The first step in building an ecommerce business is to create a Shopify shop.

The real challenge is getting it off the ground – developing a great product line, finding and supporting your work, and driving traffic toward your new thing.

Many small businesses fail to reach their goals because they are not following their strategy.

They didn’t have a strategy at all.

The top Shopify Stores share many commonalities, such as the apps they use, their customer service, and their dedication. But, what is the most important thing? They all focus on a winning strategy and execute it.

Ecommerce is becoming more competitive and crowded. New store owners must use the best strategies to stand out and grow.

By 2022, Ecommerce revenue will reach USD 5.4 Trillion. How do you get that much?

This post will discuss how to get Shopify sales for your store. Let’s first discuss why traffic to your store may not be translating into sales.

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There are reasons why you don’t have any sales at your Shopify store.

While some online shops may attract traffic well, sales are not forthcoming from them.

In such cases, you need to place yourself in the shoes of your customers. But they don’t feel it. What is the problem?

Here are some reasons your traffic is not converting.

• Low trust. Shoppers are more aware of scams and look for ways to trust the brands they shop with. You can build trust by sharing customer reviews and other proof and demonstrating your commitment to security.

• Poor navigation. Your Shopify collections can be added to your navigation menu and throughout the homepage to help them get to the product faster.

• Not mobile-friendly. More people use their mobile devices to shop or buy. You don’t want to miss this valuable traffic by not optimizing your store pages for mobile.

• Product descriptions. Product descriptions.

• Low-quality images. Your images are just as important as your product descriptions. They will be the last piece of product marketing for all the wonderful wares that you plan to sell. You should ensure that you use high-quality images to give your customers a real sense of what you offer.

• Store design. Your store will be forgotten if it looks the same as everyone else’s. It can even look worse. So that people remember who you are, it is important to design custom store pages. It should look great and reflect your personality.

• Wrong audience. The wrong audience could be attracted to your product. You could be misleading searchers with your SEO or targeting the wrong demographics with your paid advertising strategy. It is important to correct this so the right buyers can find your product.

• Bad messaging. You could be sending your entire traffic to the homepage. It’s a blessing to know your audiences so you can send them to a landing page with more targeted messaging that will increase conversions.

Let’s now look at the reasons why conversion might be a problem.

Custom landing pages are a great way to communicate the right message to the right people. Get started with Kobe Digital now!

19 ways to increase your Shopify store’s sales

You can’t have Shopify sales without a strong strategy.

Kevin Costner may have said, “If they build it, they’ll come.”

This isn’t a Field of Dreams, and you’re not building a baseball field.

You’ll need to do more than wait for customers to visit your Shopify store.

1. To nurture future sales, capture new subscribers

You want to get the most value out of the traffic that you already have.

All that traffic won’t translate into sales. And, that’s OK.

You can offer these visitors the chance to convert in other ways, and it will only cost you their contact information.

Once they have provided you with their phone number and email address, you can market to them to increase future sales.

There are many options for opt-in forms: pop-ups, flyouts, and chat windows. These forms are great tools to drive conversions by offering downloadables or discounts.

Popups convert at an average rate of 3.1%, while the most successful ones convert at 9.28%.

It’s not too bad!

Nevertheless, it is important to be cautious about which pages popups are added to.

You are only hurting sales potential if there is an obvious intent to buy, such as on the checkout page. Do not ruin the buying experience.

You can add opt-ins to your homepage and product pages. About Us page. Collection pages. The blog.

Check out our list of conversion optimization apps that are powerful and repeatable to optimize for conversions.

2. Email marketing campaigns that convert

Once you have your lead capture strategy in place, you can create email marketing campaigns to keep your brand front and center for new sales.

The return on investment for every dollar spent on email marketing is $45.

It’s easy to spend a dollar and get a 45x return, so make sure you invest in your email marketing efforts.

You’ll need to create a strategy that uses segmentation and drip emails to maximize your email list.

These buckets will help you start your strategy:

• Audience: first-time users, regular customers, browse abandonment users, cart abandonment users, etc.

• Email workflows –transactional emails (like order and shipment confirmations), promotional emails (big sales, special offers), and lifecycle marketing emails (cart abandonment and re-engagement, welcome series).

Segmentation allows you to communicate more directly with customers who have different needs to increase conversion rates.

