If you’re running an online business, one of the important touchpoints you have with your customer is when the items they ordered and purchased from you get delivered.
For one, this allows you to leave a positive impression on them and create a pleasant online shopping experience. A well-designed unboxing experience can create a ‘wow’ factor that can make your customers fall in love with your brand all over again and order more.
In general, most customers are already excited about receiving their items. But you can take it up a notch and make it even more exciting by providing a carefully curated unboxing experience.
What Benefits?
1.It Has The Potential For Free Marketing
While some customer prefers to enjoy the unboxing experience on their own, others love to record the moment and share the experience on social media. As such, it becomes a significant marketing opportunity to help your brand reach more clients and stand out.
2. It Improves Customer Loyalty
One of the most important goals of any company is to make customers repeatedly purchase their products. That said, customer experience across the buying journey impact customer loyalty.
A big part of the buyer’s journey that you can easily improve and control is creating a positive unboxing experience. This strategy relies on emotion, allowing consumers to feel pampered and valued. Such consumer empowerment can encourage people to come back again and again.
How to?
1.Packaging Materials——Choose The Right Packaging Materials
To create a unique unboxing experience for your customers, focus on the material. Ideally, it shouldn’t be just any ordinary box that you bulk buy from a supplier. Your box should feature your brand colors, logo, or name.
Once your products arrive on a customer’s doorstep, you want to let them know they came from you. While plain boxes may be cheaper, if your brand isn’t clear, you could miss out on the valuable opportunity to establish consistent brand recognition. Note that consistent branding–from product browsing and selection to purchasing to receiving and unboxing the product, can help build and strengthen your brand story. That said, don’t skimp on your product boxes.
Alternatively, the term ‘unboxing’ doesn’t necessarily mean boxes. As such, you can choose whether you’ll use boxes to pack your items. However, it’s important to choose the right type of packaging suitable for your specific products.
For instance, a custom box may not be necessary if you have smaller, flexible products such as shirts. You can opt for branded mailers or plastic pouches. Regardless of what type of packaging material you choose, you want to make sure that it reflects your brand and agreeably matches your product.
2.Think About The Layout
No one likes to receive a highly anticipated item that seems carelessly thrown into the package, nor do they want to see lots of return labels or receipts when they open their package. Instead, customers want to see a well-packaged and nicely presented product with each item positioned properly. This can provide a nice impression and make them want to order again.
That said, be intentional not just to throw return labels, packing slips, or packaging foam and material anywhere on the box. After all, you want to provide a nice impression and make them want to order again.
As a good start, pack and present the items in an appealing and organized manner. Ensure they first see what they ordered and arrange the extra papers and miscellaneous things. This approach can help prevent the less important things from taking away the customer’s focus and reaction from the main focal point, which is your product.
3.Add Personalized Extras They’ll Love
One of the best ways to create a memorable unboxing experience is to add extras that customers will love. Aside from the product they’ve bought, you can include small, personalized items, such as a simple thank you note for their purchase.
You can also leverage engagement by sending postcards that ask them to share the experience on social media with a specific hashtag. Moreover, you can also give them a discount coupon they can use for their next purchase, encouraging an additional sale. You can also send bonus gifts or product testers, especially during holidays or the sale season, to show appreciation and increase customer loyalty.
There’s no denying the increasing impact of unboxing. What was once a seasonal pleasure, unboxing, has become a powerful online fad and online marketing tool. So, if you wish to convert one-time customers into loyal buyers, designing a memorable unboxing experience can help you stay on their minds and keep coming back. If you don’t know where to start, take inspiration from the above tips to create a unique unboxing experience for your customers.
Wrapping up:
We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.
Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us: blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://bit.ly/3Cfdu4w
At some point, that thought crosses the mind of every entrepreneur selling online.
Maybe you’ve invested time and effort in setting up your store and tweaked everything for launch, only to open up shop and wonder where all the traffic is. Maybe you’ve seen steady growth over the past six months, but hit a plateau on traffic and sales. Or maybe you’ve been successful with one traffic-driving tactic and you’re curious about what tactics you can try next.
Whether you’re trying to attract your first customer or your 1,000th customer, generating more traffic to your online store is a crucial part of growing your business. If your site is properly optimized for conversions, getting an increase in web traffic could mean more customers and more sales.
How to increase website traffic
Run paid ad campaigns
Engage on social media
Hire influencers
Use content marketing
Apply SEO strategies
Explore traditional marketing like tv, radio or mail
We’ve gathered a list of 16 proven, high-impact tactics for driving more traffic to your online store.
Which tactic is best for your business?
Some of these sources will generate higher quality traffic for your specific business and some will generate lower quality traffic.
For example, let’s say you’re targeting young professionals interested in buying wacky office supplies. LinkedIn might be a better option over, say, Pinterest. If your target audience young 20 year olds, TikTok might be the best best option.
