Is your website not getting enough traffic? Are you not meeting your sales quota as a result? Do you need to reach out to more customers? If you answered yes to these questions, then you should take your digital marketing efforts to the next level. Here are three ways to increase website traffic:

Increase Website traffic strategy 1: Content marketing

With content marketing, you can have countless of ways to address a core problem or issue that your business, product, or service can solve. Content marketing includes the distribution of articles, blog posts, ebooks, case studies, infographics, case studies, and audio/video presentations.

How effective is this strategy? Studies have shown that it can generate thrice as many leads as outbound marketing. However, it is also up to 60 percent cheaper.

The key in content marketing is to add value to anything you are distributing.  As content marketing expert Jim Yu puts it, you should present the right content to your target market in an engaging manner.

Increase Website traffic strategy 2: Influencer marketing

In influencer marketing, you will be tapping key leaders to help in driving your message to a larger market. Influencers are people who can help your brand get its message across to a target audience.

This strategy has been proven effective by over 80 percent of marketers who’ve tried it. Moreover, customers who were acquired through this method were retained up to 37% percent higher compared to those acquired through other strategies.

Increase Website traffic strategy 3: Online advertising

To be more specific, this strategy will determine the geolocation of a website visitor and then deliver content based on the location.
Using geo-targeting for online advertising has been proven effective in increasing engagement and conversion rates of marketing campaigns.

Through this method, you can offer incentives, target messages, share marketing messages or customize languages depending on the geographical location of the customer.

Imagine this: you’ve made progress in your online marketing efforts. You have optimized your website for the search engines. You’ve written product descriptions and provided images. But you’re still not getting the results you want. Perhaps you’re not giving meta descriptions enough attention.

What are meta descriptions?

A meta description summarizes the content of a webpage. It is short, with a maximum of 320 characters in length. It is typically shown in the search results of search engines. It helps in enticing users to click a link. It is, without a doubt, critical in effective SEO.

Writing good meta descriptions

In writing a meta description, there are two questions you need to answer – what product or service are you offering, and why should the customer buy from you?

You should also highlight the unique selling proposition of your website. It’s best to be brazen about it because the meta description, especially in the home page of your website, is not a section for subtlety.

When writing a meta description, think of it as an elevator pitch. It should be short and direct to the point. Moreover, it must have all the important details that you would want your customer to learn. Be cautious in writing the description. If possible, write a couple of drafts before finalizing the meta description.

When to write meta descriptions?

Given the importance of a meta description, you may be tempted to go back and write descriptions for every single page in your website.
However, if your online store has hundreds of pages, writing meta descriptions can be very exhausting even for the most prolific copywriter.

One way to approach this is to list down your 10 most important pages and see if writing a description can help in improve the click-through rates.
Moving forward, you can then make it SOP to write a meta description once a new page of content is uploaded in your website.

The bottom line is that a good meta description can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts.

Email marketing is a vital part of any online marketing campaign.  But more than sending emails to as many customers as possible, you should put more weight on personalizing customer emails. Sending personalized emails are more likely to be read. And perhaps more importantly, it can provide the interpersonal connection that can lead to greater impact to the recipient.

Benefits of personalizing customer emails

Aside from personalized emails more likely to be read by the recipient, there are other benefits of sending customized emails.

Apart from what was mentioned earlier, sending customized emails increases the likelihood that the emails won’t be marked as spam. Emails with generic subjects such as “Dear Friend” are often classified as spam by recipients. But if an email has a subject line that mentions the recipient’s first name, then it won’t likely be deleted or mark as spam.

Sending personalized emails can also enhance trust between the recipient and the company sending the emails.

          Three ways of personalizing customer emails

So how do you personalize customer emails? Here are three simple ways to do so:

• Put more focus on the subject line.  According to one survey, emails that have personalized subject lines are up to 26 percent more likely to be read.  Consider using customized and ‘fun’ subject lines to catch the attention of the recipient.
• Celebrate milestones. Emails should be used as relationship-building tools.  Look into the possibility of sending emails not only to promote a product or service, but also to wish a recipient on the occasion of a birthday or anniversary.
• Offer recommendations. Finally, you can further strengthen your relationships with your customers by offering customized recommendations. These recommendations may be based on their recent buying history. For example, a customer which bought a dog collar from your site may need a dog feeder. Mention this in your email.

So you made a mistake. It’s alright it happens to us all. You thought you had memorized the whole URL perfectly. Or maybe the URL doesn’t exist? Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night you ended up on an Error 404: Page Not Found page. As a visitor to a website this page is always aggravating to find yourself on. As a web designer it is a necessary page to make.