5 eCommerce Ideas That Will Help Boost Traffic for Your Business

While the stores may be struggling, this isn’t the case for eCommerce. In fact, there’s been an impressive 129% year-on-year growth for North American eCommerce orders. Of course, we can put some of this down to the bizarre circumstances of 2020, but this trend doesn’t look set to change.

If you’re an eCommerce business owner wanting a slice of the action, check out our 5 eCommerce ideas to boost traffic and sales for your business.

1. Invest in Customer Experience

We’re starting here because what’s the point in boosting your site traffic if that traffic doesn’t stay onsite? The customer experience you offer is vital in taking that site traffic and converting it to actual sales.

Fortunately, thanks to digital marketing technology, customer experience is no longer a guessing game of what you think they’d like. There’s plenty of solutions to help you optimize your customer journey to give the best experience onsite.

For example, decibel.com offers session replays, heatmaps, experience analytics, and more. All these give you unique insights into how easily your customers are using and navigating your site.

Once you know where customers are struggling or losing interest, you can A/B test new improvements for your site. This means you can implement improvements that you know your customers love instead of guessing what might work.

2. Get Social

Once you’re confident with the customer journey onsite, it’s time to get them there. We would hope and assume you’re at least using social media to promote your eCommerce store already. But have you tried using an Instagram gallery yet?

Everyone loves scrolling on Instagram for way too long. Which is great news for eCommerce stores. With over 1 billion active monthly users, if you know your audience loves Instagram, utilizing the gallery feature is a great idea to drive traffic.

Most eCommerce stores just feature products on their Instagram account. Which is a great strategy in itself. But you can add to this by integrating the Instagram gallery into your eCommerce store.

If your eCommerce store is hosted on Shopify, Magento, or WordPress all have their own plugins for this. So, it’s super easy to implement on the most popular eCommerce platforms.

These plugins have features like tagging products in Instagram photos, so your customer can add to cart from Instagram images. So not only does integrating your gallery look great but it also simplifies the buying process for your potential customers.

This idea works particularly well for any industry where sales are led by visuals. Fashion, automobile, food, and more will all do well to try this idea.

3. Influencer Collaboration

Influencer marketing has become a big business over the last few years. It’s a vital way of reaching younger generations to build brand awareness, as well as sales.

Everyone from Microsoft to MAC is collaborating with influencers to promote their brand. Savvy eCommerce stores are doing it too.

Don’t worry, we don’t mean you need to find the funds to hire a Kardashian, though we’re certainly not stopping you if you do have the means! One of the best ways to do this is to find a micro influencer within your niche.

Micro influencers are “everyday people” who happen to have a decent following on Instagram. Usually between 3,000 to 100,000 followers. What you really want though is for them to be active within a community related to your industry.

For example, if you’re in the fashion industry, you want your micro influencer to be posting about the latest trends and looks. If you’re in the food industry, local chefs or food bloggers would be more what you’re after.

Finding the right micro influencer with the right audience means finding people who will be actually interested in your brand when promoted. It also has the additional benefit of acting as a form of social proof.

Though most people are aware of influencer marketing and brand promotions now, an influencer lending their name to your brand still says “I have faith in this brand”. It means when their audience next sees your brand, they remember that someone they like and trust recommended it already.

4. Giveaway Generously

People love something for seemingly nothing. Which is why giveaways are such a great way to reach more people. A free product in exchange for liking and sharing a post is such an easy and affordable way to build a larger audience.

Doing this regularly can build a great relationship with a growing audience. Many eCommerce stores have had incredible success and participation through this strategy.

All you need to do is choose a product to giveaway and come up with a hashtag for social media. Instagram and Facebook are generally the best social media platforms to do this on, but if your audience is predominantly on another network, try it there too.

5. Blog Regularly

We’re sure you’re sick to death of hearing the words ‘content is king’ if you’ve read any marketing blogs before. But it’s true.

Regularly writing blogs not only gives you great content to share with your audience on other platforms, but it’s another way to rank on search engine results pages.

Don’t make the mistake of blogging for the sake of blogging. Do your research. Find out what your audience is talking about and find the right keywords to rank for it.

Create engaging and compelling content for them to land on, not just a sales post listing products. You’ve already got your product pages, you don’t need that content.

But targeting related keywords to your primary keywords is a great way to create content that actually performs and brings more traffic to your site.

More eCommerce Ideas

These eCommerce ideas might not work for every business, but they’re all well worth a try to see what kind of traffic increase you may get. Most important, be creative and have fun with it!

For more eCommerce and business advice, make sure to read our blog.