Email drip campaigns you can develop for your Shopify store include: the following

• Welcome emails
• Browse abandonment reminders
• Post-purchase emails
• Cart abandonment reminders
• Company updates and product launches

Sending too many emails can lead to spam folders. You can create rules with the right email marketing tool to ensure you don’t bother people.

3. Leverage SMS marketing for better engagement

SMS marketing is becoming just as important these days as email marketing. Send marketing messages directly to your customers’ pockets and purses

If opt-in is done correctly, shoppers will be more than happy to receive text messages with special offers. They may even prefer SMS over other communication methods.

SMS open rates can reach as high as 98%, whereas the average email marketing open rate is 18% for all industries.

These messages are opened on average within 90 seconds of receipt.

Web push notifications can be used anonymously to send important nudges directly from the shop.

With the help of apps like PushOwl, you can get push notifications. Our friends at PostScript will take care of your SMS marketing needs.

4. Invest in your social marketing strategy

A strong social media presence is essential for any ecommerce marketing strategy.

One of the most important lessons from some of the top Shopify stores that we have studied was that social media is essential to their success.

Instagram is proving to be a powerful marketing tool for ecommerce businesses. Its focus on images and ability to tag products makes it easy to shop.

It is expected that its global user base will grow to more than 1.4 billion by 2025. Although you may not be able to reach all of them, your ideal audience will be there.

Although Facebook isn’t as visually appealing as other media, many brands have great success using it to interact with busy Facebook Groups and drive interest in their brands.

Pinterest is another visual shoppable platform where shoppers can congregate and find new products (like yours), as well as build relationships with brands.

Consistent posting can help you build followers, and bring in new traffic and brand awareness. These leads are already ready to buy if you have great content.

Shopify tools can help you with your social media marketing efforts. They enable you to post more efficiently and pull your social feeds on store page pages. You can also offer live chat via social messaging.

5. Great SEO can help you build organic traffic

Traffic is your dream.

That dream can become a reality with search engine optimization (SEO). To reap the rewards, you only need to make sure your store is SEO-friendly.

Shopify offers great built-in options to create SEO-friendly pages. It provides updatable metadata (title, description, and URL slug), which automatically generates sitemaps, redirects, and canonical links.

All of this ensures that your homepage and product pages, collections pages, and other pages are indexed on the most popular search engines.

Powerful Shopify apps can take over where it falls short. They call out problems as they occur and make suggestions for improvements.

You can create a blog, target the most relevant keywords within your industry and build a content marketing strategy beyond the traditional ecommerce store pages.

Blog posts rank higher on Google, and you can answer the questions that your ideal customers are searching for on this massive search engine.

6. Pay advertising can help you target your ideal customer

To gather that crucial store traffic, create paid advertising campaigns that are capable of targeting the right people. 

While you can try your best to get the top organic Google spots, it is clear that Google ads are always the most popular search results.

You can also get there with paid searches and Google Shopping Ads (to showcase particular products).

You only pay for clicks when you bid for keywords that you are interested in appearing for.

Some brands have greater success with social ads paid on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook (both can be managed through the Facebook Ad Dashboard).

Instead of targeting keywords you can target specific audiences with your Instagram ads.

They have a vast repository of personal data (likes and locations, brand associations, politics, etc.) that allows them to show your ads to people who are most likely to buy your products.

To get it right, you can tweak your ad copy and visuals as needed. It’s a great way to drive traffic, as long as you make more than you spend.

There are Shopify Apps that can help you with your paid advertising strategy.

7. Create dedicated, high-converting landing pages

You’ve created a solid strategy to drive traffic to your Shopify store.

Your store will now have a lot of curious customers by using SEO, SMS, email marketing, push notifications, and paid ads.

Amazing!

You could do nothing and just let the webmasters figure it all out. You will get more purchases this way.

However, if you already have multiple sources of traffic (and some that are well-segmented), can create landing pages for conversion.

Paid traffic is an excellent example.

It is clear who your target audience would be that clicks on your link. Would you prefer to direct them to your homepage, or to a page that is specifically targeted to selling to them?

A great landing page has some key features:

• An engaging headline
• Call to Action (CTA): A compelling call to action
• Design and images that are powerful
• Clear benefits and features
• Social proof

Make a landing page that is unique and then make it available to your audience.

Start creating high-converting landing pages now. The Hogun Page Builder makes it easy to create amazing landing pages quickly and easily 

8. Shipping is free of charge

It’s powerful to use the phrase “free shipping”. It is a psychological unblocker that allows for sales pitches to continue.

