7 Successful eCommerce Business Owners Share Their #1 Traffic-Driving Tips

Ever find yourself wondering how leading online stores are driving all that juicy eCommerce traffic to dominate their niches? We’ve got the inside scoop!

We chatted with some of our favorite eCommerce entrepreneurs to find out what their best traffic streams and marketing strategies are. Inspiration that you can implement in your own stores for maximum successes.

So, coffee up and get ready to be inspired!

1. Combine Facebook Ads and Google Remarketing for Traffic Gold

One Kid is a $600k-a-year kids apparel brand that is selling their revolutionary Road CoatⓇ like hotcakes. When it comes to driving traffic to their store, they have gotten their cross-channel marketing down to a fine art. By combining the power of Facebook video and Google remarketing campaigns, they have reached millions of potential shoppers since 2016 and generated 15% of their yearly revenue from optimized Google ads alone.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

One Kid spends $12,000 on average per year on Google ads (with Traffic Booster), $500 a week on retargeting and lookalike Facebook campaigns, and $10 per day on Shoelace. But it’s the organic success they have had with Facebook video which is a true inspiration. One of their most significant traffic sources is from Facebook video content.

One is the influencer Facebook video above – which, to date, has generated millions of organic views. The other is a video they created that went viral after they launched with a spend of only $20 per ad.

To duplicate their strategy:

If you want to drive constant quality traffic, it’s vital to have a cross-platform strategy. As a starting off point, we recommend that you try one of our top combination strategies for Google and Facebook:

• Create Facebook lookalike audiences based on store visitors from your search campaigns
• Use your most effective Facebook campaign headlines in your Google remarketing campaigns
• Target cold audiences for Facebook awareness campaigns and your brand name in your Google campaigns to catch potential shoppers who search your brand after seeing your initial campaigns
• Use your Google campaign data, such as clicked product pages, to run Facebook remarketing ads
• Combine Google Shopping remarketing and Facebook ads for more converting traffic

You can read more about these strategies here.

2. Use Strategic Email Remarketing to Bring Back Heaps of Traffic

GearBunch reached a whopping $5 million in revenue in their first year! This was no fluke. By capitalizing on the power of Facebook video ads to attract millions of new potential shoppers and strategic Google remarketing ads, they are getting 5,000 unique visits a day to their store. But it’s their email remarketing campaigns that really make them stand out, with promotional emails bringing in up to $50k in gross profit for the store.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

GearBunch invests in commercial-style videos, which they use in Facebook video ads (which bring in 85% of their new traffic) and YouTube ads. They then use automatically optimized Google remarketing campaigns – which have a 6X ad spend return – and email marketing to bring potential shoppers and customers to their store. The secret to their email marketing traffic success lies in their segmentation, which is as follows:

• Hot audience: shoppers who have just bought, or repeat shoppers
• Warm audience: traffic that has visited their site and bought one item from the store in the past
• Cold audience: traffic that hasn’t purchased from the store, which GearBunch aims to move into warmer audience segments

Additionally, they understand the need for good copy and invest in good quality copywriters. Find out how this brand got started and other insider secrets on what makes them a million-dollar eCommerce brand, in their Success Story interview.

To duplicate their strategy:

What separates good stores from great ones is their email marketing. Without a strong email remarketing strategy, you’re missing out on huge conversion opportunities. Not only is email remarketing traffic more likely to convert, but it will also cost you a lot less to bring them back to the checkout.

So, how do you bring initial traffic to your store in big enough qualities to grow your remarketing lists?

As the old saying goes, it takes money to make money.

Yes, low-quality video can have viral appeal and get you results. However, in the long run, you want to invest in good quality videos, copy and email capturing tools. This will help improve your Facebook and YouTube video ad results, widening your remarketing research for remarketing campaign success. Here is a list of professional video production services, marketplaces and platforms around the world to get you started.

