Actions to improve the traffic, sales and CRO (1)

We are in the decisive phase of Christmas Sales and it is the moment to go all out. This post is going to be the first part of a summary of actions to increase the traffic, sales, and CRO of your online store. Pay attention because I’m sure that there are a lot of things we’re going to tell that you can take advantage of for your Christmas Campaign.

Improving the traffic doesn’t necessary means to increase it. A lot of times we fall into the trap of thinking like that, the more visits, the more sales. But, the truth is that that’s not set in stone.  The actions oriented to improve the traffic should be associated with capturing users that belong to your target audience.

If you have a niche product, it’s possible that going from 1000 to 1200 visits per month could be a lot more interesting for you than diversifying the segmentation and reaching 10.000 persons from which 9000 will never buy your product. That would only be a waste of time and money.

The first advice is fundamental for all the actions we’re going to recommend to you. It is indispensable that you know your own public before proceeding with the tactics.

The best way to do that is asking yourself and asking your potential customers:

Socio-demographic factors: How old is he/she? What’s his/her gender? Profession? Annual income? Education? Where does he/she live? Civil Status? Siblings? All these answers could be helpful to create archetypes, in fact, it could be a good idea to create a buyer persona.

Market and product factors: What does the public require? Is the demand met? Who’s the competition?

Motivational factors: What compels the user to buy? Price? Exclusivity? Status? Or simply solving a problem?

This objective necessarily requires pacification. We’ve already mentioned a few times that SEO is a mid-term strategy that requires continuous optimization so, my advice is you get on it already.

As you already have a clear idea of who your public is, it’s time to optimize your strategy at an On-Page level.

The first thing you need to do is a keyword investigation that picks up all the possible terms, what your customer is looking for and how your customer tries to find your product.

Now you have to dump all these information in the Information Architecture of your eCommerce. This is fundamental because this is going to give you the patterns to optimize each page, item, category and even each post for a given search intention.

After that, you will need to work with a lot of other variables, but what you can’t forget to work on is meta tags: titles, descriptions, all the h1 headers and so on...

From an Off-Page point of view, you need your content to be so relevant that other sites link to you naturally. Also, you can give a little push to the linkbuilding by looking for links to relevant sites for your business, like blogs and social media (without forgetting the pages of your partners and suppliers).

As you can see there’s a lot of work to do, but if this is done consistently and according to the Google Guidelines, you will see results soon.

As for the PPC, the main advantage is that the actions put in place to boost it have an impact in real time.

Going back to the previous study: do you know who’s your public? what are they interested in? and, also, do you handle business criteria like seasonality or sales objectives? 

Crossing all these variables, you’ll have it easier. You can do:

• Punctual promotions based on your business. If you need to take some products out of your hands.
• Niche demand peaks: If you sell hunting products, you can do all your actions to improve the traffic to all the products marked and associated with the species calendar
• Seasonability: with this, I mean the biggest business milestone (Christmas, Black Friday, Summer, Father’s/Mother’s day and so on.)

We tend to think that PPC or SEM is reduced to AdWords, but there are a lot of other sides worth it

• Adwords: Of course. The Cost per Click is high (depending on the niche) but it is effective. Get the most out of it by using all its features (Search, Display, Shopping… and remarketing, of course).
• Facebook: the other big protagonist. Do facebook Ad campaigns using the study’s public for segments efficiently
• Amazon: if you sell your products in Amazon Marketplace you can take advantage of PPC on Amazon. This is great because it increases the traffic.

Never underestimate the power of another channels/

• Other websites: from reference blogs regarding the media sector. A mention or a review will always be something positive when they link us.
• SocialMedia: We talked about paid traffic on Social Media, but our own actions and interactions also generate organic visits. The contests and similar initiatives that send the users to your web work really well, without forgetting the marketing content linked to a blog.
• Email marketing: Use your milestones and seasonality calendar to impact with punctuated emailing campaigns. It is also important to maintain a regular flow of contact and communication using newsletters.