Using Instagram influencers to promote your dropshipping products is a great alternative to Facebook ads. In most cases, it will get you cheaper clicks for your money and results can be much better if you use the right Influencer. But Influencer marketing isn’t a magic solution to your problems and you still won’t get any sales if your store isn’t optimized for conversions.
Fortunately for you, I have prepared this guide to help you optimize your stores for Influencer traffic so that you can get the maximum results possible.
Enjoy 🙂
Influencer Marketing Isn’t Magic – You Can Still Fail If You Don’t Do A Good Research
Before I dive into details on how to optimize your online store for traffic coming from Influencers, you first need to understand that this isn’t a magical 100% working method. You’ve probably seen some videos on Youtube where dropshippers pay Influencers for product promotion, wait a day or two for results, and get back to the video with enough sales to cover what they paid and even more.
It sounds and looks really easy but in reality it doesn’t always work that way…
If you jump on the first Influencer you find on Instagram, you may find yourself getting junk traffic or even no traffic at all. Sometimes the results will be so bad that you wished you spent this money on Facebook ads instead.
Don’t let them tempt you with their low promo prices on their high follower pages – A page with 50k likes but with good engagement and real followers will do MUCH better than a page with 400k fake likes and bad engagement.
So before paying an influencer for a promotion, make sure to check out our article on how to successfully promote products using Instagram Influencers. It’s an older article but still relevant to this day ?
This article will show you how to avoid scammy Influencers and the “Beehive” bot pages, how to get a better promo deal, how to check for engagement, a few small tips regarding your stores, and more.
Install Hotjar – A Must Have If You Use Influencers
Hotjar is a must have tool you need to have installed on your online store. It will show you what the visitors are doing on your store which will help you identify what product works and what doesn’t.
If you have a general or a niche store, you will have a hard time figuring out what product draws the most attention, where your visitors stop from scrolling, to what point of your site they get to before exiting, and more.
So instead of guessing, you should just use Hotjar to know the exact behavior of your customers.
For example:
Heatmaps will show you where your customers click the most, the main focus areas on your store, to where they scrolled, and more data which should give you plenty to work with in order to improve your store.
It could be a product that gets so much attention that it needs its own banner, or maybe a collection located in the lowest part of your store. Figuring these stuff will help you get more from the Influencer traffic you’re driving to your store.
The good part about this is that you don’t have to pay a dime and the basic free plan is more than enough!
Later, when you start getting sales and more traffic, then you can upgrade to the Plus one but for beginners the free versions is just great. You have recordings, heatmaps, 2k pageviews a day, and more stuff you can play with.
Pro tip:
Check your recordings everyday and once you reach 300, delete the old ones to start recording again.
Important:
Hotjar is a great tool to have for any store out there to identify potential bugs and errors. It can be a button that doesn’t work or a broken cart page where your customers have to scroll way too much to find the Checkout button.
Stuff like that can significantly lower your store’s conversion rate so fixing them in time will save you a lot of money!
Is It Better To Have A General Store, Niche Store, Or A One-Product Store When Using Influencers To Drive Traffic?
Next is probably one of the most asked questions when using Influencer marketing and it’s what type of store works the best. Based on my experience and the experience of others, a one-product store that sells in a certain niche is probably the best choice.
If it’s a good product with a real demand in the market, then you can’t really go wrong here. All you have to do is to find a bunch of Influencers related to your product’s niche and test it out. The traffic will see only one product so you can’t really go wrong here.
Second best is a Niche store where all your products are connected to one niche. In this case, you should know what sells the best before you pay for a promotion. Your visitors need to see the best products first if you want to make any sales.
If you don’t have any data on what sells best, then you should conduct a thorough research before driving any traffic.
The worst option is probably a general store where there’s no real connection between the products you sell. In most cases, it’s just a bunch of best sellers and you will have to drive traffic from various Influencers if you want to get sales.
Like I said, even finding the right Influencer will be a problem so I really don’t recommend promoting a general store when using Influencers.
Note:
You’ve probably seen MEME pages promoting “general” stores thinking these are the best Influencers to promote general product stores. But if you look closely, you’ll see that these general stores aren’t that general, and mostly revolve around Anime and Gaming, which is the base audience that follow these MEME pages.
