great to give away your product as then, people are also getting to see what you have to offer.

Instead of just win, I would say win one of our Merino wool hats, your perfect travel companion, scrunch it in your bag, and it’ll just pop back into shape. See how this is then telling everyone one of our key selling points without being salesey, as I’m giving it away in a competition, but then even if they don’t win, they’ve learned more about the product. Encourage people to share the competition with their friends, to help you increase your reach.

You can also collaborate with other brands to run the competition. I encourage our students to team up with other brands who have the same target audience but are complimentary not competition. Such as a brand that sells dresses, teaming up with a brand that sells bags, and another that sells earrings. Then they can then run a competition combined with all of their products.

You are then exposed to each other’s audiences and you can use the competition to grow all of your brands. One of our students Corbin, from Three Warriors Tan did this very effectively and collaborated with a lot of brands that were bigger than him at the time. And now he has over 74,000 followers on Instagram.

Another way to get people to find you on social media is to encourage your customers to post user-generated content. So user-generated content or UGC as you might see it referred to is content that was taken by your customers rather than you. Photos of them wearing or using your products and posted to their own profiles.

This is fantastic for social proof as it’s word of mouth by happy customers, which is always more believable than a brand talking about this.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is optimising your website to be found at the top of organic search results. There are many search engines, but the main one is Google. SEO can be a very successful way to drive traffic to your website.

I’m not talking about wanting to rank when someone searches for your business name. But ranking when people are searching for something they want to buy. So for instance, Mason Hats would like to rank for Merino wool hats, ladies hats, mens hats, things like that. If people are actually searching to buy those, I want Mason hats to come up first, above competitors.

Black Hat v White Hat SEO

There’s black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat is a lot of different strategies and things that people do that go against Google’s rules. They’re kind of cheating. Not only are they frowned upon by Google, but with every update to their algorithm, they’re always trying to combat the new strategies that people are using.

These are things like link farms, with fake people and dodgy websites that are sending links back to yours. Very black hat. Once you get found to be using some of these black hat strategies, you actually get penalised, and then you’ll end up at the bottom of the search results, never to be found again!

Make sure that you’re only using what they call white hat strategies. These are things that will naturally help Google understand what you sell and who it’s for. One of those strategies is schema data.

Without getting too technical, schema data is information sent to Google from your website. It tells them what your products are, how much they cost, what brands they are, what they are made of – anything you include on your product pages. If you’re using an SEO-friendly platform, such as Shopify, this is all done for you automatically. You want to think about what the names of your products are, and what your descriptions have got in them. Are they using words and keywords that Google will recognise? Will they be shown to people who are searching for your type of product?

You don’t want to just keyword stuff all of your descriptions so they don’t actually read well for humans. My theory is that if you write properly and if you write for your avatar and you’re writing all the things that they would love, eventually you will be found on Google for those things.

If you’re selling, for instance, makeup. Yes. You might find it very hard to rank at the top of Google because you’re fighting against a lot of big brands with big budgets. There are things like domain ranking, how long your website has been around for. A brand new website is going to find it harder to rank as well as one that’s been going for years and years and doing the right thing.

The more niche you are, the easier it can be to be found. You can do other things like naming your images and your alt tags and using your keywords in there to make sure that you can be found rather than image 3, image 4, image 5, etc because that doesn’t mean anything to Google.

Google Shopping

Another way you can show up on Google is to appear in the Google Shopping results. You can sync up your website for Google shopping so that all your products feed through and can be found in search results when people are looking to buy something. I highly recommend that you do this because these results can be very helpful for people searching with the intent to buy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is so important for an eCommerce store. It’s still one of the top marketing things that you can do to drive traffic to your website. And checking emails is the number one thing that people do online. So you want to make sure that you have a chance of being in their inbox.

We can’t just ask people for an email these days and expect them to give it to you. They’re holding onto it that little bit tighter these days, as they’re getting so many emails. So you have to incentivise people to give you an email. You can do this with discount coupons or my favourite is by running a competition.

I recommend Klaviyo for eCommerce email marketing.

Related Reading:

How to turn your website visitors into email subscribers

7 must have Email Automations for eCommerce

How to write emails that actually make sales

Paid Ads

I’ve talked about a lot of the free strategies you can use to send more traffic to your website. Now I want to talk to you a little bit about paid ads. If you want to fast-track the process of getting more traffic, the best way is with paid ads.

Again, it’s very important that you’ve already got that good conversion rate before you start any paid advertising. Otherwise you are literally just wasting money. There are lots of different platforms that you can run ads on. I specialise in Facebook and Instagram ads, and that’s what I focus on on the eComm Ignitor course. However, you can also run ads through TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter and Google.

