Are you an e-commerce business owner desiring to increase sales on your Shopify store or other e-commerce website platform?
And just in case you’re just about to create your Shopify website, it is obvious you are here because you really want to start out strong like Jeff Bezos did with Amazon and generate sales fast right from the beginning of your website launch.
For a start, there are 3.76 million live websites using Shopify, and 69.67% of them are registered in the US.
And in the year 2020, 457 million people bought from Shopify stores. I am certain you want to have many buy from your own store consistently too.
I’ll be sharing with you in this very detailed post about the very strategic steps you should take in order to guarantee a massive increase in sales in your Shopify store.
The steps to be considered will be divided into 4 major categories below
There are 4 major sales optimization stages your business must apply to drive massive sales in your Shopify store. They are:
What is common with every great business like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, McDonalds, etc is their obsession with great customer experience and satisfaction.
The whole business, from the product to the platform, to the marketing, to the processes used are all centered around satisfying their customers and leaving them wanting more of the great customer experience.
If you must increase sales on your Shopify store, you must follow the examples of these great businesses too, and make customer obsession your number one priority.
Being obsessed about your customers’ satisfaction should be the foundation for every other stage you will read about in this post including your store page optimization, your marketing, conversion, and any other sales conversion activity you will do.
Here are a few steps to take in order to always provide a great customer experience:
Rather than starting your Shopify store selling every manner of products, especially when you don’t have unlimited funds to compete with established brands, you should instead start with a focused niche.
Jeff Bezos had the vision to make Amazon the “Everything Store” but he didn’t start selling everything.
He launched Amazon selling books because he knew the book market had high demand and was under-served because the new authors couldn’t get their books sold by established big brands.
Of course, they couldn’t because the big brands were focused on selling Best sellers and couldn’t have space for unlimited books in their physical stores.
It is no wonder that Amazon had about 1 million book titles in its catalogs in its first year serving customers and helping new authors to get their books sold.
It didn’t take long before Amazon was really known as the “World’s largest bookseller” just because they chose to focus on one niche that has huge prospects for both demand and supply.
So rather than selling fashion, electronics, and books combined, why not sell watches, bags, books, computers, or shoes if you already know there is high demand for any of these products in the market?
Here is how you decide on the niche to start with:
a. Decide on a number of niches you will like to serve: Write down a number of niches you think your Shopify store will like to serve now and in the future
b. Do market research to determine the niche to focus on: Carry out market research about those niches to determine which of them presently has a huge market(locally or globally), is under-served or can be served better, has low competition, and has high profitability.
You can then choose one niche to start with
c. Define Your Target Audience: Now that you have chosen the niche to focus on and the products you will be selling, it’s time to define who your target audience is.
Targeting the right audience for your product in every stage of the sales optimization process will determine the success of your business and it begins with defining your target audience
Define your target audience by understanding their interests, fears, problems, desires, pain, age, location, income level, status, gender, fantasies, bias, and other behavioral attitudes. You can carry out a survey to understand these better.
Now that you know the niche you are going to serve and the products you will be selling on your Shopify store, the next step is to create a great value proposition that sets you apart from every other e-commerce seller out there.
This is the unique selling proposition that makes your customer stick to you. It is what will get them to choose you instead of other competitors.
This is the advantage you have identified to make your business penetrate the market when you carried out your market research in step 1 above.
Take Domino for example, they realized that the buyers were mostly interested in having fresh pizza delivered on time. Then came their USP, “fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free“
They didn’t promise the best pizza, anybody can promise that. But they set themselves apart with their unique value proposition and put it everywhere. This one thing made Domino’s dominate the pizza market till today.
Another example is FedEx’s USP “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight!”
As you can see, crafting a great unique selling proposition after carrying out thorough market research and understanding what your target audience absolutely wants is a game changer.
It will increase sales in your Shopify store if you consistently satisfy your customers with the promises.
So whether it is, whether fast delivery, best pricing, best ingredient or materials, etc, let your unique value proposition be everywhere in your store and in your marketing campaigns
For a 1-on-1 consultation call for help creating your Shopify website and for your e-commerce marketing, click this link.
Nothing retains a customer and creates repeat purchases like when the customers have confience in the brand knowing they are always treated right and like they matter.
Majority of the established brands you know build a culture of making the customer the number one priority from the onset of the business, which led to their growth today.
If you must increase sales in your Shopify store too, you must provide quality service to your customers.
Some of the ways to provide excellent customer service that gets your customers to become loyal to your store and increase your sales include:
a. Relating with them via customer support channels on your website and social media pages,
b. Attending to and solving their complaints quickly and respectfully,
c. Engaging them after they’ve made the purchase to understand their experience with your business,
In order to keep your customers and get them to buy more consistently, it is important to have some plans for customer loyalty programs to kickstart when you launch or after some time into the business.
Whether it is giving some discount for repeat purchases, giving the discount in exchange for an email subscription, free shipping for some order amount, or even a membership program like Amazon Prime.
Whatever loyalty program you’ll put in place must benefit your customers and get them to not want to miss out on the offer.
