Chloe Thomas’ latest book, How to get traffic that buys to your website, addresses the struggle people have with driving traffic that buys to their website.
Chloë Thomas is a globally recognised eCommerce marketing problem solver. Author of several bestselling books, keynote speaker, advisor, and host of the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. She helps her clients maximise their marketing performance.
Formula for eCommerce Success
The book, How to get traffic that buys to your website, is based on the formula: Traffic x average order value x conversion rate = sales
If you want to increase your sales, you have to improve your traffic, your average order value or your conversion rate. These are the only three ways you can do it.
Traffic is the most powerful of the three components because it affects both the AOV and the conversion rate. There is only so far you can push an average order value and conversion rate but there are endless ways in which you can push traffic. However, driving a lot of traffic is far from enough. It has to be driving the right traffic. The traffic that actually wants to buy.
Traffic Optimisation is the most important skill for eCommerce growth
Traffic optimisation is critical to ensure that the money and time you are spending on driving traffic to your website is traffic that is buying.
The process of optimisation is looking at each source from which your traffic is stemming from and constantly tweaking it to make it better. In essence you want to bring more traffic that buys for less cost to your business.
To be successful in eCommerce you have to, at the very least, understand optimisation as a skill set. If you’re making decisions on how money and time are spent in your business you need to understand the skill sets you will need in the people that you employ.
Three core marketing methods
People tend to ignore SEO because it is more of a slow burn and it can take months for results to show. Instead they focus on ads or emails that will bring immediate results.
There are three parts to SEO
Be relevant and get the right keywords in the right places on your website
Be in the index by allowing google into your site so that it knows you exist
Be important by constantly building links to your website
In essence, SEO is of value to your business if it is going to drive traffic that buys to your website.
For those who want to start doing SEO, the good news is that the SEO community is very good at sharing and updating each other. In doing so they offer a whole host of free information online. Here’s a few pointers to get you started:
Google search console is a must for anyone wanting to start doing SEO. This is where you submit your sitemap to be in the index. Consider it also your way of talking to Google about what’s happening on your website. Google search console gives you stats which can be integrated into your google analytics for more stats.
Moz.com are geniuses in the space of SEO. They have some really nice free tools that you can use to check things like domain authority, which is an estimation of how important Google thinks another website is.
SEM Rush has a suite of really useful tools that will check rankings.
Search engine advertising tends to deliver faster results than SEO.
Once you know your profit target (this usually comes down to your return on advertising spend (ROAS) or your cost per acquisition (CPA) the two main numbers for businesses to focus on are: money spent and money earned.
To get the most out of Google ads, whether you're doing Google shopping campaigns or you're doing keyword advertising, the more focused you can make your activity, the better it generally performs.
It’s best to start small and then use the data to build out.