The important thing is, regardless of which platform you’re using is that you set up an eCommerce funnel and that you’re serving the right message to the right person at the right time, because that is the core of marketing.

The idea with your eCommerce funnel, is that the message that you showed to someone who is discovering your brand for the very first time is different from the message that you’re going to show to somebody who’s already been to your website or already interacted with you on social media.

You can start to be a little bit more salesey to a warmer audience than to someone who’s never heard of you. When they’ve discovered you, maybe added to cart they’re very warm. Once they’ve purchased from you, they become a very hot audience. Those people are actually far easier to get to come back to your website and purchase again, rather than always going after new.

How to get your customers spending more

There are 3 key metrics you can increase to sell more on your online store.

You can get more people to your website (traffic), you can get more of those people to buy (conversion rate), or you can get them to spend more (average order value).

If you have an online store that gets 10,000 visitors a month, your conversion rate is 3% and your average order value is $100 your store would make $30,000 revenue a month. If you could increase that average order value to $120 by getting each customer to spend an average of $20 more your revenue would increase by $6,000 to $36,000 a month. 

That’s an extra $72,000 a year without extra overheads as you’re already using a shipping bag, already packing and shipping their order, already writing the thank you card and providing that person customer service – they are just buying more.

So how do you encourage your customers to spend more?

Bundles Baby

Product bundles are a great way to encourage customers to buy more than one item. You can bundle the same product together and provide a small discount for buying in bulk.

Or you can bundle complementary products together to help people get everything they need. This is perfect for a starter pack if they are new to your brand.

You can also name your bundles to make it super easy for people to choose like Three Warriors “Summer Essentials Pack” and “The Glow Get ‘Em Pack”.

You can choose to discount slightly when people buy a pack, but it’s not compulsory as for some it’s just the convenience of getting everything they need. If you do discount make sure you point it out! 

Offer Bigger Quantities

Some customers, particularly those who may have purchased before, or know exactly what they want don’t want to have to buy regularly, they want to just purchase in bulk. Make it easy for your customers to select how much of your product they want. You can make it cheaper, the more they buy to encourage them to choose the higher quantity.

Suggest Add On Products

You know your product collection better than any customer. Do the hard work for them and let them know which products would be a great addition to the one they are looking at. This works great with an app that helps them add it to their cart at the same time.

Taccac do this really well by suggesting people purchase their bag along with the patches and carabiner. The bundle app allows users to select the patches and colour of their carabiner and add all to cart from the bag page rather than having to search all over the website and add individually. It also includes a discounted bundle price.

Upsell

McDonald’s line “would you like fries with that?” adds millions to their bottom line every year. So how can you offer your customer fries? What have you go that is the perfect add on to your products? If you sell sunglasses you can add on a cleaner or cloth. If you sell dog collars, suggest they add on the matching lead.

Earrings are the perfect upsell to clothing and earring backs or earring storage are the perfect upsell to earrings.

You can also upsell to multiple of the same product like Pure Peony does.

After Purchase Add Ons

The moment someone has just placed an order, they are a super hot audience. They have just gone through your funnel and decided to take action and purchase, unless you sell anti fungal cream they are likely pretty excited about their purchase. This makes it the perfect opportunity to sell to them again – yes already! 

I recently purchased a T-shirt from Kind is Cool, on the confirmation page they offered me a special deal on a kids tee for 10 minutes. Did it work? Bub and I are going to look so cute in our matching tees! 

These kind of add on offers work best if they create urgency (the timer) and are incentivised with a decent discount. Remember you’re already going to be shipping this person something so if you have shipping built into your pricing you can afford to give a discount to someone you’re already sending to. 

Give Them A Chance To Add to Their Order

Have you ever made a purchase online only to click buy and then find something else you wished you had added to the order? I have.. more than once but usually I don’t purchase again as I don’t want to pay for a second lot of shipping. 

If you do this and I do this, chances are your customers do this too. So what if you offer them the chance to add to their order and get free shipping? You can set a time limit based on the average time it takes you to pack and send an order after it’s placed.

Increase your free shipping threshold

A free shipping threshold is a great way to encourage your customers to spend more, while still providing free shipping.

Read: Should I charge for shipping

Your free shipping threshold should always sit above the average cost of your products so they need to buy at least 2 to qualify (unless your products are over $150).

You also want to make it above your average order value to try and increase it. Experiment with increasing your shipping threshold by $5-10 to increase the average order. 