Whether you want to admit it or not, every customer wants his or her orders delivered on time. This can even be your unique selling proposition as Domino and FedEx did.
Nevertheless, if you want to get your customers to keep coming back, you should devise a means of ensuring you are always delivering orders speedily.
It doesn’t matter if you’ll make faster delivery a membership benefit to those that subscribed or not, just ensure that customers understand it is possible for them to have their products delivered on time if they buy in your Shopify store.
Do this and watch your sales increase rapidly in your Shopify store.
Apart from marketing and providing a good customer experience, the majority of the steps you will take to ensure you have an increase in sales in your Shopify store will have to do with optimizing your e-commerce website for conversion.
Most e-commerce websites, whether Shopify stores, Woo-commerce websites, or any other from other platforms suffer customer purchase aversion simply because:
a. their online stores make it easy for the customers to not make purchases,
b. their sites also reveal that no thought was done for conversion when creating them.
Here are some steps to take in order to properly optimize your Shopify store for increased sales:
When starting out, it is important to outsource web development to expert web designers who understand user experience and can help you create a high-converting e-commerce store.
Using proper navigation on your store gives your customers and visitors the freedom to surf around your website and make their choice of what to add to the cart and make their purchases.
But where the visitors are left confused with poor navigation, it will hurt your sales conversion even if you’re getting massive loads of traffic on your website as they will most likely leave the store confused.
So you’ve got to fix your website navigation if it isn’t in a good state right now.
According to Shopify, 77% of US adults own a smartphone and nearly one-third of US internet users used their mobile devices to make a purchase each week in 2021.
Furthermore, it is estimated that 42.9% of all e-commerce purchases will be made via a mobile device come the year 2024.
As a business owner, you want to ensure your Shopify store is optimized for mobile in order to see an increase in sales.
Not optimizing your Shopify store for mobile will mean visitors and customers attempting to make purchases on your store using their mobile devices will be frustrated using your store.
This will make them leave without making any purchases, and thereby hurt your overall sales generation.
To make your Shopify store convert most of the traffic it receives, your product pages must have every feature required to convince buyers to go ahead with the purchase intent.
You optimize your product page by ensuring to:
You are bound to increase your sales conversion from the traffic to your website if you take the above steps to optimize your product pages for conversion.
Imagine spending all the effort to drive traffic to your Shopify store and watch your visitors add products to your cart only to get to your checkout page and leave without completing checkout because of some friction they experience on your checkout page.
According to PYMNTS, 91% of consumers said that a satisfying checkout experience will determine whether or not they’ll return to a given merchant
To give your customers the best checkout experience, always ensure you make completing the checkout easier for them to do.
Here are some steps to take to optimize your checkout page:
If you take the steps above to reduce friction at the checkout process, you are bound to increase sales conversions on your Shopify store
For a 1-on-1 consultation call for help creating your Shopify website and for your e-commerce marketing, click this link.
According to recent statistics, 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning a site.
As an e-commerce site, your website is expected to load within 2 seconds if you must keep your visitors and give them a satisfying experience.
Therefore, increasing your website speed is a very crucial aspect of your e-commerce website optimization if you want to increase sales in your Shopify store.
To increase the speed of your Shopify store, here are some steps you can take:
If the task of increasing your Shopify store speed seems difficult, you can reach out to us, and let’s help you fix your website speed optimization
As a business owner, you must have known by now that getting sales in your Shopify store begins with driving traffic to the store. Gone are the days where you “build it and they will come”.
Today, there are more than 1 billion websites in the world with over 26 million of them being an e-commerce store.
For you to stand out and actually sell massively, you must go out of your way to drive massive traffic to your store.
Therefore, not understanding how to run marketing campaigns for your Shopify store and still refusing to outsource it is a recipe for business failure.
As they say, traffic is the lifeblood of a business. And driving traffic to your business begins with running effective e-commerce marketing in order to put your business before the eyeballs of many prospective visitors and customers.
There are different types of marketing you can run for your online store, and you should have a coherent plan to carry out every one of these marketing step by step starting from before you launch your online store.
Here are the different types of marketing you should run to drive traffic to your Shopify store and consequently increase sales in the store
As a Shopify store owner, your marketing begins from the moment you start creating the store and uploading products to it.
From writing your product descriptions to writing captivating copies through your website, you must be deliberate about showing your customers why they should patronize you.
Moreover, once you launch, you should have a calculated strategy to write articles and create other forms of content that answer the questions on the minds of your visitors and customers.
Because visitors and customers search for more reasons why they should actually buy and stick to your brand, your content will let them know why it is safe to buy a particular product and make the purchase experience satisfactory.
Right from when you launch your Shopify store, you should be optimizing the store for search engines.
Isn’t it great that your website shows up when customers search for a particular product on different search engines?
You know that such searches have purchase intent around them and you will drive many sales if your online store is optimized for search engines.
You are already creating content, whether writing product descriptions, or articles for different pages and on different topics, or creating video content.
Now you must go a step further to ensure the content is optimized for search engines.