3. Partner Up with Niche Influencers to Bring in New Traffic

Seven-figure beauty business Glam Guru takes personalization to a whole new level – a vital goal when competing in such a competitive market. Their traffic strategy takes into account the ever-changing landscape of eCommerce marketing, allowing them to evolve with the market. This is why, along with their Traffic Booster and Facebook campaigns, they have created unique influencer and reward programs that generate a lot of their traffic and conversions for them.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

By building a community of over 150 influencers, Glam Guru uses a mix of paid and affiliate marketing posts across Instagram, YouTube and beauty blogs every month to push highly segmented product promotions. Their influencer traffic has been so successful that they invested in the development of an in-house affiliate program that enables their influencers to create and/or manage unique product links that they can push on their platforms for commission.

Additionally, they serve as a middle man between product brands and influencers, creating three-way promotions and serving as influencers themselves while selling products. Plus, they promote word-of-mouth marketing with on- and off-line customer rewards.

To duplicate their strategy:

By incorporating word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) into your traffic strategies, you will be able to consistently grow your loyal shopper communities and brand ambassadors to push organic traffic, improve SEO rankings and boost organic conversions. In short, WOMM builds trust, loyalty and hype while reaching new potential shoppers. What you want to do is to develop a unique way to promote WOMM that speaks your target shoppers’ language – so to speak. This is not to say you should make huge investments into developing your own affiliate software like Glam Guru unless, of course, you’re already using a variety of ambassadors and want to streamline the process.

Instead, start with these 10 ways you can use WOMM to increase sales. If you want to read more about how Glam Guru built their business, visit their brand profile.

4. Test Various Streams to Find the Winning Combination for Your Specific Brand

eCommerce traffic is continuously evolving and needs to be tweaked for your specific brand, market and niche. A brand that understands this well is million-dollar business Bleacher Creatures. This unique brand has had to adapt their traffic strategies to fit their unique sales model that includes retail, wholesale and online sales. Their online business includes their site, partner sites, affiliate sites and eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon.

Because of the variety of places from which customers can buy their products indirectly, they aren’t able to determine ROIs for their brand campaigns and this makes remarketing campaigns tricky. Which is why social growth and email capturing is one of their most important tools, allowing them to remarket their traffic directly.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

What differs with this brand and because their products can be bought in various places like sports venues and retail stores, is that they focus a lot on brand awareness. In short, their traffic strategy is not to have a set strategy but instead a fluid plan that they are continuously optimizing. To do that, building their communities (email lists and social follows) is a top priority.

Bonus Content: How an Idea to Make People Smile Turned This Brand into a Million-Dollar eCommerce Business

To duplicate their strategy:

What works for one brand may not work for another. Especially if you have a unique hybrid business model like Bleacher Creatures. Therefore, you want to test a variety of traffic streams to find the winning combination for your specific store. Every niche and market is different, therefore, to get the most traffic for your effort (and budget) you want to adapt and optimize your strategies based on your own data. Remember: email lists are the one channel that you fully control and own and they are a vital component of your remarketing strategy

5. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Word-of-Mouth Advertising  

Another brand that understands the traffic power of WOMM is Impact Mouthguards. And we’re not just talking digital referrals here. They still consider good old-fashioned word-of-mouth within their niche as the hallmark of their growth. They do a lot of ‘on the ground’ events, where they network with athletes directly to build brand awareness. In conjunction with digital traffic strategies, they have been able to consistently generate half a million in revenue since starting the brand in 2012.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

Offline, Impact Mouthguards invests in networking events and traditional repping/networking practices to build awareness among athletes and sports teams. As they expand with new products into new markets they can’t directly network with, they have adapted their traffic strategy accordingly. With the help of reviews, reputations and endorsements offline, they have been able to use digital marketing to build trust and attract traffic.

Online, they capitalize on Facebook growth and remarketing campaigns, generating hundreds of thousands of views on just $1,000 per month.

