Must-Know Tips to Double Shopify Sales 2021
By LitExtension
Introduction
Greetings to readers!
Up until now, we have seen around 15 years of operations for Shopify — an eCommerce solution that allows anyone to easily sell products online. However, have you encountered fewer orders sold or even no sales on Shopify over the past months?
Recently, the global eCommerce market has become a bigger piece of pie. Adobe reported that it can hit over $4 trillion during 2021. Covid-19 also brought out the significance of eCommerce, setting off the search for digital shopping solutions among customers.
As is known, increasing sales is one major goal for every owner. The more competitive the market is, the tougher the challenge to get more orders. For that reason, we will provide an overview of Shopify and our top-recommended Shopify tips and tricks which can help you along the way.
In case you’re selling somewhere else and plan on moving to Shopify, our team is always here to support you.
Shopify in Brief
About Shopify
Shopify is a hosted eCommerce solution that helps you create an online store without causing any concerns about highly technical work. It is a versatile platform with a full suite of services. So even with no online selling experience, you can still build a complete store with Shopify’s built-in features and needed apps.
Shopify also offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card requirements so you can try building your new store right away. You can also dive deeper into Shopify pricing for better budget planning when it comes to officially set up and managing your store.
If you’re moving to Shopify, for instance, from Magento to Shopify or BigCommerce to Shopify, have all your data transferred with our migration platform. It saves you the most time and effort to safely complete the data migration from your old store to Shopify.
Why Shopify?
Though there are numerous eCommerce platforms for owners to choose from, Shopify still remains in the top three. This in-depth review on Shopify will help you to understand its key elements, and here are the top five reasons:
- Easy to use: compared to open solutions (i.e. WooCommerce and Magento), Shopify does not require coding ability to build stores. This is exceptionally a good start for beginners.
- Powerful app store: a treasure that enables you to customize and manage the store with +5000 apps and features (advertising, payments, customer relationship, etc.).
- Supportive customer service: Shopify is available 24/7 via phone, email, or web chat to solve your issues. You can also join community forums to network with other store owners, developers, and customers.
- Fast loading speed: Shopify offers a content delivery network (CDN) that helps stores to load faster and enhance customer experience. Furthermore, Shopify themes are optimized to be globally responsive across devices. This enables customers to access your store from anywhere, say a smartphone, a tablet, or personal laptops.
- Effective marketing tools: Shopify offers affordable marketing tools such as email marketing, product reviews, and loyalty programs. You can integrate them with social media channels and find it easier to market the business.
9 Must-Know Tips to Double Shopify Sales 2021
Create email marketing campaigns
Why you must know:
Email marketing is among the profit-driven Shopify tips during Covid-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, email marketing ROI was reported to be $42 for each dollar spent, and that ratio makes your business more valuable. There are also no print or postage charges included, no headcounts, and high technology required.
You also can make the most of this time in online shopping by elevating your eCommerce promotion activities via email channels. Emails enable brands (i.e. Deliveroo Plus) to quickly and easily communicate the right message in a non-invasive manner. You can either send offers, recommendations, or reminders through emails, but only in a limited number per time period.
To implement:
Choose from many email marketing apps for Shopify and customize your own branding email templates. You can go to Shopify App Store and search for the keyword “email marketing”. Shopify Email is a good example with tons of customizable templates and up to 2500 emails per month for free. Most importantly, do not forget to draw up an email marketing strategy beforehand to implement an effective campaign later!
Build a loyalty and reward program
Why you must know:
In the digital world, customers experience the ease of information access, resulting in fierce eCommerce competition. To put an example, a customer can open both your Shopify store site and your competitor’s at the same time. Thereby, building a strong connection with customers through a loyalty program will urge them to choose your brand over the other.
The loyalty program offers rewards to customers who complete several desired activities for the brand. Rewards can be discounts and free shipping codes, or user points saved for the next purchases. The two best loyalty program practices refer to Starbucks and Sephora that have gained a huge amount of profit for years. Therefore, the program will help you grow your Shopify sales and foster the customer-brand relationship.
To implement:
You can choose from many loyalty and rewards apps for Shopify such as Smile: Rewards & Loyalty or Gift Cards & Loyalty Program. Go to Shopify App Store, look for “loyalty and rewards” in the store, and choose what is best for your brand.
Add social proof in product reviews
Why you must know:
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon. It is a concept coined in 1984 by Robert Cialdini in the book Influence. The term basically explains: if many customers say your product is good, the new one tends to think it is good. In marketing, social proof appears in the form of reviews, current customers or partners, media coverage, and more.
Trustpilot reported that almost 90% of customers read product reviews before making purchases. As a result, online businesses try very hard to get customer reviews after purchases. Therefore, it is definitely worth keeping the human touch in a digital environment to build trust with your customers!
To implement:
To implement:
This technique is often executed by developers because it requires some technical skills to initiate the interactive functions. Nonetheless, it is worth taking your product display to a different level compared to other stores.
Fortunately, Shopify offers relevant apps! Go to Shopify App Store, type “360” or “product spinner” on the bar search and choose the most favorable one.