Website traffic acquisition success is found by doubling down on the most relevant traffic you can find. Of course, “the most relevant traffic you can find” is incredibly subjective and different for everyone, so let’s break down each tactic you can use to increase web traffic:
Tactic type: Whether the idea is a short-term or long-term traffic generator. Short-term tactics usually see results quicker but require more maintenance or reinvestment. Long-term tactics take longer to see results but are more evergreen and require little to no maintenance.
Effort: How much time, skill, or experience you’ll need to put into the tactic.
Time to return on investment (ROI): Whether you invest time, effort, or money into a traffic-driving tactic, it will take days, weeks, or months to see that investment increase traffic and sales.
Cost: The upfront budget you’ll need to launch the tactic.
Traffic potential: The total amount of traffic that could be sent to your store.
💡 TIP: You should aim to choose one tactic you can do consistently. If you spread yourself thin with trying too many tactics at once, you’re not going to see results—and that’s when you get frustrated, and feel like you should give up.
Run paid social media ad campaigns
To increase website traffic you need to be able to get your business in front of your ideal customers. With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted campaigns that serve tailor-made ads to the customers who are most likely to click through and purchase your products.
If you’re thinking about running paid social media ads, here are some platforms you should consider:
1. Facebook ads
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Low
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤
With 2.6 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2020, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. Facebook is filled with opportunities for you to reach new customers and drive them to your online store. Its robust advertising platform lets you target users based on their interests, behavior, location, and more. Facebook also can be a tool that saves you time and money by optimizing your ad delivery and getting your message in front of those most likely to convert.
Using Facebook Dynamic Ads you can even serve customers who have previously visited your website automatically generated ads featuring the products they’ve already looked at or added to their carts. These powerful ads can help you bring users back to your website, so you can make the most of the traffic you’re already getting.
2. Instagram ads
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Low
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤
Instagram is an incredibly popular platform, with more than one-billion active users worldwide, with 90% of accounts following a business according to Instagram.
Finding hashtags on Instagram or creating videos or images for marketing are just a few of the Instagram tools to grow your following. Creating Instagram ads is most likely to result in growing website traffic and sales, so, if you’ve already built an army of followers on Instagram, you aren’t really using it to its full potential until you’ve tried its advertising platform.
Make sure you’re signed up for an Instagram Business account or convert a personal account to a business one. This will give you even more ways to connect with your audience through Instagram ads. The platform offers the ability to create ads as photos, videos, carousels, collections, and stories, so you can begin creating ads in the content format you find easiest.
3. Pinterest ads
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Low
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤
Pinterest is the ideal place to reach your potential customers as they visit the platform to consider future activities and purchases. According to Pinterest, 72% of active users say they use it to find new brands and services, and, in another study, 90% of respondents said Pinterest gives them ideas about which products to purchase.
Pinterest is extremely popular among niche groups like home decorating, renovating, landscaping, and DIY crafts and is ideal for businesses hoping to make inroads with these markets.
Pinterest is home to Promoted Pins, a form of paid advertising that pushes your Pins to the top of your customers’ search results, helping you stand out from the crowd. Promoted Pins blend in with the rest of Pinterest’s content, making it a great tool for capturing your customers’ attention and pulling them to your online store.
4. Google Ads
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
Unlike social media advertising platforms, Google Ads offer a unique opportunity to advertise your products and services directly to people actively searching for them. Emarketer reports that 35% of users purchase a product within five days of searching for it.
Google gives you the option to put your ad in front of users on the world’s two largest search engines: Google and YouTube. Although the platform gives you the ability to increase web traffic and sales, on the downside, it’s a complex platform to navigate for beginners, and you can risk spending a lot of money advertising to the wrong audience.
Google offers three ways to put your ad in front of web browsers; search ads (SERPS), Google Display Network (PPC), and YouTube ads. Google ads operate on an auction basis: the amount you bid on your chosen keywords will determine your placement in relation to other bidders, as well as relevancy to the search term. And if you’ve ever used Google Analytics, you know how powerful some of the insights Google can provide.
5. TikTok Ads
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Medium
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
Contrary to popular belief, TikTok isn’t just a platform of silly videos and memes. It continues to be an incredibly powerful platform for advertisers across virtually every demographic. According to Data.Ai, “TikTok ranked #1 among all apps and games by consumer spend in both Q1 2022 and the previous quarter – becoming the first app to ever beat a game in consumer spend in a given quarter — first in Q4 2021, and again in Q1 2022.
Furthermore, global spend in TikTok in Q1 2022 marked the biggest quarter for any app or game ever. The app surpassed $840 million in consumer spend worldwide, a 40% jump from Q4 2021.”
