If used right, social media can help you drive traffic to your eCommerce website and boost sales. With more than 70% of customers researching the product they intend to purchase on social media, your digital presence should no longer be limited to your website.

Here are 5 social media approaches to drive traffic to your eCommerce website.

Optimize your social media basics

Start simple, make sure your social media is up-to-date and visible. To do so, here are a few steps

Study your eCommerce target audience

When creating (or optimizing) your social media profiles, keep your target audience in mind and realize who will be seeing your posts. Look at your customer personas or create them if you don’t have any. Keep specific information in mind when creating your personas, such as age, income, profession, location, and anything else you find relevant to your product.

Once you realize who your audience is, it is time to know where to target them.

Make sure you are on the relevant social media platforms

Even though you can find people of all ages and backgrounds on all platforms, you can use these platforms to target a specific target segment. For example, you can use TikTok to target the younger demographic, or local social media to target a specific region.

Set strategies and goals

Posting on social media isn’t enough for you to succeed and drive traffic. You need to have a purpose for posting and a clear strategy in mind. To do so you need to:

• Set short & long term goals

• Decide how do these goals relate to your audience

• Decide how to use social media as together and as separate platforms

• Figure out potential obstacles and bottlenecks

• Apply your product specifics to your marketing strategy

• Repeat

Align your social media brading with your eCommerce website

Whether you’re an omnichannel retailer or just an eCommerce business, it is important that you integrate your branding across platforms. Having a consistent brand identity would boost your brand recognition across platforms and boost your revenue by an average of 23%. Maintaining your brand identity across channels will also give you a competitive advantage over your competition as only 25% have strictly enforced brand guidelines.

Read more on how to improve your omnichannel retail strategy.

Now that you have set up and optimized your social media accounts, let’s look at hands-on approaches to improving traffic to your eCommerce website.

Target your eCommerce audience with social media ads

Social media ads can be the fastest and easiest way to drive direct traffic to your eCommerce website. However, it does not come without incurring a high cost. There are different types of ads you can run, but here are concise and common steps for social media advertising.

Leverage your social media and eCommerce data

Using social media ads can help you grow your audience and engage them to increase sales. Targeting potential buyers based on their demographics, interests, or any other attribute is difficult, but ads provide a clear solution.

Social media marketing helps you understand the cost per lead by creating conversion metrics such as website visits, purchases, sign up, and more.

Test your ads

By using the data that social media or social media analytics tools have to offer, you will be able to see what works (or doesn’t), what call to action and messaging have a higher engagement rate, and learn how to improve your customer persona.

Optimize your eCommerce website

Driving traffic to your website could be a good first step, but you also need to make the customer journey convenient and user-friendly. One way to do so is to make sure your website is optimized for social media traffic.

As most people use social media on their phones, it is vital that your website is mobile-friendly. If your website is slow to load, has design problems, and is not optimized for mobile use, your traffic will probably not turn into conversions.

One other solution is to create landing pages that would navigate users directly from your social media profile or ads rather than having to go through the website. 

But having an optimized website and landing pages isn’t the only solution, another one is mobile and social commerce.

Social and mobile commerce

Mobile commerce has been on a tear in the last year with a whopping 169% increase in sales, and it’s not slowing down any time soon. Mobile apps had a 157% conversion rate than mobile web browsers.

Another way is to start directly selling through social media using the features that social media platforms offer, such as Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, or WeChat.

Promote your eCommerce customer experience

Having an optimized website, ads, and marketplace are all essential parts of a successful social media marketing strategy and are essential to driving traffic. However, the human essence is still essential to retain customers, drive traffic, and gain popularity. There are various ways to do so. Here are three:

Publish regularly

People want to get updates but not spam, so make sure that you are always publishing but not spamming your audience. To do so, look at your social media data such as time to post, channels, type of posts, and how they convert. Based on that, build a social media calendar with pre-scheduled posts that allows the customers to stay up-to-date with your eCommerce business.

Engage with your customers

Humans are social beings and enjoy being appreciated, so make sure you show that. Talk about your customer experience, reply to comments, check your customer reviews on various channels, and maybe hold social media contests for your followers to interact and share your profile with others.

Optimize your offline customer experience to drive traffic back to your eCommerce site

Having an optimized online experience and interacting with them is great for your customers, but to be able to retain your strong social media presence and traffic, you need to ensure your offline experience too. 

For most eCommerce businesses, the last-mile delivery is the only physical interaction with your customers, so having a reliable last-mile partner will heavily complement and influence your customer retention rate. 

6 out of 10 customers will buy more often from a company that offers fast and reliable delivery options, while 8 out of 10 say sustainability is vital when choosing their preferred method. So make sure to choose the right last-mile partner that boosts your customer experience

Packaly is a completely CO2-neutral last-mile delivery provider that offers express, same-day, and next-day delivery to your customers. Some of the added features that Packaly offers with our last-mile delivery service are:

• 100% CO2-neutral and fully sustainable

• Delivery Dashboard, Integrations, and API

• Track and trace feature

• Delivery at the neighbor option

• Fixed pricing model, no hidden costs, clear and simple

• 7 days a week operations

• Our age verification if your product requires it

• Damage and loss insurance

• Professional bike fleet that ensures proper communication with your customers

• Live support team 7 days a week with an average response time of 1 minute

• Delivery verification through a uniquely generated code

So, start reaching your customers with Packaly’s sustainable on-demand and scheduled last-mile delivery and give them the last-mile experience they deserve.