Its well-known driving traffic to your website is a fundamental part of running a dropshipping business. After all, you’ve spent all of that time and effort getting the website design right, and choosing winning dropshipping products. Your prospective customers should be able to see it.
You need a constant flow of visitors coming to your website daily in order to increase your potential sales, and gain more opportunities to engage with your customers online. However, driving traffic to your website is not as easy as it seems and requires consistent work.
According to SitePoint only 25% of all websites across the internet get more than 5000 unique visitors each month.
So what does it take to join this successful 25 % and make sure your sales keep growing and your business keeps flourishing? Well, here’s the answer:
Everything Starts with the Customer
“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”―John Russell.
Customer engagement is an important connection between your business and your customers. Successful dropshipping businesses rave about the success of their personalized customer service chatbots, and how personalized customer experience is an eCommerce trend you don’t want to miss out on.
Highly engaged customers buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty to your business, that’s why providing an outstanding customer experience is now one of the primary concerns on how to engage with customers.
Customers are getting smarter and quicker each day, thanks to the internet and social media. So to involve more customers in their business, brands all over the world are coming up with different customer engagement strategies every day.
The main goal of every customer engagement strategy is to create an emotional connection and encourage them to get involved with your brand. Customer engagement also works as a metric for your business that can show the quality of your customer experience and how loyal your customers are.
Successful dropshipping brands use everything from funny and sassy social media responses to advertising through influencers. And let’s not forget that personalized emails with discounts and vouchers will always inspire loyalty and affection in customers.
By the end of this blog, you’ll be able to increase customer engagement and know how to drive traffic to your website by getting a grip on these examples of successful customer engagement strategies.
Let’s dive in!
1. How to Drive Traffic to Your Website using Social Media
Social media is essentially an integrated part of our life. According to Nielsen, adults spend nearly half a day interacting with media. But that’s not surprising considering we do all of our shopping, communicating and sharing on social media.
Diving into the specifics, in 2019, people spent an average of 144 minutes on social media a day. And that’s before the new norms set in and created the immense growth in eCommerce and online shopping since the COVID outbreak.
Interacting with customers on social media platforms is one of the most useful customer engagement strategies for all types of businesses. And best of all - It’s Free.
So, how can you get started?
First things first - you need to choose the right social media platform. Depending on your target market, make sure you use the correct platform and reach out to the right groups, hashtags, and people.
To get you started, identify your target market based on age, gender and lifestyle, and use the infographic below to pinpoint the top three platforms you should be focusing on.
If you’re just entering the world of social media for your business, it’s more likely that you’re only considering the most popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
These are a perfect start and necessary for all types of eCommerce businesses, but there are also some other platforms you should also pay attention to, for example, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok.
Each of them offers different things for your dropshipping business: Pinterest is more of a visual content platform, Snapchat and TikTok are for short videos about your brand and products, and are still critical to tapping into as any customer markets as possible.
As I mentioned above, social media giant Instagram is one of the essential parts for an eCommerce business. To make the shopping experience easy and comfortable, Instagram introduced Instagram Shops, which allows online shops to set up a shopping experience right on the platform.
This feature makes shopping really fast and convenient for customers and gives online stores a new channel for sales, right on the account.
Engage with your customers by:
- Following them
- Commenting on their photos and getting to know them
- Sending them recommendations that they may like
- connecting them to your brand through storytelling
Being real and personal with your social media audience is one of the best customer engagement strategies for higher conversion.
It’s important to continuously engage with your audience and keep your customers interested in the content you provide. But remember, too much self-promotion doesn’t provide enough engagement, you need to really connect with your customers, listen to their voice and answer their questions.
Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, try posting interesting content, connect with customers and answer their questions personally, and don’t be a robot with automatic replies, be a human, customers feel that.
Know your followers on each platform, it will help with analyzing who is your real customer and what demographic groups are interested in your products, this information will be useful for future marketing planning.
Social media is a unique world, where you can engage directly with your target audience and improve the experience people have with your brand. Remember, each click from social media pages brings traffic to your store, so use it as productively as you can.
2. True Power of Inbound Marketing
Create content. Publish content. Amplify content. Repeat.
Another great customer engagement strategy, that in my personal opinion brings the most traffic to your website, is inbound marketing. There are a lot of different channels for inbound marketing and let’s talk about the most suitable channels for eCommerce.
Engaging with other communities in order to expand your brand’s name and grow your reputation drives traffic to your website which will eventually lead to conversion.
For example, you can start guest blogging. Blogs have a major influence on the online market and society today. People search for information on blogs and other informative websites, so make sure that your blog post contains informative content and tips on what the target audience wants.