Furthermore, they run email promotions, Instagram marketing and use Google to reach new traffic. You can read more about their success secrets here.

To duplicate their strategy:

Find out where your target market hangs out and find influencers within these channels. This can be offline or in online forums and groups. Yes, influencer marketing can be very effective, but only if you’re reaching your ideal shopper. If you are looking for another excellent example of how to use word-of-mouth to drive traffic, then check out how Ciera Rogers leveraged her personal brand to push her online store. Her brand is now 2 million followers strong, making her an influencer in her own niche.

Here’s a newbie guide to starting with influencer marketing to get you started. If you’re already familiar with influencer marketing, then our How to Find the Best Influencers for Your eCommerce Brand will help you expand.

6. Back Up Your Campaigns with Quality

There is no use spending all your effort to get the traffic if you’re not optimizing your site to prepare it for that traffic. Someone who understands this all too well is eCommerce entrepreneur Slava Furman.

Slava is the founder and owner of $3.5 million-a-year online yoga leggings store Noli Yoga. Started in 2015, Noli now spends $60-70K per month on Facebook and Instagram ads, while investing in good quality product photos and good site UX to turn targeted traffic into conversions.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

Noli Yoga uses Facebook and Instagram to boost awareness and retargeting ads (with the help of YotPo), which use product reviews from real customers as their main paid traffic channels.

Additionally, they have invested a lot in their site UX and product photos – to not only attract shoppers with their product ads but convert them when they do. Noli uses professional photographers for white-background product photos and lifestyle shots (in gyms and studios) they use on their sites and in campaigns. Why? Because they want their campaigns to reflect the quality of their high-end leggings.

To duplicate their strategy:

Your whole shopping experience plays a role in driving – and keeping – traffic. To do that, create campaigns that are relevant to your products, store content and target market. In other words, there is no use using awesome images in your campaigns and then having lousy product photos or clumsy UX. Why? Because that won’t convert. In short, you need to invest in your business. Once you have optimized your traffic streams, you should be investing in more eCommerce traffic tools, campaigns, tools and channels to help bring more targeted traffic to your store.

7. Hand Over PPC Optimization

eCommerce marketing influencer Susan Bradley not only runs a successful kids apparel brand but has helped thousands of other online business owners with their Facebook campaigns through her Social Sales Girls group coaching. Building Wee Squeak into a successful store didn’t happen overnight; it takes consistently building streams that bring in good quality traffic. Which is why they decided to hand over their optimization – which, as we know, is the key to ensuring your campaigns deliver.

Their eCommerce Traffic Strategy

Wee Squeak puts their emphasis on getting highly-targeted quality traffic in volume. To do this, they need well-optimized Facebook and Google campaigns. As Susan admits, she isn’t a Google expert. She therefore handed her Google ads over to StoreYa to ensure she is getting the greatest amount of good quality traffic she can, for her spend. With the help of Traffic Booster, they have been able to get well-qualified, low-cost traffic which, even if they don’t convert on their first visit, are pushed into Wee Squeak’s remarketing and email sales funnels to convert further down the line.

To duplicate their strategy:

It is important to understand that there is no use getting hundreds of site visitors a day if those visitors are not in your target audience. It is also not good enough to have highly targeted traffic if you’re not getting enough of it.

Think of it this way: if your conversion rate is 1%, you will only be making 10 sales for every 1,000 visitors. Having optimized Facebook and Google ad campaigns is vital to ensure you are getting the right quality traffic in big enough qualities to turn traffic into sales. Here are some other big brands that have handed their Google ads optimization over for big rewards:

Military Hippie:

Old Guys Rule:

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There you have it: traffic-driving tips from some of the most inspirational online stores. Ultimately, you need to find a cross-channel strategy that works specifically for your brand and then test and optimize your way to success.

If you’re struggling with your traffic, post your questions in the comments; our Google and Facebook gurus are standing by.

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