Introduction

How to bring potential customers to my online store?

This is the common question of every entrepreneur who started their online store. Driving targeted traffic to the eCommerce site is a fundamental factor to make sales and increase brand awareness.

Online business planning for long-term goals of stability and sales gives priority to reach the targeted audiences. Sometimes even with quality products, best prices, customer support, and favorable reviews, your sales may stagnant after reaching some points. The average conversion rate of eCommerce websites is 2.86% globally. With this rate, the online stores can’t make more sales with current competition in the market. In this case, the Shopify store owners can nurture the existing users and drive organic traffic to the store. 

But gaining traffic of potential audiences is challenging for any Shopify online store. Whether you have started a new store or established one in the industry, driving traffic to the store is important to increase sales and brand awareness globally. 

You can access the best Shopify apps to maintain and promote online stores. Along with this, marketers need to know few strategies to drive targeted traffic to Shopify stores.

Best Strategies to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your eCommerce Website

Here we have explained ways with examples to drive targeted traffic to the Shopify stores. Following these strategies can increase the potential traffic to your online store.

Optimize Shopify Store SEO to Reach Top Ranks

SEO plays an important role in driving traffic to websites. Customers mostly depend upon google searches for checking a new product or service online. Marketers should always optimize their stores to attain top ranks in search engines. Search for relevant keywords using keyword tools like Ahrefs, keyword planner to optimize your content. You can concentrate on particular keywords to rank the good positions in search results to drive traffic. Shopify store SEO optimization plays a major role if you plan to target traffic with content marketing.

For example, a user comes across an Instagram ad about a new product and checks in search engines. There are high chances that the user clicks on the first search engine result to know more about the product or purchase. To rank these top positions you need to look out for store optimization.

Here we have curated some guidelines for optimizing your Shopify stores.

  • Add relevant keywords in page titles, descriptions, alt text, and headings.
  • Choose key phrases with low or medium keyword difficulty that help to rank easily.
  • Curate unique and SEO-optimized content for publishing blogs.
  • Regularly analyze search positions and get data on working strategies.
  • Review content keywords and change them based on customer search, trending, keyword volumes, etc.
  • Include both internal and external links in the content. It builds the link juice that helps for better page rankings.

Know Your Audiences

Before planning any marketing campaigns you need to know your audiences. Marketers need to know the demographics of the audience like age, region, buying behavior, engaging habits, interests, and other details. These details help you to optimize the campaigns to drive more traffic to the Shopify store.

For example, if you are running a modern fashion store then the majority of users come from millennials. For this, you can optimize the content, frequency, and timings of marketing campaigns like push ads or push notifications to attract particular users rather than concentrating on all audiences. You can check the previous campaign’s results to narrow down the ads to particular regions for various fashion seasons.

Regular Social Media Ads

86% of the millennial generation uses social media to find new technologies, places, products, services, and more. So, running social media ads will always help you to drive targeted traffic to Shopify stores. Social media platforms are now the leading way to have effective interaction with customers.

Shopify stores collaborating with influencers will increase the opportunity to reach more potential customers. The online store owners can also increase their brand credibility by giving instant reactions on social media like comments, likes, reposts, and sharing user posts about products on the page. You can add shoppable pins on products on Pinterest and Google ads to drive targeted traffic to your Shopify stores.

For example, You can encourage your visitors to share content on different platforms. It will increase your brand awareness and drive new traffic to the website.

Here are ideas of which content to post on social media to drive targeted audiences.

  • Shopify stores can post new product collections and updates on services.
  • Use videos and images of the products to help the customers.
  • Post blog links with the latest information about your achievements or product testimonials.
  • Post the customer reviews and testimonials.

Run Referral Programs & Giveaways

Referral programs are a marketing technique where the stores use the existing customer network to drive traffic, subscriptions, leads, and followers. It is the best strategy to get potential customers in a short period.

Customers are 4 times more likely to purchase a product from a brand when referred by friends or family. The stores can conduct these contests during special occasions or seasons with valuable discounts and prizes. Shopify provides free and paid referral plugins to run these referral programs effectively.

For instance, a Shopify store runs a referral program where the existing customer gets $10 Off and the new customer gains a $5 discount. With this type of contest, both the referrer and new customers benefit, and there are high chances of an increase in average purchase and traffic.

Content Can Drive Potential Customer's Traffic

Content plays a major role in today’s digital marketing techniques. We can’t limit content marketing only to blogs or guest posting. It not only goes hand in hand with SEO but also plays a major role in driving traffic. Instead of running ads in search engines, you can attract customers by creating relevant and valuable content. Even though the technique requires more time, you can observe potential results in the long term.

Along with optimizing blog content, concentrating content of product descriptions, home page content, page title, and every section that is visible on the website gives better results. Don’t restrict your blogs only about your products or services. Try to add content about your industry-related topics which is helpful for your customers. Here are a few tricks that will help you while curating content.