Also, forums are a great channel to engage your audience. You can answer questions related to your products on Quora, talk about your industry on Reddit. Show your knowledge and people will trust your brand more and become your loyal customers.
If you have an opportunity to create promotional or explainer video - do it. According to Wyzowl, half of a billion people watch videos on social media every day and soon video traffic will represent 80% of all consumer online traffic.
My personal favorite one is Dollar Shave Club’s explainer video that went viral, gaining over 26 million views on YouTube.
YouTube already has over a billion users and creates massive traffic every day from all over the world. As I mentioned earlier, you need to provide informative content to get more viewers. Show how to use your products and tell them the story of your business, or make a funny video and go viral. Anyways, all videos get lots of attention and may bring major traffic to your website.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”
— Seth Godin
3. How to Engage with Customers through Email Marketing
Email marketing is an inexpensive and powerful tool to reach your customers. Doing it the right way can take your business to the next level, grow customer engagement with your brand and generate an uptick in website traffic.
It may be a friendly email reminder about a new service or product for your existing customers or promotional email to attract new targeted audience’s attention.
You can even convert your viewers into leads by offering a discount code once they sign up for your email newsletter! An incredible way to gain new leads and new customers. All while keeping your customers engaged and interested.
Properly written emails may create your brand’s awareness and build loyalty and trust among your customers.
But make sure the recipients get emails related to their needs and not something that would like “spammy” emails. That’s why it’s better to send personalized emails.
You can segment your buyers based on their purchases, and send different segments personalized emails.
For example: If someone purchased a few onesies for a 6-month-old, why not send them recommendations for a 12-month-old a few months later? Or consider a customer that purchases a sweater dress in February, why not send them a personalized email for bathing suits in the spring? People appreciate the thoughtfulness.
Many Shopify Apps have features like automated emails in order to save you time, and one of the most effective ones is the all-in-one marketing platform Growave.
Its automated emails work as a reminder to purchase things that customers liked or will need in the future. For example, if your store’s visitor viewed some items and put them on a wishlist but never bought it, Growave will send a friendly reminder about the items he liked. There are different types of emails that could be sent out to a potential customer:
Those emails have a high rate of openings and usually turn a one-time visitor into a customer. So do not underestimate the power of email marketing, keep updating your email list by asking your visitors to sign up and reach out to more potential customers.
4. Let’s Talk Influencer Marketing
They say that one of the best ways to promote your business is influencer marketing. It a great way to gain new customers because influencers have already built their user base for you, who are ready to buy your products and services.
But how can you know which influencer has the right audience for your brand?
To make your life easier and save you time and money, there’s a bunch of influencers marketing platforms like Upfluence and Openinfluence that can find a suitable influencer for your business to collaborate with, help you manage your campaigns and track and analyze the results.
Influencer marketing is basically using the influencers’ power to show the targeted audience your products and services. It became a popular marketing strategy because it brings major audience’s attention without the need for manual marketing tasks.
It is also one of the most effective forms of marketing for SEO. This happens because links from influencers’ websites and social media pages have significantly high authority.
Let’s talk about its many benefits. The world of SEO requires high-quality backlinks now and as I mentioned before, influencers’ traffic is exceptional. It’s not because of the number of their followers, each influencer has its own set of followers that converts very well.
It may consist of millions or just a few thousand followers, but those few thousand are extremely targeted. You can give an influencer a coupon or discount code, use the referral or affiliate program, or just make the promotion of your brand via a post.
Whatever way you will choose, it will drive traffic to your website right away and you'll realize that it’s never been easier to reach the required audience than by using influencer marketing.
5. Engage Customers with Contests, Giveaways, and Sweepstakes
There is something about giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests that sparks people’s eyes and drives them for action. They recently have become a key customer growth strategy for a lot of online businesses. Great offer + targeted audience = successful and effective tool to engage with your potential customers and drive traffic to your website.
You can offer a set of products and choose what customers need to do in order to participate in your contest or giveaway. Running a successful contest is as easy as adding a customer’s email to the mailing list or getting people to tag their friends and follow your account.
Anyways, people love the idea of getting free stuff. So use giveaway marketing to spread the word about your products, reach new customers and increase your traffic and sales. The investment is worth it.
There are many other ways to engage with your customers in order to drive traffic to your website.
These mentioned 5 steps are probably the easiest and don’t require too many investments, mostly it requires your time and your knowledge. Try using these strategies and you will notice a huge impact immediately. Join that 25% of the websites that get enough unique visitors each month, convert each visitor into a customer and keep your sales increasing and your business prospering!
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