Once upon a time, there were only a select few stores where you would have found yourself customized clothing or the latest pair of designer shoes. There was absolutely no pressure on keeping up with the trends to stay relevant. However, it’s not just the absence of influencers or social media that limited the number of online stores, it was rather the entry barrier of technology that business owners had to deal with to sell across digital platforms. Now that Shopify makes it all easy for anyone to get started on their own homegrown business, the competition for gaining attention digitally is harder than ever. Small businesses with their unique customer-centric product fall in direct lines of competition with international brands in terms of getting traffic and conversions. In fact, according to Smartinsights it was reported that the average visitor conversion rate, even for the top 100 online retailers is just 2.8 percent!
We know what you’re thinking. So much effort for such small numbers? But it doesn’t have to remain that way if you focus on things in the right way at the right timing. To begin with, as a small business owner you need to work on building a solid traffic lineup for conversions to come through in stable numbers, before growing multiple folds. Even when the low baseline theory holds true, you can find that the numbers come in slow and steady.
Not all of your users are going to flock in and buy your products straightaway unless it’s something extremely rare. With a deep-rooted strategy, you can drive more sales with time without blowing up your business with risky shortcuts. Here’s how:
1. Optimizing Your Store
How do you let your visitors know you exist? That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes in to help them out, every time they go looking for you online. A lot many now-successful brands like Good Earth started out on a low-profile themselves, but had an effective SEO strategy enforced for people to explore about them before they decide on buying from them (and eventually they did!). Be it Google AdWords to target directly to your audience and tap into their interests, or going for deep-rooted keyword research and amping their brand visibility online with crisp content. Some of the best ways in doing so that actually converts are:
- Catchy, insightful product titles
- Detailed, product description pointers
- Providing alt tags to images
- Any other relevant content
2. Churning Actionable Content
There’s so much more to content than product descriptions and alt tags. Don’t take too much time in producing highly technical blogs as you start out, rather focus more on keeping meaningful information paragraphs on each category page.
Credits: The Folklore Company
You can learn from the examples of brands like The Folklore Company, a popular customized clothing line in Sweden. Once you take a closer look at their page, you may notice that there are numerous keywords present through the content in the different category pages, including primary and secondary ones. In case you perform searches on Google regarding their products, you may notice that most of the content comes from the bottom of the product pages, which is purposely drafted for SEO purposes and generating more traffic.
3. Customized website for mobile users
It is estimated that four out of five Americans shop for products on their phones, and with the growing preference, mobile eCommerce will only thrive in the coming years. In fact, the data shows that during the 2018 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale, there were more mobile purchases made than from Personal Computers, and as much as 66% of Shopify users generating conversions from their mobile websites. It’s crucial for your business to remain flexible in adapting such changes to make the most of it. Here’s how mobile eCommerce can benefit your business:
- Your visitors are less likely to move away from your website on smartphones unless your website takes too much time to load.
- Convenient shopping for your buyers who can add/remove products to their cart as and when required.
- For mobile-only/voice-based queries, ranking higher on SERPs can get easier for your store.
- Shopify comes with a responsive checkout for your users to have a seamless payment process.
4. Curate Guest Posts/Blogs For Your Niche
Content is the backbone of any SEO eCommerce marketing strategy, and these days both search engines and users value content that’s worth reading. The more backlinks you have leading to your website on healthy scoring niche websites, the better chances are for your brand to appear on the leading search results. You need to look out for the domain authority score, also known as the DA to remain 40 or higher telling Google about how many users have referred to your website.
If your brand comes with unique products that can help your customers in a personalized way, you can write more about how it all works in your guest posts that you’d be publishing on such websites. Even if your website doesn’t feature custom products you can focus on writing about topics that are relevant in your industry and share an educational and insightful opinion on them. An example of the same can be if your Shopify store is a beauty and wellness store, you can always write about some of the most-loved beauty and wellness regimens that your readers can take away from and implement in their own lives. In such ways, you can develop a relationship with your readers who may or may not visit your website and learn about your products; as well as show up on higher page results.
5. Run Google Ad Campaigns
Have you ever noticed how every time you look for a specific product, it shows you snippets of the products along with the price, specifications, and website? That’s a Google Ad Campaign. According to reports, brands can observe a 200% ROIs on their Google Ads if done correctly. For Shopify store owners, there are multiple platforms/apps that can help in auto-installation of the tracking code to your Shopify web pages, and may also help you keep a track on the real-time conversions of your store.
During the holiday season, brands have marked a 30% or more rise in the performance of their online store with the help of such apps with the help of the conversion pixel. Such apps can automatically regenerate remarketing tags before embedding it to your Shopify store.
6. Implementing Full-Funnel Retargeting
Before getting into retargeting you need to understand the roadmap that your visitors take before they make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter, or complete any other CTAs.
Source: WordStream
Once you have the roadmap to your marketing funnel, you can look closer for understanding:
- What are the channels through which your visitors are learning about your brand?
- What are the touchpoints that your visitors have to complete?
- What offers come with the completion of each milestone for your visitors?
- What is the average duration that your visitor takes to travel from the top to the bottom of the funnel?
Having insights into such deeper questions may help you to leverage each of your potential customers by focusing on converting visitors into buyers since it is easier to accomplish than tapping into a new audience. This is when retargeting ads come in to compel the viewers to make their first purchase and transition into customers.
Ad fatigues are rampant online that drives away your visitors from completing a purchase. It could be minimized by segregating your visitors based on their age, preferences, and familiarity with your products, and then catering to their needs and experience based on personalization. Such steps can cause better engagement with your audience and can push them to completing purchases.
It’s always a wise decision to bring back your old customers and win them over again. In such cases, the retargeting needs to work in ways unique to an existing customer, since it adds value to your store. Reports show that any customer having completed the first purchase has a 27% chance to return to your store and is 10X more likely to make a second purchase.
7. Email Marketing Campaigns
Yes, emails are still a great way to keep your visitors and customers in the loop with every little update to your store. Your emails need to appeal to your customers on a personal ground rather than coming through as superfluous. Shopify reports show that emails converted up to 4.38% of overall sales in the Black Friday Cyber Monday Sales of 2018; which is more than what social media converted.
Sending out regular emails to your customers can lead to better engagement and keep them updated with products that they are interested in. Here’s what your emails can be about:
- Heads Up to your users about products back or moving out of stock
- Sending them personalized birthday/anniversary messages
- Updates on sales and new products
- Season sales and offers throughout the year
- Holiday season sales and custom offers based on their purchase history
Conclusion
There are many ways in which you can drive more sales to your Shopify store. They all revolve around building a relationship with your customers instead of the noise other brands offer. In case you are looking to provide an advanced customer experience and are looking to hire a development company, we have some recommendations.
VT Labs Offering advanced service to larger clients, VT labs can get their hands dirty with more complicated tasks, like headless Shopify.
CodeClouds
A global company offering a variety of eCommerce development services, CodeClouds is a great place to hire a Shopify expert with predictable monthly development packages.
Absolute Web
Though not as big as the other 2 mentions on this list, with 2 locations in Miami and LA, they’re not exactly small. Absolute web offers development for Shopify Plus as well as many other services.