While creating quality content on the platform does require a fair amount of investment, it can be a great platform to add to your marketing arsenal. At Shopify, we see the value in TikTok so much so that we launched TikTok Shopping in partnership with TikTok. With TikTok Shopping, Shopify is the first commerce platform to bring organic product discovery and shopping tabs to TikTok, helping creators and merchants deepen their relationships with consumers
Be sure to check out our complete guide to advertising on TikTok to learn more about how you can get a higher ROI on your advertising efforts.
Engage in conversation on social media
Social media engagement is more than simply sharing a link across Facebook, Twitter, etc., to your online store in the hope it increases website traffic. Social engagement is about encouraging conversations with the right people, responding thoughtfully, and driving excitement and enthusiasm.
6. Get friends and family to share
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Weeks
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤
When you launch your business, turning to friends and family to get support is a great tactic to generate initial awareness, traffic, or even your first sale (thanks, Mom!). People don’t launch businesses too frequently, so it’ll probably be quite novel within your circle of friends and family to see you start your own online store. Hopefully they’ll be willing to share news about your brand new business endeavor.
Do you know the site Upworthy? Did you know that its initial momentum was generated by friends and family. It set a goal of getting 1,000 Facebook fans by the end of the day it launched. It worked, and that’s part of what gave it the initial traction to take off.
Reach out in a targeted way to your friends and family. You’ll get away with it without risking irritation. On Facebook, talk about your store in an update.
Are there channels for talking to your extended family? Do they plan reunions on an email list? Send a note and tell them about your new store.
Don’t focus your ask on getting them to buy your products. While you could offer them your products for free or at a big discount—they are your friends and family, after all—instead, ask them to share your store with their networks. These are people with whom you have social equity, and you won’t ask for these kinds of favors very often. You’ll have a higher rate of success than reaching out to strangers, and if enough of them share, that may give you sufficient momentum to keep a regular stream of customers.
7. Drive excitement with contests and giveaways
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
Contests and giveaways are a great way to get more followers on Instagram, increase social media engagement, and drive traffic to your website. When you run a contest or giveaway, 94% of the time users share the promotion immediately after they register. And of the total participants, 62% share the promotion with a friend and suggest they take part too.
With viral contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes you can quickly drive more traffic to your store by offering exciting prizes in exchange for your customers’ participation. Prizes and rewards are powerful incentives for getting both current and new customers to actually visit your store.
Using tools like Gleam, Woobox, or contest and giveaway apps on the Shopify App Store you can embed giveaways into landing pages or blog posts on your store. These contests can even use social sharing as a method of entry, giving your sweepstakes a higher chance of going viral and spreading around social platforms. Once participants are on your store, you can use different techniques to guide them to your products, like offering discounts or coupons on first purchases.
8. Offer time-sensitive discounts
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
Offering time-sensitive discounts can be an extremely effective way to get people to take action, generating traffic and increasing sales. Putting an expiration on your discount leverages scarcity, which is a powerful psychological sales trigger.
In the example below, bags and accessories brand Rareform offers a discount that expires after one day. Rareform is a larger brand and can afford a 50% discount and flash sales on its products. If you’ve launched your store recently, consider adding a minimum purchase limit. This can be a smart way to still offer your fans a nice incentive but also make sure you don’t give away the farm.
Product discounts aren’t the only offer you can provide customers. If you don’t normally offer free shipping, then occasionally doing so can be a compelling incentive to drive traffic from social media or email marketing campaigns onto your store.
Reach new audiences with influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is the process of building relationships with influencers to get your online store in front of new audiences. According to BrightLocal, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.
With influencer marketing, you can harness the creativity and reach of relevant influencers in your industry while leveraging the trust they’ve already formed with their audiences, generating referral traffic to your store.
9. Send free samples to Instagram influencers
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Weeks
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
Instagram is one of the most effective marketing channels for ecommerce businesses. According to Yotpo, at least 30% of Instagram users have purchased products they discovered on the platform. It’s also a great way to increase awareness of your brand and potentially drive traffic to your store—especially if you know how to target influencers.
Bloggers and social media celebrities like Estee Lalonde are highly trusted by their followers, so getting them to feature your products is an effective, organic tactic for increasing your traffic.
Estee Lalonde applying makeup and promoting products she uses, with links to each to drive traffic to websites of her brand partners. Estee Lalonde on Instagram.
There are more reasons to work with an Instagram influencer other than accessing their audience. You can tap into their knowledge of the platform, see what works, and learn to create the best content for that platform. Also, you can work with them as consumers of your brand and get their feedback and perspective, which can help improve your products.
💡 TIP: If you’re yet to find an influencer to work with, find one through an influencer marketing platform.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking for an Instagram influencer to work with:
Are they a good brand fit? Ask yourself: “Does the influencer we’re going to work with seem like someone we would want to be a customer, and would they actually use or wear our stuff?”