Clearly state your free shipping threshold on your website and gamily it by showing them how much more they need to spend to qualify.

There you have 7 ways to start getting your customers to spend more on your online store. Which one will you try first?

Written by Karyn Parkinson

Karyn (“with a Y!”) Parkinson is an eCommerce marketing specialist with a knack for high-converting Facebook ad funnels and website optimisation.

Through her eCommerce marketing agency Unstoppable eCommerce and on-the-pulse membership eComm Club, Karyn’s helped hundreds of eCommerce store owners across the globe boost profits, generate more revenue, and achieve an ad-spend ROI of their dreams. 

How to turn your website visitors into customers

I know a lot of people track their website visitors – some are even guilty of watching them live through their analytics and get excited when someone jumps on only to be disappointed as they leave without buying again.

As tempting as it may be I don’t recommend this type of tracking as it’s not a productive use of your time! 

The percentage of people who check out when visiting your website is called your conversion rate. So if for every 100 people who visit your website, one person buys you have a 1% conversion rate.

A good conversion rate, and one I get our students to aim for is 3%. I’ve seen websites convert much higher, which is awesome, but 3% is a great place to be to have a profitable eCommerce store.

I recommend you hit at least 2-3% conversion rate before you focus on driving traffic to your website, and definitely before you spend money on paid ads. 

There is no point in spending money to drive traffic to a website that is not converting.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re wanting to collect data, perhaps you have a new store, or you’ve just made some major changes and you want to find out where your conversion rate is now.

Then it’s OK to run ads, but have data as the main reason for your ads, not sales.

Now your conversion rate might fluctuate a bit, especially during promotions – you should find your conversion rate goes up. Katrinia from Bask and Bloom sees a consistent conversion rate of 4% which is excellent, but during peak promotions, this gets as high as 10%! 

If you’re not sure what your conversion rate is you can check your analytics either in your Analytics dashboard if you’re using Shopify, or on Google Analytics which you should definitely be using!

OK so now that you’re tracking your conversion rate let’s talk about why it’s such a big deal.

If you get the exact same amount of traffic, your average order value – or the amount people are spending stays the same but you just increase your conversion rate, you’ll make more money – pretty cool right?

So if you currently get 1,000 visitors per month and have an average order value of say $100 and a conversion rate of 1% you’ll make $1,000 a month. If you up your conversion rate to 2% you’ll double your revenue to $2,000 – get it to 3% and you guessed it, your revenue goes up to $3,000 a month.

Do this with a website that gets 10,000 visitors a month and you can take your revenue from $10,000 to $30,000 a month just by increasing your conversion rate from 1%-3%.

Tripling your revenue without spending money of extra traffic – sounds pretty good right?

OK OK so now that you’re convinced that your conversion rate is suuuuper important, let’s talk about how to increase it. 

Firstly you want to make using your website a nice, easy experience for your customers. 

There are several ways you can do this.

Build For Mobile

First make sure your website is built for mobile – the majority of your website visitors will be viewing on mobile, yet we still see people building their site for desktop and then hoping it looks OK on mobile.

You can actually look at your Google Analytics stats and see firstly how much of your traffic is on mobile, and secondly your conversion rate on mobile compared with your conversion rate on desktop. This can be quite an eye opening experience.

You’ll see above that this store gets over 60% of its traffic from mobile, however, the conversion rate on mobile is only 1.82% compared with 2.13% on desktop. If we get the mobile converting as high as the desktop it will mean extra revenue without any extra traffic.

Optimise Your Menu

Next we want to make it super easy to navigate and find what they are looking for. Optimise your menu to help them find your products – instead of the default home, shop, about, contact use your menu to showcase your categories like tops, bottoms, dresses or rings, earrings, bracelets and necklaces.

For Dignity does a beautiful job of this.

As with all changes you want to use data to make these decisions, so look at your Analytics and see which pages people shop by. Do they go by men, women, kids, or tops, bottoms, dresses?  If you’re not sure change it to one way and then look at your stats after a month to see if people are moving through your categories how you thought they would.

A cool tool you can install is a heat map tracker. This tracks how people use your website and shows you where most people scroll and where they click. You may be surprised how people use your website compared to how you think they do.

As we always say here at Unstoppable “Until you test, it’s just a guess”.

If you have a lot of products you can make finding the perfect purchase easier by using filters in your category sidebars. 

The 3 Second Test

You want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to know that they are in fact in the right place when they land on your website. 

To do this we ensure it passes the 3 second test. What’s that I hear you ask? 

The three second test is a quick and easy test you can do to see if your website is doing it’s job.

