With the global eCommerce market rapidly building to a predicted $1 trillion by 2025, it’s safe to say that dropshipping is here to stay!
Finding a winning niche, developing a great-looking storefront, and opening your doors is an exciting time for would-be entrepreneurs. But by far the biggest question on every dropshipper’s lips is ‘how do I drive traffic to my Shopify store?‘
An eCommerce store is similar to any other brick-and-mortar store in that it needs an advertising strategy. Utilize social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube along with influencers. A great-looking store, along with paid advertising, and an SEO campaign will help drive traffic to Shopify store.
So with the short answer in the bag, so we can understand a bit more easily how to drive traffic to your Shopify or other types of store, let’s start by discovering some of the most common strategies for website traffic.
Best strategies to drive traffic to your store
It can be pretty soul-destroying to spend a lot of time building your brand while spending time and energy developing your store only to find orders are pretty scarce. It’s worth understanding that although your shop is effectively on the ‘internet high street’ it’s not plain sailing.
Simply having a store means you are in the race, but with the raft of others sharing this online retail space your store needs to stand out from the crowd.
So what can you do?
Here are our top five tips for how to get ahead of the game and drive traffic to your dropshipping store.
- Paid advertising
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
- SEO (optimizing your website for optimum placing on Google searches)
- A good website structure
Dropshipping is attractive to many online entrepreneurs as in general its setup and operational costs are low, with a potentially high margin. So is it worth allocating an advertising budget to help drive customers to your eCommerce store?
Let’s get into that next.
Paid advertising
Pay Per Click advertisements
Pay Per Click advertisements which are often referred to as PPC is a way of getting traffic to your store where you only pay if someone clicks your ad. This keeps more money in your pocket and is good for cash flow purposes. Google ads, which were previously known as Google AdWords, are one of the most popular. This is mainly as much of the traffic generated to stores on the web is likely to come from a Google search or display network.
Other platforms such as Bing also operate their own pay-per-click ad service.
Essentially you are paying Google or another search engine provider to place your ad at the top of Google. So for instance, if you are selling ladies’ swimwear in your store, anyone searching for that product will see your ad along with search results.
Shopify offers some free training on Google ads which is well worth a look, along with lots of other free courses to help you get the most out of your store.
Google Shopping
Another really popular option for people who are want to get more traffic to their dropshipping store is Google Shopping, which is also known more commonly as Product Listing Ads.
These ads are displayed in a carousel at the top of Google search when they are searching for products on Google.
Paid social media marketing
This is where you can pay for any posts that are doing well organically to be posted out to more potential customers. Popular social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok are some go-to places to test the water.
Paid ads allow you to:
- Manage the creative work
- Target your audience
- Set up and manage your budget.
- Run adds across multiple apps
The upside of social media marketing is you can promote your store for as little as a couple of dollars a day. As your orders increase, it’s easy to add more spending, invest in more traffic, and scale business.
Social media marketing
There are effectively two ways of utilizing social media marketing to build your brand and order book! The first way is by posting your own ads out to your growing tribe of followers. For this to work best you need to:
- Be committed to regular posting
- Make sure you know your target customers
- Able to consistently produce engaging posts.
Building a consistent rapport with your potential customers is vital to driving sales to your eCommerce store.
Building relationships, familiarity, and of course your reputation is crucial. The volume of brand messaging is also important especially when marketing gurus estimate potential orders will come after the 7th engagement!
Influencer marketing
Moving on slightly from social media marketing you do yourself or through paid Facebook or Instagram ads, is paying someone else with a large following to advertise for you.
This essentially means you will reach the customers of your chosen influencer through their posts. It’s a form of advertising where you can extend your reach on social media to take advantage of others with a much larger pool of potential customers.
One of the advantages of this is that you can specifically target an influencer that fits with the ethos, branding, and product interests of your store.
For example, if you are dropshipping clothing items, an influencer big in the fashion industry will already have followers who love clothing.
How “influence marketing” works
Essentially, you pay a person to post your post on their Instagram, Facebook or YouTube channel. The price of an influencer shoutout will depend on how important their page is. This will be dependent on how many followers and also how good their engagement rate is.
SEO for your dropshipping store
Free traffic is what every drop shipper dreams of! But for this to work, you need to spend some time making sure your website is the best it can be in terms of receiving traffic and potential orders from your customers.
According to experts, over a third of all eCommerce store traffic comes from a properly optimized website.
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization and is exactly what it says on the tin. If your website is optimized you will more likely receive what’s known as ‘organic’ or traffic you haven’t had to pay out for.
If your website has a great structure, (we will discuss that in a little more detail below) as well as is ‘search engine friendly’ you have more chances of consumers heading over to your shopping cart than those of your competitors!
SEO can:
- Increase your revenue and promote sales
- Gain more traffic and help conversions
- Assist you to become an authoritative brand
In a nutshell, if you hire an SEO agency Bath (or in your locality) to optimize your website and content, you are improving your chances of making greater profits, as this marketing technique can attract more traffic to your website.
Here are three important criteria you can follow to get your website seen over and above your competitors.
- Keyword research
- Competitor keywords
- Website speed – Check this by using Google page speed insights Pingdom, or GTMetrix
Investing in this side of your business is crucial to make sure your store increases its traffic, orders, and profit.
Good website structure
Ecommerce website structure is an important aspect of SEO. It not only helps search engines to find all the pages, but it makes the website user-friendly too. A proper website structure will also optimize your website’s speed as it will require fewer codes and run faster.
Ecommerce websites tend to have more pages than classic websites, and if you don’t have a proper structure from the beginning, it can reduce visits, customers, and conversions. It’s worth knowing that most of the pages of your website should only be three clicks away from your homepage.
And finally…
So we hope that’s helped start getting your orders rolling into your store and given you some great strategies to grow your order book! Finding the best dropshipping partners will make sure those orders are fulfilled reliably and by experts in the industry.
Here at HyperSKU, our dropshipping veterans have years of experience in providing eCommerce store owners with a speedy and one-stop dropshipping service to help build their brand.
Check out how we can help here.