Do they have good engagement rates? It’s not always about the number of followers—engagement rate is more important. Ideally, an influencer’s engagement rate is anywhere from 2–3%, with multiple comments on each of their posts.
10. Reach out to bloggers and press
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Weeks
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
It’s hard to grow a business and market it alone. When it comes to selling online, the more connections you have the better—especially if they’re connections with an engaged audience of their own. Having connections who will talk up your product is essential to driving traffic to your site and increasing sales. This is where blogger outreach comes in.
Blogger outreach is about more than making friends online. It’s a process to help you achieve measurable success in your business. Even if you don’t have a lot of contacts online you can still reach out to people. The key to successful blogger outreach is to offer value and tell bloggers exactly what’s in it for them. Even if they are a good natured individual, asking for help rarely will work, as people are busy and have a million things of their own to do.
Here are some blogger outreach ideas to help you generate traffic:
Guest post on other blogs. While growing your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Link back to your site where relevant, even if it’s only in the author bio. Guest blogging maybe time consuming, but it is one of the most powerful ways to get your brand on the map and generate backlins, especially when starting out.
Do an expert roundup. Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story, to your blog post. Then, publish a list of all the responses you get back. Let them know when you publish your insight and they’re likely to share it with their audience.
Solicit product reviews. Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them your product for free in exchange for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.
Find affiliates to promote your business. Incentivize other people to drive traffic to your business by using an affiliate program and offering a commission on every sale .
Get included in gift guides. The right gift guides can increase sales and traffic to your website. However, inclusion in these guides does not happen randomly and requires some effort, as there is strong competition to get your product listed.
Ask Instagram influencers to promote your product. The same techniques for reaching out to bloggers still apply when contacting instagram influencers. Getting the right mention or stylish photo can drive traffic or sales to your store.
Get press coverage. If you have a great story or an interesting product that people will want to write about, put it out there! Get in touch with bloggers and journalists who cover businesses like yours and tell them what you’re up to.
You don’t have to target the biggest and most successful people. You have a better chance of getting featured by influencers with a smaller audience because they’re not constantly swarmed with requests. Keep in mind that the loyalty of the audience matters almost as much as its size.
11. Write a blog post featuring influencers and their advice
Tactic type: Short-term
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤
This tactic is an expansion of blogger outreach that deserves its own section, as it has worked well for a long time and continues to do so.
The core of the tactic is: write a blog post featuring an influencer and/or their advice, and send it to them in an email or via Twitter in the hope they share it with their audience.
For example, here are two ideas to get started:
Ask influencers their advice on a product. Imagine you’re a cosmetics brand and you’re writing a blog post on what to look for in buying your next foundation. You might want to reach out to influencers that write or record videos of their reviews and ask them what they think is the most important thing to look for when buying a new foundation. You could do this with only one influencer or as many as you see fit.
Create a master list of trustworthy voices in your niche. Potential buyers are always looking for authorities in the space they can trust to get consumer reviews. If your industry has influencers, try writing a blog post that lists the top five, 10, or 20 trustworthy influencers in your niche. By doing this you’ll help potential buyers and start building a good relationship with influencers.
After you’ve produced your blog post, reach back out to the influencer with a link and ask them if they can share it with their audience.
Instead of waiting for an influencer to feature you, you can feature them first. If you’re looking for influencers to connect and build a relationship in your industry with, this might jump-start the process.
Attract customers with content marketing
Content marketing is about creating interesting, informative, and engaging content to organically attract customers to your online store. From videos and podcasts to guides and ebooks, there are endless opportunities for your business to branch out into the world of content and generate traffic.
Original content helps position your business as an industry thought leader and build your brand. Your business’ content strategy can include anything your customers might find relevant or interesting—don’t limit yourself to content that includes or focuses on your products. Instead, consider any and all topics and resources related to your business that your customers would find useful.
Content marketing also gives your store the chance to conquer search results beyond product and brand keywords. Using free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Keyword.io, you can identify new opportunities for your business to rank in search results and get in front of larger audiences, as well as generate new content ideas.
12. Write blogs to provide information or solve problems
Tactic type: Long-term
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Months
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤
According to WordPress, the world’s largest blogging platform, each month 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages. In the same period of time, WordPress users produce about 70 million new posts, and 77 million new comments.
While there is ample opportunity to reach an audience, if you want to attract relevant buyers and generate traffic back to your store through blogging, you’ll need to be purposeful about your targeting. Solving problems through content while also producing “search engine findable” is the best method for a blog, but it isn’t easy. It’s literally the job description of a good content marketer. Content marketing on a blog involves some customer journey mapping, persona building, keyword research, and content gap analysis.