Design astounding CTA (Call-to-action)
Why you must know:
Several initial steps when completing a Shopify store include applying the core theme, page navigation, product displays, etc. After that, the next challenge is how you persuade visitors to do something — the desired action, on the page. Call-to-action (CTA) items are the right solution at this stage.
CTAs appear in different forms from text boxes, to images and buttons. A call-to-action can also be anywhere: at the top of a page, sprinkled all over the page, or at its bottom. A good example of a CTA display is Joy’s webpage. The CTA button is right at the top of the homepage and colored with purple which is a vibrant color placed on the background image.
When you scroll down on the page, the purple CTA disappears, however, replaced by a different colored CTA with the same call-to-action text.
To implement:
You can create CTA buttons with the instructions from the Shopify Partners page. Otherwise, you can check out Shopify App Store and search for supported apps with the keyword “CTA”. Make sure you use this recommended checklist to optimize all CTA items:
- Well-designed shape: to grab customers’ attention with the right color and shape
- Strong visibility: to display the item on a noticeable area on the page
- Straightforward benefit: to get customers to click on with clear benefits offered
- Actionable text: to use words that trigger customers’ actions like “discover now” and “learn more”
- Short and urgent message: to get rid of distraction and have customers read in a quicker manner
Engage social media channels
Why you must know:
Social media channels and eCommerce are seen as a perfect match. As an online store owner, you can connect with customers via social media because social usage is continuously increasing. In 2021, We Are Social reported approximately 45% of users using social media to find brand-related information.
As an interactive channel, social media enables users to co-create and share their content publicly in an efficient way. With access to the internet, everyone can sign up for social media accounts. Users can share any content, and each of the posts can potentially reach at least one online customer.
To implement:
Shopify now allows store owners to sync stores with Facebook and Instagram — a potential path to rocket your Shopify sales this year. HubSpot reported that both social media channels are in the top four most popular platforms in 2021. To be more specific, Facebook, with over 2.8 billion monthly users (Statista’s report), is an ideal destination to start with. You can create a new Facebook Shop and follow our detailed guidelines on how to carefully connect it with your Shopify store!
It would be a pity if we don’t mention Reflections in Metal — a metal art company built on Shopify when mentioning the integration of online business and social media. As you can see, the engagement with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gives this company a chance to reach more potential customers on these social channels.
Optimize on-page and off-page SEO
Why you must know:
Improving the Google search ranking of your store site will increase the possibility of getting more orders. Plus, it limits the case of having no sales on Shopify during the Covid-19 pandemic. A constructive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy will certainly help your store to grow more traffic during hard times.
Accordingly, two SEO buckets are, relatively: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO consists of all out-of-website work to improve your site rankings. Google takes various off-page elements, including links quality, to rank websites. Most of the off-page work is links building, however, there is more beyond it. Off-page tasks can be:
- Growing the number of referring domains
- Checking the linking page authority and relevance
- Considering “nofollow” or “dofollow” links, or traffic of linking pages
On-page SEO includes the optimization process of website-related elements such as visible content and HTML source code. Google looks at your site’s different content edges to check if it’s relevant to the search query. A few popular tactics to optimize your content are:
- Including keywords in the titles and sub-keywords throughout the content
- Optimizing the title tag, meta description, and images
- Adding internal and external links
To implement:
It will take you much time and effort to build an effective off-page SEO ecosystem. Spend time studying and updating Google’s Ranking Algorithm to receive the best result. You can follow important off-page techniques from popular digital tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Yoast.
Moreover, you can take a look at many third-party SEO apps on Shopify such as SEO Suite or SEO Doctor, which will support your on-page SEO optimization. Go to Shopify App Store, look up “SEO” and choose one that fits best with your current store.
Display upselling offers
Why you must know:
Another trick for your Shopify store is upselling. It is a technique that encourages customers to buy more expensive, but relevant, items than the ones they choose. A study reported a 27% chance of the first-time buyer coming back, and it goes up to 54% after his second time. That’s why upselling is definitely a cost-effective solution to boost your lifetime value.
Shopify allows developers to deliver upsells on the post-purchase page, enabling store owners to upsell customers who finish their orders. Meanwhile, pre-purchase upsells occur before a customer completes an order. Consequently, post-purchase upsells do not risk the conversion of first orders. So normally they are more preferable than pre-purchase ones.
Deliveroo and Tesla are examples of displaying upsells. They simply offer more selections before customers finish the checkout.
To implement:
The additional offers should be something that customers would like. It will not be effective if you only think about money-making and offer irrelevant products. Therefore, start doing detailed research on your customers and adjust offers accordingly.
There are various Shopify apps (i.e. ReConvert for post-purchase and Bold Upsell for pre-purchase) that support the implementation of upselling. Otherwise, you can go to Shopify App Store, search for “upsell” and choose ones that fit best with your store.
Final thoughts
Before applying the above Shopify tips, with your colleagues, make sure to reflect back on your current store and decide which technique is best to go for. You can join our eCommerce community to acquire more practical suggestions on your online store. If you’re planning on migrating to Shopify, have a visit to our migration platform to experience the most time- and cost-effective solution.
The rest of 2021 still awaits. Take a leap and recharge sales possibilities. Our recommended Shopify tips may appear to be low-hanging fruits. However, don’t forget to focus on the ones that are most beneficial to your store. Wish you luck along the way!