So don’t be tempted to work with these MEME pages thinking you can sell whatever you want.
Optimize Your One-Product Store For Influencer Traffic
One of the best options is to go with a one-product store and to find the relevant Influencers with the right audience for that one product you’re selling. In order to get the maximum out of your promotion, you have to optimize your store for the incoming traffic.
So before paying for a promotion, here’s how you should optimize your store:
1. Forward people straight to the cart page when clicking the Add to Cart button on your product page – This is probably one of the most common mistakes out there and it’s just leaving your customer on the same page after clicking on the cart page.
If you’re using a free theme, which is great to start with your one-product store, by default the settings are set to just a notification instead of actually transferring your customer. Leaving this as it is is going to prolong the buying process and can make your customers a bit confused.
It’s really simple to set it up the way we want to and all you’ll have to do is to uncheck the cart notification option in your theme settings. You can read all about it in our Ultimate hacks for dropshippers guide where I show you how to disable the Add to Cart notification.
2. Design your front page the right way – This is a bit general but the front page of a one-product store needs to be like a closed loop. No matter what you do or what you click, you’ll be transferred to the product page.
Clickable banner, Buy now link in the main menu, Gifs with buttons on them, product preview on the main page, and more tweaks so that your customers doesn’t have to scroll too much to find a Buy Now button.
Luckily for you, we have probably one of the best ways to teach you how to build the perfect one-product dropshipping store – It’s a 3 part video that shows you exactly how to create a fully optimized one-product store and all the tweaks we’re done to make it actually work.
Mordechai Arba, the CEO of Ecomhunt, is the one who’s going to guide you through. The whole process is recorded which means you will get to see the original video ad he created, the additional tweaks he made, and the actual sales the product made using Facebook ads.
3. Create a special discount for your Influencer visitors – If you’re looking for ways to convert the traffic better, then a special discount code for your new visitors is a good option to start with. You can use a special discount code and include the name of the Influencer in it or just welcome the new visitors with a cute banner.
For example:
- If you’re Influencer is a cat celebrity page named “Fluff The Fat Cat”, then you can make a special 10% discount code looks like this: “Fluff10”. Ask the Influencer to write the code in the original promo post and advertise it also on your store.
- Create a special banner with a neat design welcoming the visitors coming from a specific Influencer page. Something as simple as a banner with a “Welcome Fluff The Fat Cat fans! Enjoy a special 10% discount on our kitty chewing toy by using the code Fluff10.” text is enough.
4. Lower your base prices – Unlike with Facebook, Influencer traffic is in most cases cheaper but you can never know the quality until you test it. With Facebook ads, especially when your pixel has enough data, you can be sure Facebook is looking for buyers. With Influencer marketing, your traffic won’t be of the same quality for sure but at least there will be much more traffic than what you get with FB.
So to maximize your chances of getting sales, you should consider lowering your base prices. You’re testing the waters so if you can eliminate the price barrier, you will know if your promotion is good enough to get sales. If you barely get any sales with low prices, you may have issues with the shipping, ad, store, or even the product(that depends where you get it from).
5. Offer multiple payment options – You can never know what payment option the fans of the Influencer you use prefer, so make sure you can accept PayPal and CC at least. If you don’t have that option, make it as clear as possible on how you accept payments and mention workarounds if such exist.
For example(If you have only PayPal): You can pay with a credit card on PayPal without having an actual account with them. Letting people know about this and guiding them with pictures should help you get more sales from people who only have credit cards. You can add some screenshots of the guest checkout page on your product page and even writing a few words on the payment page about it.
If you want to take it to the next level and understand exactly how we build our stores, create our campaigns, and run our ads then check out our Ecomhunt masterclass course. You’ll get access to 70 video lessons which will take you from a beginner to a complete pro! (with some cool bonuses too)
Optimize Your Niche Store For Influencer Traffic
Niche store optimization is similar to a one-product one but it requires more research and probably more spending. Unlike a one-product store, niche store has multiple products so the most important part is to decide what product gets the spotlight.
It’s almost the same as browsing Youtube: You’re getting the results based on your interests and the content creators are competing for your click with shiny thumbnails. Now translate the Youtube experience into a niche store and you have a winning formula!