Successful content marketing on a blog starts with two things:
Figuring out who your ideal audience is. Put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes: what problems do they have that they turn to your store to solve? What interests them outside of your products? What do they do for fun with friends? What are they passionate about? Craft blog content based on the answers to these questions.
Creating content where your ideal audience would want to hangout. Sites that win big have pages with information that people are looking for. To get in front of the right audience, make a list of topics and phrases to target. Ask yourself: If I were looking for this product/service/article, how would I search? What words would I use? What phrases? Getting in the mind of your visitor-to-be is the key to generating quality traffic.
You can also turn your long form content into a webinar to generate additional site traffic. Infographics are also a great way to communicate the message of your content as well.
Don’t go into blogging unprepared. Know your ideal audience, have a strategic plan for gaining mindshare with that audience, and eventually create a new place for them to hang out online.
13. Produce podcasts to reach new audiences
Tactic type: Long-term
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Months
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤
According to Edison Research, the number of Americans listening to podcasts every week increased 175% over the last five years, with roughly 90 million listening to a podcast each month.
Much like blogging, podcasting gives you the potential to excel in a specific niche, targeting a specific audience.
The problem is that podcasting isn’t necessarily optimized for traffic acquisition. Podcasts are enjoyed at the gym, on the bus, or during a lunchtime walk. Unlike a blog post or social media post, there’s no call to action to click while you’re listening. There is a heavier lift on the listener to remember key points and take additional steps after listening to a prompt or suggestion.
You have to find other ways to drive traffic and make it as easy as possible for listeners to find information mentioned in the episode, says Shuang Esther Shan. “We stick to three core principles. First, for in app podcast descriptions we provide a concise and accurate summary of the episode with a link to our blog post that accompanies the episode. Second, on our blog, we’ll publish a key summary for easy access and reading as well as the transcripts for our hearing-impaired audience. Finally, if an episode covers a lot of apps, tools, or any other useful resources, we’ll provide a list of relevant resources with each item linked accordingly.”
14. Use video to educate or entertain
Tactic type: Long-term
Effort: High
Time to ROI: Months
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤
While there are various options for hosting videos, YouTube is the most popular and the best channel for generating traffic. It’s also the second-largest search engine in the world.
The potential audience and numbers you can reach are impressive. According to YouTube’s stats, it has over two billion users (almost one-third of all people on the internet), and on mobile alone reaches more 18–34 year olds than any TV network in the US, with more than 70% of YouTube views. The demographic on the average viewer is wide open. The average YouTube user is not a young, single male.
So, how do you narrow down that massive audience and get the right eyes on your YouTube channel and then back to your store? Here are some of the different types of content your business could be using:
Educational content. Teach new skills to build trust with your audience, and if possible, use your product as the centerpiece for solving their problem. Educational webinars are an especially great way to highlight your products features and the pain points it solves.
Storytelling. Inspiring videos that fit into your business’ identity are perfect for communicating your brand’s image and ideals to a wider audience.
Entertainment. Fun videos that cater to your audience’s interests is one of the best ways to capture viewers’ attention and focus it onto your products.
Use SEO to increase your store’s discoverability
Can your customers actually find your store online?
When customers search for your products, you want your store to be one of the top results that appears for their search, especially considering a study by marketer Brian Dean that reports 75% of clicks go to the top three results on a search engine results page. That prized position is a key ingredient for generating sustained, qualified website traffic for your online store.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of fine-tuning your website to increase its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.
SEO is a fine science and only works when you put time and effort into learning the rules that govern search engines like Google and Bing and apply those rules to the structure and content of your site. You can use popular SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SemRush to help you further understand where you can improve.
15. Write titles that match search intent
Tactic type: Long-term
Effort: Low
Time to ROI: Days
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤):👤👤👤
The meta title is the line search engines show on their results page for search queries.
Both meta titles and meta descriptions are attributes that determine how your page appears on a search engine results page. They’re immensely important to getting clicks to pages. Click throughs from search traffic are the lifeblood of organic traffic. They’re one of the essential metrics Google uses to prioritize the order of results.
Google explains, “Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”
Ultimately, it’s the meta title that’s going to help you stand out. This what we recommend you aim for when writing meta titles:
Create unique titles for each page.
Keep page titles to less than 55 characters.
Keep consistent with use of title or sentence case across all your pages.
Include your target keyword.
Ensure you match the search intent of the query.
16. Add long-tail keyword variations to your pages
Tactic type: Long-term
Effort: Medium
Time to ROI: Weeks
Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰
Traffic potential (out of 5 👤):👤👤👤👤👤
Building a keyword strategy for your ecommerce website is essential for consistently generating organic traffic from search engines. It’s easy to focus on short, high-volume terms, because they’re easier to identify and research, but you might be missing out on page views if you’re not looking at long-tail keywords.
