10 Tips to Help You Increase Sales on Your Shopify Store

Venturing into the eCommerce world can be quite daunting. Competitors are everywhere, consumers are capricious, and you have to bear it if you want to survive — daunting indeed. Thankfully, one aspect of eCommerce isn’t as difficult as it used to be: attaching a website to your brand. There are literally hundreds of eCommerce platforms you can use to house your site, and many of them can be created with little to no coding knowledge at all. Take Shopify, for instance.

Shopify is a fan favorite for many reasons. For one, as many of the Shopify web designers London has to offer will tell you, it has all the functionalities and features you need to launch your site within minutes, and as your store grows and you scale up, you can update it with advanced features that’ll help you deal with the spike in traffic. Second, it’s one of, if not the best platform for themes — whatever you need, they have it. Third, it has a comprehensive dashboard with everything you’ll ever need to manage your store. And fourth, these stats say it all:

• 600,000 businesses are powered by Shopify
• 1,000,00+ active users are on Shopify
• $5.5B sold on Shopify
• Big brands like Budweiser, Tesla Motors, Red Bull, The Economist, KKW Beauty and many others are happy Shopify users

With Shopify backing you up, all you need is a good eCommerce marketing strategy that answers the question, how to drive traffic to your online store and increase sales. Here are 10 eCommerce marketing ideas and tips that do just that.

1: Integrate with Social Media

If you want to know how to get sales on Shopify, the first step you should take is integrating your store with social media. Most of your audience is already on a social platform, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn, and you’re missing out by not giving them the option of buying as they browse through your social catalogue.

For example, you can use ‘buyable pins’ on Pinterest, enable the Facebook Store on Shopify’s backend to sell through the platform and Instagram as well, and so on. In fact, according to Shopify, 85% of all orders from social media belong to Facebook. As to the other social channels, here’s a breakdown of their average order price:

• Pinterest: $58.95
• Facebook: $55
• Twitter: $46.29
• LinkedIn: $44.24

Additional tip: Use hashtags (#) to make your brand more discoverable.

2: Produce Content

Content is king for a reason. From blog posts and infographics to videos, content is what will attract potential buyers and what will give them the extra nudge to convert. It’s what you can use to impart whatever message you want your audience to know, and what will help you make more sales. It all comes down to the fact that more traffic equals more sales, and each time you produce a piece of content, such as a blog post, a new landing page to your site is created and your chances of ranking higher are increased.

3: Use High-Quality Images

High-quality images are excellent selling tools that allow you to show off your products in all their glory. Whenever you produce content that uses images, upload a new product picture, or do anything that involves putting out some sort of visual, ALWAYS go the high-definition route. Pixelated and blurry images, on the other hand, deter people and paint your brand in a bad light that makes it seem outdated and out of touch with the digital consumer.

4: Focus on Your Keywords

We haven’t talked directly about SEO today, but much of what we’ve covered and will cover pertains to it. As it happens, keywords are a very big part of it as well. That being said, an important aspect of owning a business in the digital age is crafting a list of keywords you can use throughout you site and your site’s content to attract visitors. To this end, you can analyse your competition, your audience’s search habits, your own inventory, etc. Once you have a list in place, make sure to use them everywhere — your titles, descriptions, meta tags, blog posts and so on — but don’t overdo it. This is called keywords stuffing and search engines like Google penalise it with lower rankings.

5: Combine SEO and SEM Strategies

As any eCommerce agency knows, combining SEO and SEM strategies is fundamental to increasing site traffic and sales. On the one hand, SEM is paid and aims to increase the likelihood of your audience finding you. SEO, on the other, is unpaid and functions to increase your organic ranking so that more and more people can find you. SEM, then, places you in your audience’s radar, and SEO follows up by securing that spot and making it more likely they’ll find you and give you their business.

6: Optimise Your Landing Pages

We covered earlier that more traffic equals more sales, but this only holds true if you have optimised landing pages that can keep users on-site long enough to convert. Key here is making sure that you deliver what your audience expects when they land on your site. In other words, if one of your ads promises 50% savings on sneakers, you better have sneakers that are 50% off on that ad’s landing page. Otherwise, your visitors will be disappointed and click-out, leading to high bounce rates.

7: Reduce Abandoned Carts with Emails 

Abandoned carts are a hallmark of eCommerce; you simply can’t avoid them. It may be because you had too many steps to checkout, your users had pressing business that required their attention, or maybe they simply changed their mind and logged out. No matter the reason, you should never let an abandoned cart be the end of the line. Instead, use them as an opportunity to follow up with an email that reminds them of what they could have, and maybe even include a discount or promo code to seal the deal.

8: Reward Your Loyal Customers

More often than not, the bulk of a brand’s business comes from repeat customers. As such, you should always reward your loyal customers with discounts or loyalty programs they can enroll in to save money as they buy more, which works to send more money your way. In doing so, you’re incentivising them to keep coming back to you instead of your competition.

Additional tip: Go further by offering a referral program that rewards them and the person being referred.

9: Don’t Forget to Upsell

According to Econsultancy, upselling on eCommerce sites performs 20 times better than cross-selling. The thing is, sometimes consumers don’t know that something better, albeit more expensive is available, and once you present it to them they’re more open to buying it than if was the first thing they saw. In doing so, make sure to emphasise what makes that product better than the cheaper alternative, and don’t go overboard with the additional cost. For example, a $20 difference for a $100 product and its more expensive alternative is easier to digest than a $50 difference.

10: Show Off Your Reviews 

Closing off, don’t be afraid to show off your reviews. Not only do they increase your likelihood of ranking higher on organic search, but they also serve as testimonials from past customers that tell future ones you’re a reliable brand who can deliver what it promises. If you’re lacking in reviews, feel free to send an automated message after every sale asking buyers to rate their experience with you.

Let’s Take a Second Look

eCommerce is not easy — there are a lot of moving factors and you simply can’t control all of them. With a little effort, though, your job is made easier. Hopefully these 10 tips we covered today will answer your question of how to boost eCommerce sales:

1. Integrate with Social Media
2. Produce Content
3. Use High-Quality Images
4. Focus on Your Keywords
5. Combine SEO and SEM Strategies
6. Optimise Your Landing Page
7. Reduce Abandoned Carts with Emails
8. Reward Your Loyal Customers
9. Don’t Forget to Upsell
10. Show Off Your Reviews

Good luck tailoring your new Shopify marketing strategy!