Shoppers are more likely to buy if they know that they won’t be charged any extra fees for last-minute purchases.

In a 2019 survey, 68% of shoppers didn’t buy at least half the amount when free shipping was not an option. The majority of shoppers ( 88% ) expect free shipping if their order exceeds a certain amount.

Either you take the hit to profit margins, or you can increase product prices to pay for free shipping. It might be a better option to absorb the costs of all the benefits offered to you.

This is especially true when you offer conditional shipping. Customers must spend enough to receive free shipping. This strategy is powerful for increasing  order values (AOV ) 

As an incentive to purchase from your brand, you can offer free shipping on certain products or holidays.

9. Improve product pages by using text, images, video, and other media

Products are the most important part of your Shopify store. You want to show off what makes them so special.

Even though shoppers shop online for business, this doesn’t mean that they miss the experience of shopping in-store.

Instead of being able to turn your products in their hands and inspect them in person, create a product webpage experience. 

This means that you need to take amazing photos from different angles.

Video can also be used to communicate the details of your product.

These visual explainers should be accompanied by your product descriptions that are detailed and evocative.

Be sure to include important product details and a compelling story about the product. Great storytelling is the foundation of commerce.

10. Trust is earned through great social proof and UGC

Although you would love to believe that shoppers will make purchasing decisions based solely on your marketing, the truth is that most trust their fellow consumers.

Potential buyers will be more inclined to buy from you if they see the happy feelings of customers.

Show potential customers by taking user-generated content (UGC ) and displaying it in your store.

Instagram posts by customers wearing or using your products in real life are a popular form of UGC.

Social proof is powerful, and you will want to make an effort to encourage its creation and display it prominently on your store pages.

An app that automates customer reviews can help you get more customer feedback and showcase your Shopify store.

Add those logos and quotes to your store to earn the trust of those organizations.

11. Incorporate cross-selling and upselling strategies

The inclusion of social proof can influence customer trust. However, the additional cross-selling and upselling elements can encourage customers to buy more.

Although they are two different strategies, they work well together.

Cross-selling allows shoppers to add additional products to their shopping carts. Upselling encourages people to upgrade their purchases.

If someone were to buy a laptop, they would cross-sell a wireless keyboard/mouse, but the upsell would include a laptop with more RAM or a higher resolution screen.

This is in the form of product suggestions widgets or dropdown menu sections on product pages.

Many apparel brands include a section called “Complete the Look” that suggests clothing that matches the product.

These elements are often used by brands on product pages and shopping baskets to help shoppers get closer to buying.

The closest product equivalent in a brick-and-mortar store is the one displayed just before the registration opens. Online, the products are more customized to what the customer is purchasing.

12. Showcase customer reviews

Customer reviews are a subset of user-generated material (UGC).

We mentioned that shoppers trust others when they make online purchases. Customer reviews are a great indicator of the quality of your products.

Statista reports that 53% of online shoppers believe reviews and ratings are more important than navigation.

Ask your customers to review your products. You can use positive reviews throughout your store through customer testimonial sliders.

There are many great apps to help you ask for reviews at the right times and display them throughout your store for maximum effect.

13. Your customers should be brand ambassadors

Referral programs and loyalty are powerful engines for word-of-mouth (WOM).

Recognizing your top customers is an easy task, especially if it means more business. 77% of consumers believe a customer loyalty program will make it more likely that they stay with a brand.

These programs will not only increase customer retention but also turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors, which is a great addition to your marketing team.

With one of the highly-rated Shopify apps, you can create powerful referral and loyalty programs.

14. Personalize the experience

Consumers are becoming more open to personalization when shopping online. A study showed that 71% of shoppers are annoyed when their shopping experience is impersonal.

Ecommerce marketers love it when customers share their data.

Consumers are willing to share data to have a more personal experience.

What can you do to personalize their experience?

Product recommendations are a powerful way to personalize. Amazon makes this a huge success by showing customers products that are related to other items they have viewed and recommending bundles of products to increase order value.

They can also show you what you last bought to help you keep the sales process moving.

Email marketing sequences can be leveraged based on customer behavior. This includes cart abandonment, browse abandonment, and products added to wishlists.

This targeting can easily extend out to one of the cheapest forms of paid advertising–retargeting. You can track visitors on the internet by providing visuals of the products they are looking at in your store.