In our case, we have to catch our visitor’s attention with a shiny winning product and convert him as fast as possible into a paying customer. Here’s how we do it:
1. Show your winners first – Play it safe by showing your visitors the best sellers based on your analytics or Ecomhunt analytics. If you don’t have any info about what sells best, take the best sellers on Ecomhunt and check which one of the products is trending the most by using Ecomhunt LIVE. If a winning product in your niche is also trending on Ecomhunt LIVE, you should display it first.
2. Upgrade your product pictures – Make your best sellers look more appealing on your front page. Look for HQ pictures, put a border around them, add some promo text, basically anything that will attract more attention. Consider Fiverr GIGs if you have trouble upgrading your pictures.
3. Organize your store – Create categories and make the navigation easy to understand. Customers can get easily lost if your store isn’t organized and doesn’t have the categories people are looking for. Your best seller can be a doggy chewing toy but maybe the customer who’s about to spend his money is looking for a cute dog bed. If you don’t have a “Pet Bed” category, then you’re about to lose a sale.
4. Have at least one product for each popular category – The best way to do that is by checking for popular categories in your niche on Amazon and other websites and adding them to your store. Then look for products in that category on Ecomhunt and import them to your store.
5. Don’t be lazy about descriptions – You can never know which product will sell next so don’t half-ass your product descriptions on the less popular products. Create a normal, full description for each product on your store. It may take time but at lease you won’t lose sales because of that.
6. Prepare an email marketing strategy – You should prepare all the base emails every store should have to squeeze even more from your new customers. Welcome email to those who signup to your newsletter, Thank you emails to those who buy(add a special discount for the next purchase), regular weekly emails where you push more products, and more.
You can easily do it with Mailchimp or you can use a Shopify app like Abandonment Protector to do it automatically for you + get some of your lost sales back. This Shopify app has ready templates you can use to create stunning emails to be automatically sent out to your email subscribers. Requires absolutely ZERO knowledge and you will have some basic email marketing setup and ready to get you more sales.
7. Increase your AOV with bundles and upsells – You have multiple products on your store so why not test a bundle to increase your Average Order Value. There are plenty of apps on Shopify that can create a bundle for you in a few clicks so test it out and see if people pick it up.
I personally prefer to run it first as it is without any bundles or upsells just to see how the product converts. If it goes well, then I can test an upsell or create a bundle to see if it gets me more or slows down my sales.
Important:
Bundles and Upsells can slow down the purchase process because the customer is going to check the second product you offer. I recommend adding products without too many options so the process is faster.
For example:
If you’re selling a dog pet bed, then a deluxe chewing toy with only one color option is a good choice. It’s cheap and self explainable so some customers won’t even bother checking the details on that product. Instead, if you offer dog snacks then the customers will have to check the product details which will make the purchase process much slower.
Optimize Your General Store For Influencer Traffic
I really don’t recommend starting out with a general store but if you insist, you need to know that it’s a combination of both one-product store + niche store optimizations. You’ll have to upgrade your main page product pictures, put your best sellers first, and prepare some kind of welcome promo code or banner.
The difference this time is that your products are completely random which makes it much harder to get the right audience for you. No matter how good the product is, if you bring the wrong people it will not be sold… Get ready to spend big amounts of money on promotions just to see what works and what doesn’t.
The only way I see this working is if you’re the actual owner of the Influencer page, which gives you infinite amounts of promotions to figure out what products work best.
To Sum It Up
Influencer marketing is a great alternative to Facebook ads and with the right Influencer + audience, you can get much better results. But before that, you have to make sure you’re all set up and ready to make the maximum from the traffic you’re about to receive.
Don’t forget to check out our Instagram Influencer guide on Youtube to make sure you get the best deals and don’t fall on fake bot accounts:
Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?
Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!
Must Read Articles:
- Ecomhunt Dropshipping Podcast Season 1: Dropshipping Expert Peter Pru Shares Rarely Used Methods To Increase Sales!
- Ecomhunt’s Trending Product Suggestion – Sell This Toddler Fluffy Sleeping Bag + Store & Ad Review, Targeting Suggestions, And More
- 4 Things You’re Doing Wrong When Dropshipping
Daniel Aloni is one of the leading mentors in the Ecomhunt family. Daniel is a highly experienced Print On Demand seller with multiple 6 figures successful launches.
