All the fastest ways to drive FREE traffic to Shopify store

If you have an eCommerce store on Shopify, you should always manage to drive free traffic to your Shopify store.

The one and only opportunity gap between Shopify’s business success and failure is the traffic. In addition, research shows that 92% of social commerce businesses especially the small and young ones really consider social traffic as the biggest concern when they first establish Shopify stores. 

How does social traffic matter in businesses?

As we’re all aware of the explosion of social commerce in recent years especially in 2020 when the Coronavirus shut the world down and forced shoppers around the world to stay at home. Since then, over half of the world’s consumer population prefers shopping online, and that is a real big boost to social commerce. 

Until now, social commerce has been gaining 23% of growth each year, and even better it is forecasted to reach $2.4 billion of revenue at the end of 2020. Obviously, social commerce’s pace is unstoppable, and it is opening new business opportunities for online sellers on Shopify as well as many other eCommerce platforms. 

Even the future of social commerce is promising, but most new social sellers including Shopify merchants have to struggle to survive in a vast ocean of competitors regardless of the all-time challenges along the way.

Eventually, 90% of new social commerce businesses end up in failure within only 120 days. It’s a really harsh reality compared to the skeptical vision of success most people usually have when they think of social commerce and its benefits. 

First thing first, Shopify entrepreneurs, as well as others, need to ‘survive’ long enough to make profits and be able to scale up their business first before they can think of any further future. 

Social traffic will include free and paid traffic. Before you have to spend a bunch of money to do marketing, run advertisements on social media, or else, you should probably try your best to leverage all the available resources of traffic first. Accordingly, we are going to blow up your mind with ‘all the fastest ways to drive free traffic to your Shopify store’.

Where does free traffic come from?

Before we jump right into the tips to acquire free traffic, we would like you to know where you can find it first. Since using social platforms has become an inseparable part of modern lifestyle, each and every familiar social platform has an enormous amount of users, and they are exactly the free traffic resources we are aiming at. 

To look at the statistics from Yotpo, Shopify merchants will find out multiple sources of available free traffic which is broken down into different categories. 

As you can see, 40% of free traffic comes from direct audiences who are interested in your brand or your product types. While 34% of free traffic can be led to your Shopify store by searching since the audiences already have demands. 

These two free traffic sources are usually organic and can be acquired without much effort. Nonetheless, you should take advantage of them to convert every shop visitor into buyers, don’t be too overconfident or inattentive. 

The next 10% of free traffic comes from referrals. Once your customers are happy with the products or service, they tend to leave positive reviews and recommend your Shopify brand to other people. 

This activity can take place on social via chat, posts, stories, or in person. It will encourage more audiences to search for your Shopify store and products no matter which ways. 

More importantly, the customers you gain through a referral have a lifetime value of 25% higher than normal customers. 

Social traffic is the easiest source as well as the most friendly way to drive free traffic. 

According to Yotpot’s metrics, Shopify merchants can approach 6% of free traffic through social media. The giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are available with a huge number of active users across the globe. 

Do not underrate 6% of free traffic on social if you really want to drive some of over 2.7 billion active users from Facebook, more than 1 billion Instagramers, 145 million Twitter users, and even more.

Last but not least, 3% of free traffic can be driven via marketing emails. Even a lot of people find marketing emails annoying, and the open-rate is not considerable, but it is better than you do nothing. 

Be patient and persistent in email marketing to drive as much free traffic as possible cause you know what they said: “Many a little makes a mickle”.

To be honest, many or even all of you are already aware of these traffic sources; however, not every Shopify merchant really acquires the full potential of them, or at least they do not know-how. 

Therefore, it is time for Shopify merchants to do what they have missed with ‘all the fastest ways to drive free traffic to your Shopify store’.

Showcase your brand identity on social

A survey conducted in 2015 shows that 74% of businesses involving social media platforms consider online brand profiles very important. 

In time, brand profiles also known as brand identity are switching from nice-to-have to must-have due to their great impact on brand value and customers. 

When you first establish your channels on social media platforms, you have to fill out your profile first. 

All the need-to-be-published information must go on social media so that your audiences know who you are and where they are able to find your store. 

Shopify merchants should add all the required information by the platforms’ requirements, and do not forget to list down your social media channels such as websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. 

By channelizing traffic from one social platform to another, you acquire the free traffic source from social efficiently. More than that, a social commerce brand with multiple social channels as well as a transparent and professional identity will be easier to build customer trust and loyalty. 