There are many ways you can create an exceptional shopping experience for your customers. It’s great to know that they are open to it.

15. Mobile-friendly shopping: Optimize your shopping experience to maximize speed

Shoppers don’t want to wait for a store to load because it takes too long. There are so many stores, there’s no reason to wait for one to load.

Nearly 50% of online shoppers want webpages to load in two seconds or less. Mobile users, on the other hand, expect pages to load within four seconds.

It has been proven that a delay in loading results in an overall loss of 7% in conversions.

This is how to speed up your store pages.

However, speed is only one aspect of the overall experience. It’s not possible to ignore mobile shopping, given that so many people shop from mobile devices.

Ecommerce stores that are the best have mobile landing pages which can lead to increased sales and conversions.

Simply enter your URL to Google’s PageSpeed Intelligence portal to see where you stand in terms of speed and mobile responsiveness.

You will see how fast your page loads on mobile and desktop as well as your Core Web Vitals scores. The report will make recommendations for improving your stats.

Kobe Digital allows you to create great mobile experiences by allowing you to adapt store pages to different screen sizes.

16. As sales channels, Instagram and Facebook can be added

Your Shopify storefront is not the only one.

You can reach more customers and establish new customer relationships by adding additional sales channels.

Instagram makes it easy to sell with their Insta Shopping feature. This allows brands to set up mini stores and add product tags to posts to make them shoppable.

Shopify allows you to let customers shop from Instagram.

You can easily set up your Instagram Shopping account using Facebook’s Commerce Manager. This makes it easy to sync products.

You might also add Facebook Shops while you’re on Facebook’s backend. Shopify allows both platforms to be run through the Facebook sales channel.

These sales channels, unlike Amazon and other marketplaces, can direct you back to your product pages. This allows you to maintain control over your customer relationships.

17. Chatbots and Live Chat are now available to help customers shop

Shoppers will always have questions, no matter how well-designed your store may be

They may decide to go somewhere else if they don’t get the answers they are looking for (despite having a great FAQ page).

Live chat allows you to quickly answer customers’ questions and reduce friction during shopping.

They can make their purchase with confidence by getting immediate answers.

Even with a strong support team, it can be difficult for live chat support to be provided all the time.

Chatbots are now incredibly advanced. This allows you to create complicated Q&A workflows that answer the most frequently asked questions (more interactively than an FAQ page).

Chatbots and live chat help your customers get the answers they are looking for. The best apps to provide an exceptional customer experience are what you should be reading if you’re on Shopify.

18. Optimize your marketing through A/B testing

After you’ve created your landing page, you might start to think about the parallel world with a different headline. You might wonder how it would be.

To see if slight adjustments would make a difference in the conversion, we don’t have to look into the multiverse.

You can instead test your pages and choose the best version every time.

You can test A/B on your Shopify store using external tools that draw over your pages with slightly different versions.

Only do one thing when you make changes to pages.

Multiple changes can lead to a decline or improvement in your performance.

After you have completed a test, and you found a workable change, you can add the element to your page. Then you can start a new test using another element. You can continue this process.

A/B testing is easy with these great tools:

• Google Optimize. Free tool for merchants who are just beginning their design experiments.

• VWO. Enterprise-level A/B testing tool. Pricing is based on your business details.

• Optimizely. A great option for small and large businesses, with pricing determined by the phone.

You have many options. Make sure to do your research before you make a decision.

19. To drive future purchases, create wishlists

Your customers may not be ready right now to purchase from your store.

If they love what you sell, and they were reminded about it at some future point–say when they are ready for buying–you would want a way to keep them informed.

Make wishlists.

Customers have the option to add products to their wishlists. This encourages them to sign up for email updates and allows them to build a relationship going forward.

To convert these customers, you can segment them and send them specialized emails.

You can also gain insight into inventory demand to plan your purchases with that information in mind.

Growave is featured in our roundup of the best Shopify applications. Growave helps you to create strong loyalty and referral campaigns. You can also enable wishlists on your store.

Even the smallest things can make all the difference

To make big sales, you don’t have to do it all. Start with the low-hanging fruits and work your way up.

Each business is unique and each implementation will have different returns. Listening to your customers is the best way to make positive changes in your business. Learn from them what works for them.

Many of these ideas can be easily implemented using apps or tools. You just need to decide what is best for you and your customers.