Ahrefs performed a study across 1.9 billion keywords and found that 92% of them get 10 searches per month or fewer. On analysis of their data, while 60% of searches go to keywords with 1,001 or more search volume, these are short-tail keywords that make up only 0.16% of total keywords. This means the remaining 40% of keywords are long-tail keywords that own 99.84% of queries with 1,000 or fewer searches per month.
This is great news because long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and usually get clicks from search engines at a much higher rate than shorter, more generic terms.
As an example of how you can maximize your exposure to long-tail variations and increase your traffic, let’s pretend we sell the Logitech C310 webcam and want to optimize our page to rank for as many searches as possible. We could use a tool like Google Keyword Tool and make note of all the long-tail variations or, if we really wanted to go in depth, a free tool like keyword.io could unearth many long-tail queries. We’d also want to look at the bottom of the search results where Google lists related searches. The related searches for “Logitech C310” look like this:
Because our Logitech C310 page is optimized for the term “Logitech C310,” we don’t need to insert each long-tail search phrase into the page verbatim. Instead, we want to work the unique variations at the end of “Logitech C310” into our copy to allow the possibility of ranking for it.
Revisiting the related searches from above, we’d want to pick and choose relevant words and add them to our page. For instance, we might include the words “review” and “windows 10.” We can also compare the differences between the C270 and C615 models by using the phrases “vs C270” and “C615.” With all of these newly included modifiers incorporated into the copy, our page has the potential to rank for a wider range of queries.
Not all of the modifiers we uncovered will be applicable. Branded keywords such as “amazon” won’t be useful, and we would likely have a number of modifiers already incorporated. However, more often than not, by looking for long-tail variations we’ll uncover a handful of gems to help increase potential ranking opportunities and ultimately boost our traffic.
Wrapping up
We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements. Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses.
If you would like to know more details about us, please contact with us: www.shopshipshake.co.za
If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://bit.ly/3Cfdu4w
There are more than half a million new small businesses every year. For a brand-new retailer without an existing customer base, spreading the word and generating sales poses a challenge.
Social media is one way to build buzz and attract customers to your new store. Almost all (91%) retailers use at least two social media channels, so that means there’s a lot of noise—and clutter—users have to cut through.
With a few creative content ideas, strategic paid targeting, and tools to help you track your efforts, social media can be a huge asset to building buzz for your brick-and-mortar store.
Keep reading to learn:
Social media marketing challenges for retailers
Retail social media content ideas
Buzz-building social media tactics
Measuring your social media marketing
Common social media challenges for retailers
Tracking real-life actions taken because of digital initiatives isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Here are five common challenges that retailers face when it comes to social media. If you can relate, you’re not alone.
No existing audience
If you’re new to the scene, you don’t have the luxury of an already-existing audience—you’re starting from scratch.
Britni Johnson faced the challenge firsthand, when she worked with The Summit at Fritz Farm, an open-air retail mecca in Lexington, Kentucky, to promote its grand opening. Most of the brands were making their debut in the area, so local consumers didn’t recognize or know the retailers.
“Most of the community had no idea who [our] brands were,” she says.
We had a large task on our hands with generating excitement and really educating the city of Lexington on why they should be excited.
No ideas for content
A lack of social media content ideas poses yet another challenge, especially if you don’t have an established customer base to inspire new options.
Anna Sullivan, co-founder and strategist of The Creative Exchange, worked with a client, Two Roosters Ice Cream, to promote their grand opening. One of their biggest challenges was a lack of content.
“We didn’t have any pictures of the store,” Sullivan says. They got creative and took pictures of the space, the product, ice cream out in the wild, and Implemented other creative ideas (like using staged shots to gain attention on social channels).
Before you blindly jump into your social media marketing efforts, start with a blueprint. “Plan first with a social media strategy,” Sullivan recommends.
Your strategy should include the following:
Goals
Audience definition
Which social channels you’ll use
Brand voice
Content suggestions
Your strategy should also touch on how you plan to spread the word.
Sullivan recommends tagging local publications and newspapers. “A new business opening is easy to get journalists to tweet about, since it represents economic growth,” she says.
No time to dedicate to social media
Opening and managing a new store is busy for even the most seasoned retailer. Social media can easily fall to the bottom of your priority list. After all, what’s more important: sending out a tweet about the products you’re excited to reveal, or making sure said products are artfully merchandised when you open?
Additionally, social media may not be every retailer’s area of expertise. Therefore, it could take you longer to conquer the learning curve and to execute social media promotion.
