3 marketing hacks you should be using to drive more traffic to your online store

Online marketing is not easy, especially in the super competitive e-commerce world, where within minutes anyone can have their online store up and running. We are all at the mercy of Google whose ranking system undoubtedly favors long established sites with large budgets leaving the crumbs for the rest of us, and who has the budget for PPC campaigns which are becoming less and less profitable? The way to market in today’s Internet is by leveraging social channels and by building a tribe. In this post I will cover 3 free marketing hacks which you can implement today on your online store to start building your tribe.

Hack #1: Collect emails from everywhere

Building up a subscriber list is both free and effective to leverage loyalty of your visitors and help drive more traffic to your site. A service like Mailchimp is perfect for such a program. In addition to collecting emails from your customers, you should encourage your visitors to opt into a “Loyalty club”. It’s easy to provide incentives to your visitors to opt into the list. Advertise secret specials, inside information, freebies and more to those who opt into your list.

As you grow your email list over time you will be building up a reservoir of interested, loyal supporters (part of your tribe) who you can communicate with, incentivize to help you out, encourage them to become referrers and much more.

Bonus tips

1. Email every new subscriber personally and thank them for joining and give them a taste of some of the benefits they will get for joining the list.
2.  Never just add someone’s email to your list. People need to opt into the list.
3. Allow a one click opt out option (existing feature of Mailchimp).

 

Hack #2: Integrate Yotpo’s social reviews with your store

Yotpo is a free plug-and-play social reviews solution for store owners. What makes Yotpo special is its integration with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. After a customer writes a review, they are encouraged to share their review on their social networks. This results in an increase in referral traffic and because it’s already qualified traffic (friend brought a friend) there is already some context. This traffic therefore has a higher conversion rate than regular referral traffic. Yotpo’s free solution results in drastically more reviews than any other reviews service out there.

Yotpo currently supports Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, Volusion, CS-Cart, Prestashop and more.

Bonus tips

1. Make sure you customize the Yotpo widget to suit your site so it doesn’t become too much of a distraction and blends perfectly with your site.
2. Don’t forget to turn on the social sharing feature to take full advantage of the user-generated content produced by your reviewers.

 

Hack #3: Promote complimentary products

In order to build your tribe and maintain loyalty it is very important to constantly find ways to provide value to these individuals. One of the easiest and most overlooked ways is to promote complimentary products to your own. Basically every product has complimentary products associated with it and fit very well with your area of focus. Let’s say you sell hiking shoes on your online store. Your customers and potential customers need more than just hiking shoes. They also need outdoor clothing, specialized backpacks and maybe even climbing gear.

If you are promoting complimentary products and providing quality information on such products, people who live in the niche will find you and start following you because you will be a resource of valuable information. The trick is to understand your target market and constantly provide value to them.

Bonus tips

1. Use Twitter to find great deals and promotions being run by stores which sell complimentary products. By following these retailers and promoting them, they may start doing the same back to you which will result in more sales.
2. If you are using Hack #2, you can include a section in your newsletter which promotes complimentary products.

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