  • Adding relevant keywords to your content will improve your organic SEO.
  • Make your website content easily navigable for the users.
  • Create sticky content that can drive users to your website and spend more time.
  • Give preference to quality rather than quantity.

Paid advertisements in Google search engines and social media platforms can drive targeted audiences to your Shopify store. Before starting any paid advertising marketing campaign make sure you list out the definite goals to figure out the budget value. The paid advertisements reach organic audiences effectively by displaying top search results for the keywords. Shopify store owners can collaborate with websites or push notifications services to run push ads campaigns for targeted audiences to drive traffic. 

Marketers can plan text-based advertisements for Google ads and media advertisements on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. You can exhibit your creativity in videos, images, and content to attract and drive the audience towards the store. Check which demographic people you want to target and run the paid advertising campaign on a particular platform. Here are some tips for organizing successfully paid advertisements.

  • Analyze the results of the marketing campaigns regularly. It will help you to optimize your strategy. Follow the trial and error methods to find the right ads campaign for your Shopify store.
  • Run marketing campaigns that automatically sync with the stock, new collection or shipping offers updates, and more. 

For example, the discount offer period on a particular product has ended but you are running ad campaigns. Users click on the ad and find no discount. Now, this creates a false impression of the brand. If you choose automated campaigns then ads end or update timely.

  • Never compromise with creativity in your ad campaigns. With huge competition outside you can drive targeted traffic with new thoughts.

For example, a clothing online store wants to target millennials and choose social media platforms. It is because most of them rely on social networks to explore new brands or products. To reach audiences you can segment according to their interests, and age, and target the audiences.

Examine Your Competitor's Strategies

Always keep an eye on your competitor’s strategies to step ahead. It will help you to make changes in marketing plans or create new campaigns to attract visitors to your website.

You can check the targeted keywords of competitors, search engine positions, the structure of content, backlinks, and gained traffic from each channel. Now, knowing all this information is easy with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.

For example, if you want to know the organic search results for one particular keyword you can use Ahrefs. You need to give the competitor’s URL in the tool and it gives a three-month report. So, you can now have more clarity on keywords to concentrate on and reach top positions in the search engines to drive traffic.

We have curated all effective strategies that can drive potential traffic to your website. These strategies are applicable for every e-commerce industry like fashion, electronics, travel, and more. Driving targeted traffic will increase the average number of sales and brand awareness among the competitors.

Tools That Can Help To Drive Traffic for Shopify Stores

To implement traffic-driving strategies effectively, you can make use of a few popular tools which are mentioned in this section.

Shopify Analytics

Shopify analytics is a built-in dashboard that gives stats and reports of store performance. The eCommerce store owners can analyze activities like store speed, transactions, customer search behavior, product analytics, sales reports, and more.

These stats will give more insight into your campaigns and optimize them to drive traffic and sales. You can tag the Google Analytics tool to this to get a rooted analysis of your Shopify store.

  • Check which marketing channel is driving more traffic to your Shopify store.
  • Impact of the paid ads campaigns in driving potential customers.
  • You can know the products that have contributed the most to your revenue.
  • Effect of the SEO strategies in improving traffic to the online store.

Google Keyword Planner

If you have observed that keywords play a vital role in all the above strategies to drive targeted traffic to Shopify stores. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool available to know keywords search volume, ads bidding, monthly searches, and more.

  • Search for target keywords according to the country.
  • Get content generation ideas that can drive traffic organically.
  • Regularly optimize your Shopify store content using trending keywords.
  • Plan new marketing campaigns using in-depth keyword research.

For example, a home decor Shopify store wants to drive traffic only from European countries. Marketers can select the targeted European countries in the Google keyword planner location section and add those keywords to the content. In this way, you can drive more customers from a particular place instead of concentrating globally.

Truepush- Push Notifications Plugin

We all know push notifications have become an effective way to drive and engage customers. Shopify merchants can use the Truepush Shopify plugin to send simple notifications of updates, and announcements that bring potential traffic to the store. You can also push notifications about abandoned carts, in-stock alerts, shipping updates, and more for existing users. Check our detailed blog on how Shopify stores can increase sales using push notifications.

Influencer. co

Influencer marketing has become the heart of social media networks. It is because you can narrow down the targeted audience and increase traffic and sales. Influencer. co is a tool that connects marketers with influencers. You can find over 100 thousand influencers who are popular in your niche industry.

Shopify store owners can check their reach, previous collaborations, interests, and many more. Apart from finding influencers, this platform also works as a social network to promote your brand and reach influencers. 

For instance, a Shopify store wants to find an influencer to target the Middle East region. You just need to give the country and region and get the list of potential influencers who can promote your brand.