Free Download: From Clicks to Customers: How to Measure Your Retail Store’s Marketing Success
Every marketing campaign is an investment of your time, energy, and money. Do you ever wonder if your efforts were worth it? Read this guide and build a framework to plan, track, and measure the success of retail marketing campaigns.Get your free guide
Not offering incentives for people to come shop
One mistake retailers often make is not offering an incentive for customers to physically visit their stores, especially if they’re promoting a grand opening or an event. “Why would I go [to a grand opening] if there’s going to be a crowd, and I can come back in two days?” Sullivan says. “I’d rather just wait for there to be no line and no people to shop.”
Matt Hamm, president and owner of Computer Repair Doctor, made sure he didn’t make this mistake when promoting the grand opening of one of his retail locations. He offered people discounts on computer-repair services—plus free pizza and beverages.
Give people a reason to stop by. Make the event significant for the local resident,” he says.
Hamm’s suggestions for other retailers? “If you’re opening a bar/restaurant, give away free drinks or appetizers. Clothing store? Opening weekend discounts on your clothes.”-
Although there’s never a single go-to answer for when to start promoting an opening or event, Sullivan has found in her experience the four to six weeks prior is a good time to start rolling on social media. This gives you enough time to build buzz, create relationships, and generate a following.
For Johnson, the scenario was a bit different, given the phased grand opening of several retail businesses in a single location.
“We did a huge social media campaign in anticipation of the entire center opening this year, starting the social channels from scratch a little over a year ago,” she says. Today, they have nearly 9,000 followers on Instagram and more than 16,000 on Facebook.
If your event is extra buzz-worthy, a prolonged launch strategy could be your best bet.
Small budget
Many retailers don’t have large budgets to invest in social media marketing. But, Sullivan advises that if you’re going to invest, do it at the start. “You want to invest upfront and then DIY it later, instead of the other way around.”
“If you don’t, you run the risk of damaging your brand,” Sullivan says.
It’s generally better to enlist the help of an expert at the forefront. They can lay the blueprint for your social media marketing efforts moving forward, so all you have to do is execute. Starting a social media business account from scratch is extremely challenging, and you could waste a lot of fruitless hours trying to build it up yourself.
Additionally, if you don’t have a budget to promote your social media channels, your initial reach is going to suffer. Hamm learned this through his own experiences.
“Things we’ve tried that didn’t work were posting without a paid boost. Unless you’re paying to promote the post, it won’t have a high enough reach,” he says.
Retail social media marketing content ideas
Capture behind-the-scenes visuals
Behind-the-scenes posts are a common go-to for social media content as they’re easy and authentic to capture—and shoppers love them. “Sneak peeks make [consumers] feel a part of something,” says Sullivan.
Talk about what you’re working on,” she says. “Post about your Home Depot run to get more paint, your first shipment, assembling displays, and setting up inventory.
Basically, Sullivan explains that if you display your emotional involvement behind the launch, consumers are more likely to invest emotionally, too.
Johnson is familiar with this tactic, too. “We mixed in photos from the actual construction of each of the stores, as well as photos from live interviews on-site,” Johnson says.
Anytime you can include a visual, do it. People share video content with friends twice as much as other types of social media posts.
Show your excitement
Whether you’re promoting a grand opening, special event, or normal weekday at your retail store, share that excitement with your audience.
Write heartfelt posts about the history of your store, meaningful moments with customers, vendors, or employees, and land interviews through which you can share your excitement with new audiences on other social channels.
Because of the phased grand opening for The Summit at Fritz Farm, Johnson says, “we created a 30-day countdown campaign that highlighted a different tenant that would be opening on day one.”
Johnson and team also secured interview spots for the founders that were featured on other social media accounts with established audiences.
The more people you can get excited with you, the more likely they’ll spread the word and come shop.
Post community-driven content
Being active in your local community is a great way to connect with customers in your area. Even if it’s not philanthropic community involvement, your passion for the thriving economic growth in the local community is contagious.
Johnson talks about how The Summit at Fritz Farm was a major symbol for economic development in Lexington. “[We shared] photos from retailers with a short story about their brand and why Lex,” she says.
Engage local influencers
Influencer marketing is another great tactic to get your brand in front of new audiences. “[We] worked with bloggers to promote various brands throughout the campaign,” Johnson says of her experience. “We also invited those bloggers to a VIP brunch on the opening day and had them post live stories while exploring.”
Engaging local influencers—much like getting publicity from local publications—gets the word out on social media to new audiences. Those audiences are more likely to trust the influencers they already follow and engage with than a brand-new store that hasn’t yet opened.
Create fun, engaging posts
Not everything has to be promotional. Social media posts that are just for fun can inspire engagement, relationships, and positive sentiment towards your brand.
Sullivan recommends posts with fun facts or games like fill-in-the-blank activities. Other creative social post ideas could include challenges to your audience to caption a photo, trivia, or games where followers have to guess what’s in the picture.
Buzz-building social media tactics
Create a Facebook event
One mistake Sullivan says she sees is retailers who neglect to use Facebook events for special openings or events.