Show someone your website for just 3 seconds, no scrolling just 3 seconds on your home page above the fold.

Then after 3 seconds ask them 2 questions: What do you think I sell? Who do you think it’s for?

Then if they get it right, you pass and if they don’t you have some work to do.

Now don’t go asking your mum, your sister and your favourite aunty – ask people who you haven’t told all about your business. If the local butcher is not keen you can jump in my free Facebook group – Unstoppable eCommerce Entrepreneurs and post a screenshot to get some fresh eyes to do the test for you.

Your home page should clearly showcase your products and your target audience with one clear hero image – not a slider.

You want a heading and sub heading that sums up exactly what you sell and who it’s for.

“New Collection out now” is not helpful as some people are coming to your website for the very first time, if they don’t know what you sell what good is it to them to know your new collection is out? You can promote that to your warm audience – shout it from the rooftops on socials and definitely send it out in your emails – just not your home page hero image.

See how these headings tell you exactly what it is that they sell. They all get bonus points for ditching the default and using custom call to action buttons.

Think Fast

Another huge thing that will impact the user experience is the speed of your website.

You want your site to load in under 5 seconds, 3 is optimal. People are so time-poor and always in a rush, they are not going to sit and wait for your site to load. Use the Google speed test to see how long your website takes to load. Be sure to check the speed on desktop and mobile.

If your site is running slow look at compressing your images to make them smaller and therefore quicker to load. Also delete any plugins or apps you’re not using as each one will slow down your site. 

If your website is terribly slow and you can’t get it down, look at using a new platform such as Shopify which is designed specifically for eCommerce with speed in mind.

It’s all about Trust

Now you’ve optimised your website to make it easy for customers to use we need to answer one big question for them – why you? Why should they buy from you? What makes you different? Why should they trust you?

Now it’s important to remember people buy from people. So put yourself out there as the face behind the brand, don’t be scared to show your face and share your story. Gone are the days when you have to pretend to be big – people like shopping small and knowing where their money is going – who it is going to.

They would rather help you put food on the table for your family than help some bazillionaire buy another private jet! 

This is why I encourage our Ignitor students to put themselves on the home page with a link to their full story. Share behind the scenes of their business on socials and don’t be afraid to let people in.

Not only do people want to buy from people, they also want to know they are not the first person to do so! They want to know that other people have bought from you, that they go their products and they loved them. This helps build trust and reassure them that they too will receive their products and that they will love them too.

To help build this trust be sure to have reviews on your product pages, your home page and your cart page. Reviews add lots of trust and are simple to set up with a plugin such as Yotpo or reviews.io. If you haven’t got a lot of reviews yet then just use brand reviews about your great customer service or fast shipping times and put them on all the product pages until you have more. 

Even better than just showing written reviews is showing user generate content. This is photos or videos taken by your customers of them with your products. Photos and videos are far more believable than just words so user generated content is gold for your website and your socials and particularly on your product pages. You can encourage user generated content through a competition or set up a review app to ask for a photo when they leave a 5 star review.

Ride Proud Clothing instantly add trust by showcasing these pants have had 45 five star reviews. Importantly, if you click the stars it takes you to the bottom of the page where you can see all those reviews. Make sure your reviews are genuine – making up reviews is a shore fast way to loose trust.

Visual icons are a great way to simply showcase key things about your business to add trust. I recommend using these on your home page and on your product pages. On your home page highlight 3-4 key things about your business such as handmade, made in Australia, made from the tears of unicorns! Whatever makes you special.

You can also use the icons on your product pages for things like vegan, cruelty-free, gluten-free if it’s food products and also to add trust around security like secure checkout. 

Stand Behind your product

If you want people to trust you enough to buy your product then you need to trust your product enough to offer an awesome Guarantee. And when I say awesome I mean awesome for the customer, not for you!

You want to offer a simple returns policy. One of the biggest objections to shopping online for people is “what do I do if it doesn’t fit, or it’s not right.” If you can overcome that objection by backing your product with a great guarantee then you’ll find it will generate enough extra sales to cover the odd return – this is of course as long as you have a great product.

Offer Free Shipping

The other big objection to people shopping online, one that can really affect your conversion rate is your Shipping charge.

Now this is a big one and I recommend you read Should I Offer Free Shipping?

If you’ve ticked off everything else in this list and haven’t seen an increase in your conversion rate it may be necessary to look at your shipping fee and see if you can lower it, or at least offer a free shipping threshold. 

So there you have 7 ways you can increase your conversion rate to turn those visitors into customers. Which one will you implement first?

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