As you can see, this very simple and oblivious thing really matters a lot in driving free traffic, and not so many Shopify merchants especially newbies take it seriously. Stop being carefree when creating your profiles on any social media platform. 

The more detailed and professional you are, the more potential free traffic you can drive to your Shopify store. Remember if you want the audiences to visit your Shopify store, show them the ways.

Build and optimize content to drive huge traffic to your Shopify shop

‘Content is king’ – Bill Gates (1996).

It sounds like a skeptical theory about the benefits of content, but we all heard the world billionaire – Bill Gates talked about how important content is to all kinds of businesses. 

One of the most successful businessmen in the world has emphasized the influence of content on business since 1996. It still stays the same until today. 

Yes, content is exactly one of the fastest ways to drive free traffic to your Shopify store.

 In the modern business world, selling is not only about convincing customers to buy, but it should be more than. 

Building content is how you are engaging with your audience. Let’s make it clear that there are two types of traffic that will browse into your Shopify store. 

One is the audience with demands, which means you are selling the products they need. The second type is audiences who are looking for information. 

They have some concerns and questions about some specific fields, and they are on the way to find the answers. 

Fortunately, you have the answers in your content such as blogs, social media posts, infographics, or else. Then the audiences find themselves in your Shopify store and pages. If your content is good and useful enough, it can immediately convert those browsers into buyers.

In brief, Shopify merchants should build various types of content on their social channels and websites to drive the searching audiences to your brand willingly. 

In addition, once you have good content, you need to promote it to readers by doing SEO and content marketing. 

Putting hashtags in your content or social posts is also a very good way to let audiences discover your brand. As long as you constantly create good content, you make audiences keep coming back for more and more.

Embed social proof across multiple platforms to increase Shopify traffic for free

The next fast and simple way to drive free traffic is to embed social proof across multiple platforms. This is an easy but effective method that most Shopify merchants do not pay attention to or even ignore it. 

By showcasing social proof especially the user-generated content such as reviews and product images by customers, Shopify merchants not only nurture brand trust and customer loyalty but also channelize the traffic to multiple social media platforms. 

Let’s take an example. You have a beautiful Instagram feed with amazing images, and you are determined to display it on your website. 

By doing that, you can grab audience attention and direct over 50% of web browsers into your Instagram channel. 

It’s called ‘Omnichannel Traffic’. Shopify merchants can do the same thing for other social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, etc). 

This is a way to ‘kill two birds with one stone’ when you can drive free traffic to your Shopify store and build brand trust at the same time. 

‘Sow your brand seeds’ on social communities for massive free traffic to your Shopify shop

According to Wikipedia, “seeding is the process of allocating marketing to specific customers, or groups of customers, in order to stimulate the internal dynamics of the market, and enhance the diffusion process”.

Seeding is a very effective natural method to drive free traffic to your website or Shopify stores; however, it needs some time and a lot of effort to take effect. Seeding not only helps you drive organic traffic but also can strengthen your brand values and recognition on social media. 

More importantly, seeding is a free marketing strategy for driving free traffic. All you need to invest is your time, effort, and patience.

A question remains “How to do seeding to drive more traffic to your Shopify store?”. Do not worry, we are going to guide you through this process. First of all, Shopify merchants need to identify their product types and fields. 

This helps you locate which communities you should seed among a lot of communities and forums on social media. Once you select the “good spot to sow your seed”, the next important step is creating seeding content. It can be a query or an answer related to the main concern of the communities. 

For instance, if you are joining a group about yoga, you can ask ‘what are the benefits of doing yoga?’ or “Does yoga help you lose weight?’. 

By doing this, you are creating a debate and interaction between people who share the same concern. If your seeding content is good enough, it will lead the audiences to your websites or social platforms willingly. 

Seeding content can be either direct marketing or indirect marketing; however, you should create natural seeding content in order to impress and convince audiences easier. 

A typical seeding content must meet two demands – SEO & brand prominence. Make sure that you optimize your seeding content on search engines, and your brand or product must be reachable. Last but not least, it is fundamental to emphasize that Shopify merchants need to be patient when doing seeding. 

Final thoughts.

In conclusion, we have gone through the fastest ways to drive free traffic to your Shopify store:

• Complete profile and information on social media.
• Build & optimize content.
• Embed social proof across multiple platforms.
• Do seeding on social communities.

These tips are the fastest ways to magnetize more free traffic to your Shopify store as well as social pages. 

All Shopify merchants especially the newbies should leverage these available resources of free traffic to benefit their social commerce businesses. After that,  you attract extra traffic by paid methods. Wish you luck, and happy selling!