Here are the steps to conduct e-commerce SEO on your Shopify store:
Taking your time to ensure you implement SEO on your online store will guarantee that your website will rank higher on search engines and ultimately drive more traffic and sales to your site.
From Facebook to Instagram, to Twitter, to Pinterest, to Linkedin to Tiktok, creating and executing a plan for social media marketing, and growing your brand recognition on those platforms will increase traffic and sales on your Shopify store.
Imagine being a first-time visitor on a website trying to make a huge purchase and you quickly do a social media search to ascertain that the website is genuine but then realize they have no social media presence, how confident will you be making that purchase?
Also imagine you check on social media and realize how the brand is being talked about positively by their existing customers for their great products and customer service, how confident will you make that purchase?
Now you understand why creating strong brand recognition via a very well-planned and executed social media marketing strategy will not only drive direct sales, it will also give your potential customers the confidence to buy from your online store.
Perhaps the quickest way to drive traffic to and generate sales on your Shopify store is to run paid advertisements.
Even established brands today spend as much as possible running paid advertisements on major social media platforms and Google.
Even Amazon known to be the biggest e-commerce brand in the world today still remains the biggest ad spender on Google and a very top spender on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ads combined.
While it takes time for your organic content marketing (blogging, SEO, social media marketing, etc) to produce results you can speed up the process by actually running paid advertising to quickly increase traffic and sales on your Shopify store.
The different types of Paid advertising you can run include:
To fully take advantage of your paid advertising, make sure to run the ads to optimized product pages, dedicated landing pages as well as other places like categories or specific URLs.
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for increasing sales on Shopify.
With an email list of your current and potential customers, you can easily reach out to them with targeted messages and offers that encourage them to make a purchase.
Start by building your email list through sign-ups on your website, social media platforms, and in-store promotions. Then, segment your list based on purchase history, interests, and behavior to create targeted campaigns.
In your emails, make sure to include personalized recommendations based on the recipient’s browsing and purchase history, as well as exclusive discounts and promotions.
Additionally, use attention-grabbing subject lines and compelling calls-to-action to encourage recipients to open and click through your emails.
Overall, email marketing is a cost-effective way to increase sales and drive customer loyalty on Shopify.
Consider the statistics below :
As you acquire customers on your Shopify store and your business starts to grow, you should take advantage of running a referral program where you enlist the help of your existing customers to recommend your products to their inner circles
It usually comes with a reward that makes your customer more excited to tell people how good your products are.
You should plan for and offer referral marketing early on in your business if you want to have the word spread about your Shopify store products and thereby increase sales.
The steps we’ve taken till now have all been towards driving traffic as well as converting the traffic into sales.
However, there are some other steps you must take to actually increase the sales conversion rate of your Shopify store. They are:
Having eliminated some fundamental reasons for shopping cart abandonment like an unoptimized cart or checkout page, too many checkout fields, not offering multiple payment options, etc, as discussed in the steps above, you can still take some further steps to reduce and recover cart abandonment.
The steps include:
Have you ever tried purchasing products on an online store and getting products recommended to you based on the type of products you were searching for?
It is estimated that 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its product recommendation engine. This shows you that you can effectively increase sales on your Shopify store if you employ personalized product recommendations on your store.
Product recommendation apps like Wiser, Related Product Recommendation, Also Bought, etc can be used to offer personalized product recommendations on your website.
Discounts and Promotions are excellent ways to get customers to take advantage of your offer to make more purchases than they would normally have made.
To increase sales in your Shopify store, you should have a strategy of Discounts and Promotions you’ll offer your customers and potential customers.
You can plan the offer around special periods like holidays, Black Fridays, special seasons New Year, etc.
You can as well give these discounts and promotions in exchange for email subscriptions and repeat purchases or in exchange for a paid membership to your Shopify store.
Your goals and objectives in line with your initial market research will determine the type of discounts and promotions you’ll offer your visitors and customers alike.
Increase your average order value by upselling and cross-selling your customers.
Apart from the 1-click upsell (also called order bump) that you can use on the checkout page, you can also upsell your customers after they have made the purchase.
Upselling is recommending a higher-priced version of the product the customer just purchased while cross-selling is recommending a related or complimentary product of the product the customer just purchased.
Downselling however is offering a lower-priced version of a product o your customers once they decline a higher-end version.
As an e-commerce marketer, you should be providing the 3 options to your customers once they buy your products so you can increase sales and the average order value of your customers.
Now that you understand how to increase sales in your Shopify store, it’s time to start taking action right away.
If you already have a Shopify store and you’re yet to make enough sales as you’ll want to make, it’s time to start from step 1 to focus on what your customers actually want and provide it for them.
Then you investigate how optimized your website is, do a marketing analysis of your Shopify store and finally make efforts to increase sales conversion on your Shopify store.
If you do this, you will see a massive increase in sales within a short period of time.
If you’ll like to learn about how Amazon became a multi-billion dollar business, read this post.
For a 1-on-1 consultation call for help creating your Shopify website and for your e-commerce marketing, click this link.
Tags: ecommerce, online sales, shopify
