By Rob Toledo
Ah, the holidays. Remember them? A time when merchandise practically walked itself from crowded shelves to customer doorsteps — when being an ecommerce site meant checking and rechecking and re-rechecking that your servers could handle daily surges of frantic last minute shoppers. It all seems so far away now.
But springtime does not have to mean the ecommerce doldrums. Though your customer base might not be as imbued with the same sense of urgency as they do on December 23rd, there are a number of key ways to rev your ecommerce sales engine throughout the year. Let’s take a look at a few ways to do just that:
1. Take Your Inspiration from the Holidays
Yep, our first stop on the holiday nostalgia train is (drumroll please!): the holidays. Chances are, even if back then your products were hot sellers on their own, you also drove those sales with a concerted marketing push. Well, there’s no reason why you can’t repurpose a fair amount of that content to your efforts now. With a little restructuring, that blog post entitled “Santa’s Top 10 Tips for Selling Your Crafts Online” can easily become “Top 10 Springtime Tips” instead. And those elf-themed 25 percent off coupons? Swap the little helpers out for flowers, tweak the copy, and you’ve got yourself a new campaign.
Of course, whatever you repurpose will truly have to be different from the original, or else you’ll get pinged by Google for duplicate content, and your most loyal audience members will feel cheated. Amazon offers holiday ecommerce tips; use these as a guide, and go from there.
2. Up Your Facebook Game
Chances are, you have a Facebook page. But are you really using it to its maximum traffic-driving benefit? If you’re just tossing up a few posts here and there, the answer is a clear no. Spring is the perfect season for a little refreshment. Start by doing a page audit. Take a look at your analytics to see what kind of posts your fans are engaging with. Also take note of just how often you’re posting and the kind of content you’re providing. Is it varied? Does it provide expert help while still personalizing your brand? How often do you post videos and images, such as product collages or photos of your customers using your products in interesting ways? You can garner on average two times the amount of comments and likes with the latter included, which is bound to turn into traffic to your main site.
Your Facebook page is also a great place to get to know your customers. Pay attention to what they’re saying on your posts, respond to every comment, and ask for their opinions through surveys. Additional ways to engage customers include offering caption contests, gift certificates or other giveaways, and incentives, like free shipping. Taken together, all of these approaches are a great way to drive interest, engagement, conversions, and eyeballs to your main site.
3. Embrace Imagery With Instagram
If photos are a key part of capturing comments and likes on Facebook, imagine what they can do on social sites dedicated to imagery. Instagram, for example, has a massive and engaged audience of over 100 million people, many of whom enjoy participating in photo contests and otherwise interacting with brands.
Photo contests can be as easy as designating a certain hashtag, and then having your followers do something creative, like post photos of their pets wearing your product. However, if you’ve got someone on hand who can handle the API, there are a number of ways you can go even deeper to integrate Instagram into your brand and promote conversions.
For instance, you could launch a microsite for your customers and have Instagram submissions feed directly into it, or embed photos of your customers using your product. You could even set it up so that when fans post such photos to your Facebook page or microsite, you can link directly to the product they’re showcasing so that other fans can easily find the product and click purchase. In this way, customers can help build the brand as well. This will not only keep them engaged, but it also makes them more likely to share when they’re featured, driving high levels of traffic from their private social media pages. It’s a win-win situation, all around.
4. Offer Something for Free or at a Discount
Of course, it’s important not to forget that classic, pre-Internet form of marketing: offering something for free or at a reduced rate. At its most basic level, this can mean something as simple as offering coupons or slashing prices by 25 percent the first time a fan likes your page. It can also mean sending a free resource, like a helpful ebook, to your mailing list or social followers.
While these are all highly effective strategies, you’ll get the most out of them long term if you set your sights on developing a full-scale resource center on your website. Resource centers can be a marketing and SEO gold mine, allowing you to establish your company’s expertise in a variety of ways, including blog posts, infographics, and videos. They also allow you to corner your niche so that you can cover every aspect of the issues that matter most to your industry. This has obvious benefits for getting found online, as the more juicy content you provide, the greater your density of naturally used keywords. Just as important, visitors will be impressed and therefore more likely to convert into customers. All of that, for just a little bit of free!
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5. Pay Per Click
Though it’s not necessarily right for every company, pay per click (PPC) advertising can still be an effective way to drive traffic to your site. (Note, however, that this traffic will be much more likely to turn into paying customers if you provide useful content on your page as noted above). You probably know PPC from search engines like Google, which will feature your PPC ad prominently in the search feeds when users search a term that matches yours. While PPC can be effective, it tends to be more effective with bigger businesses that have the means to compete.
For smaller businesses, however, it can be more effective to concentrate your PPC ads on places like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where the ads can be more tightly targeted to users with specific interests and buying habits. Mobile ads can also be well worth the spend, as users are increasingly shopping from these platforms.
The Takeaway
Off-season doesn’t have to mean off sales. With the holiday spirit to support you and a little bit of creativity, you’ll drive that traffic right back where it needs to be — at your ecommerce site making a purchase. Good luck!
The post How Ecommerce Sites Can Increase Traffic Beyond the Holidays appeared first on AllBusiness.com
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