“People get notifications and reminders,” she says. But it’s not just for increasing attendance; it’s also helpful for you. “Facebook events give you more direct numbers and insights, and you can calculate an attendance rate.”
Denver-based Trill Evolutions had a grand opening event, and they used Facebook events to spread the word.
They took it up a notch, though, and asked for customer information in exchange for additional discounts. Now they have information to send retargeted social ads, text messages, and emails to their audience in the future.
Giveaways and contests
Giveaways and contests provide another way to link the digital engagement of social media and the physical engagement of your brick-and-mortar store.
Sullivan and Two Roosters hosted a sidewalk chalk art contest for free ice cream. This not only created some fun engagement on their social channels and provided plenty of eye-catching content to post; it also enticed their followers to visit their storefront.
Giveaways and contests are always great ideas to generate excitement and make people want to follow you.
Use hashtags
Why use hashtags? “A hashtag immediately expands the reach of your tweet beyond just those who follow you, to reach anyone interested in that hashtag phrase or keyword,” according to Buffer.
Create a branded hashtag to promote your store or event, and tap into local, trending hashtags to spread the word. Using a branded hashtag can help you build buzz and recognition around your brand and help you track your efforts (more on that later).
Using existing hashtags can help you jump in on conversations that are already happening. Don’t use too many, though. More than two, and engagement could significantly drop.
Paid social advertising
After you’ve created and populated your social media pages with organic content, run paid ads. “This helps you get in front of the right audience,” Sullivan says. With social ads, you can choose who you want to serve the ad to, and this includes geographic parameters (especially helpful for grand opening events).
Hamm has firsthand experience with how much paid social advertising can amplify your efforts. He was able to reach nearly 7,500 people with a single paid boosted post—for just $34.02.
Other paid social ideas include Snapchat filters. “This is especially good for customers who need something to do in line,” Sullivan says.
Interested in launching ads for your retail store?
In addition to paid social ads, you could set up Shopping Ads on Google to boost your store’s sales.
Engage with your followers
A major part of social media marketing involves community management. Remember, social media isn’t a one-way conversation. Brands need to interact with their followers, hear their feedback, and answer their questions.
Measuring your social media marketing
Every once in a while—monthly or quarterly, per se—it’s important to analyze the impact of your social media marketing efforts. This will help you adjust strategies moving forward and learn insights about your customer base and business.
As we said before, tracking real-life actions taken because of digital initiatives isn’t always the easiest thing to do. But there are some helpful tools that can give you some insight.
Of course, you can calculate the attendance rate from your Facebook event and look at your branded hashtags.
“One reason the branded hashtags are a good idea,” Sullivan points out, “is because you can track the use of those hashtags later.” This provides direct engagement and reach numbers.
Look at qualitative data as well, such as individual interactions on social media, or customers who have come into your store and referenced the Facebook event or Instagram post about the event.
There are many paid and free social media analytics tools you can use, too:
Brand24: This paid tool is great for social listening. You can use it to find out what people are saying in your area, about your industry, about your store and products, and about your event.
Awario: This is a more affordable social listening tool that does much the same as Brand24 but with fewer features.
Canva: This is a free tool that’s helpful for content creation. Create graphics and collages, add text to images, and make other creative visuals to accompany your posts. Pay for the full version to access additional features.
Hootsuite: This tool is a social media post scheduling tool. You can also use it to engage with your audience. It will save you time to schedule social media posts in advance, rather than signing in every time you want to post something. There is both a free and a paid version.
Buffer: Much the same as Hootsuite, Buffer is a social media post scheduling tool that’s also available in a free and a paid version.
Facebook Pages Manager app: Especially handy for the entrepreneur on-the-go, this app will enable you to manage your Facebook business page from your phone.
Grand opening FAQ
What is a grand opening?
A grand opening is a celebration marketing the opening of a brand new store, whether a completely new store or a brand’s new location.
How do you promote the opening of a store?
There are several ways to promote the opening of a new store. Put out ads and billboards. Host an event. Share event information on social media. Hold contests and giveaways. Work on building up as much foot traffic as you can for your very first day open.
How do you introduce your business to social media?
Start by choosing and branding your social media platforms. Put together enticing content that grabs attention and draws potential customers in. Then announce your launch or grand opening in order to increase the number of people that show up.
What type of social media posts get the most engagement?
Some of the most engaging social media post types include short-form videos, behind-the-scenes content, and Instagram stories using interactive stickers. While you’ll want to sprinkle in other types of content in your grand opening social media strategy, be sure to focus around these three types.
Wrapping up
We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, and more. With a successful track record of over 20,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements. Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses.
If you would like to know more details about us, please contact with us: www.shopshipshake.co.za
If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://bit.ly/3ks
