At the end of 2023, Shopify generated a reported $7.06 billion in revenue, an equivalent of over 16% of the global ecommerce market for the year. And e-commerce revenue is expected to 100x in growth by the turn of the next decade. The question is, how do you get sales on Shopify and get some of that money?
Many Shopify sellers struggle to make profits due to reasons such as low conversion rates, frequent cart abandonment, or even market competitiveness. Getting sales on Shopify requires a balanced approach to addressing these challenges, combining multiple awareness and conversion strategies.
Below, we discuss some proven strategies to get sales on Shopify. These strategies are:
- Increase Conversions with Popups
- Create a Brand Strategy
- Maximize Social Media Marketing
- Run Ads to Increase Reach
- Implement Email Marketing
- Create Multiple Content Channels
- Set Up a Loyalty Program
- Create Social Proof
- Provide 24/7 Customer Service
- Deliver Quality Service
- Persuade with Free Shipping
Best Ideas to Get Sales on Shopify
We reviewed a number of data about successful Shopify stores and collected the most tested ideas for getting sales on Shopify. They include:
Increase Conversions with Popup
Shopify popups show an average click-through-rate of 8.5%. When done well, a Shopify popup can boost average order value, reduce cart abandonment rate, and help you build an email list. Here are ways to use increase conversions with popups:
Upselling
Research confirms that upselling increases a customer’s lifetime value by at least 20%. Upselling offers a buyer extra value at the same or lower costs.
For instance, you can create a campaign that fast-tracks time-to-sellout by offering a 20% discount that covers all purchases above $500. Adoric Shopify app user, Soho Center, offers buyers free shipping on purchases over NIS 249. Buyers are more likely to purchase items within this range to benefit from the free shipping, which increases conversions.
Personalizing Recommendations
Personalized recommendations seem to read the buyer’s mind and propose products leaning towards their preferences. Recommendations can increase conversions by up to 150%.
Shopify seller, Nootri Shop, increases conversions this way with the Adoric app. The store displays a non-intrusive popup at the bottom of your screen, notifying buyers of recent purchases and popular products.
For your popups to convert, you have to set them up the right way. There are a couple of ways to do that:
- Target with triggers: Popup timing influences engagement rates. Before publishing a popup, you can set the trigger to capture your audience at the right time. On Adoric, you can edit a trigger for each popup by clicking the banner at the bottom of the page. For instance, an exit intent popup can be set to appear when there has been inactivity for more than ten seconds.
- Gamify users’ engagement: Six in ten customers are willing to become regular customers of Shopify stores offering Shopify gamification. This is a good strategy to convert first-time visitors to buyers and buyers to frequent buyers.
On Adoric, you can reward buyers with custom wins – 20% off, $20 free items, etc – on participating in a store game and buying items worth X amount. These short-span games – usually less than one minute – appeal to first-time visitors and can convert them to buyers.
Create a Brand Strategy
A well-crafted brand strategy helps define your value proposition, understand your audience, and shape various aspects of your store, including your brand story, product descriptions, and content. To develop a brand strategy:
Define Your Value Proposition.
Your value proposition answers the question, “What sets my business apart from competitors?” Your value proposition should clearly articulate the problem your product solves and the unique ways you meet your customers’ needs.
Warby Parker does this by addressing offering stylish glasses at affordable prices with a home try-on program. Their strategy focuses on delivering high-quality products with excellent customer service, setting them apart from traditional eyewear retailers.
Know Your Audience
Research demographics, interests, and pain points to create a connection with your customers. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you won’t know how to reach them.
Gymshark primarily sells to fitness enthusiasts and athletes. The company partners with fitness influencers and advocates, called Gymshark Athletes, to promote their products through collaborative social media posts, giveaways, etc, a partnership that ensures Gymshark address their target audience via their influencers’ followers. This, coupled with the quality of their products and gears, creates a strong brand connection.
Describe Your Products Effectively.
Product descriptions should highlight the unique features and benefits of your products while addressing the needs and desires of your target audience. Make your descriptions compelling by sharing details that add some personality to your products.
For Pipcorn, this means focusing on the unique features of their popcorn, such as its smaller kernels, which offer a lighter, crispier texture and are easier to digest. Pipcorn’s descriptions also highlight its non-GMO, gluten-free, and all-natural ingredients, catering to health-conscious consumers.
Clear, compelling descriptions can drive conversions and enhance the shopping experience.
Maximize Social Media Marketing
Good social media marketing elevates your brand voice and helps you create a solid presence. As you engage customers, you can seamlessly direct them to your store, increasing conversions.
For effective social media marketing:
Provide Value
Don’t market just because you want to market. Teach or remind your audience about something. Repurpose content from your blog or product pages to your social media platforms, and including links leading to the original content.
Use High-res Visuals
Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are visual-driven platforms. The clearer your product images, the better. Go all in with your visual marketing. Pair up your products with high-resolution images that depict exactly what customers should expect when they order. Then include descriptions to shopping these products from your store.
Warby Parker demoing one of their eyeglasses
Build Customer Interaction
Engage your audience via comments and DMs. Answer questions, give clarity where necessary, and provide feedback. This warms the relationship and keeps your store top of mind.
Promote Your Page on Social Media.
Link your well-performing social media posts to your product pages to maximize the engagement. You can also boost these posts with ads to increase their reach and visibility
Find more tips on growing with social media marketing here.
Run Ads to Increase Reach
Pushing social media ads can be a good way to promote store visibility and increase sales. In 2023, sales through social media contributed to 18% of the total online ecommerce sales. You can increase the performance of your social media posts with paid ads.
For instance, combine Google Ads with social media (meta) ads to create staggering visibility. With your targeting set right, you can convert across both tools. Here are some detailed strategies to enhance your Google Ads campaigns:
Match Ad Copy with Store Content
Ensure consistency between your ad text and landing page content. For instance, if you advertise “handmade leather bags,” the landing page should feature those products prominently.
Include Negative Keywords
Filter out unrelated searches with negative keywords. For example, if you sell luxury watches, you might use “cheap” as a negative keyword to avoid clicks from budget shoppers.
Focus on Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords like “online luxury travel item shops” attract customers with specific buying intent (ready to purchase), often resulting in higher conversion rates and more sales.
To convert with meta ads:
Target the Right Audience
Use Facebook and Instagram’s detailed targeting options to reach your ideal customers. You can target based on interests, behaviors, demographics, or even create lookalike audiences given your existing customer base.
Include Engaging Visuals
High-quality images and videos that capture your product’s details can increase the likelihood of gaining the attention of prospects, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
A/B Test Your Ad Copies
Test different ad creatives, headlines, and calls to action to see which performs best. For example, you might test two different images of your candles to see which drives more clicks.
If you’re not sure you’re setting up your ads the right way, contact an expert.
Implement Email Marketing
Email marketing is integral to business growth. Nine in ten users check their emails everyday, and 59% of buyers admit that emails have previously impacted their purchase decision. Email marketing converts even more than social media marketing, with 9 in 10 marketers using emails as the primary method for generating leads.
To maximize email marketing:
Set Up Email Popups
Create email popups with popup apps like Adoric. You can explore a range of email templates that lets you capture your buyers’ emails and build an email list.
Want to gather email leads while still providing your customers with value? Create a free gift email popup that offers a lead magnet once your customer submits their email information.
Share Timely Deals via Email
Launching a new product or restocking on a bestselling product? Offer your buyers the option to get notified via email. If you’re running a discount or promo, or planning a seasonal or anniversary sale, distributing emails to your subscribers converts seven times more than normal emails would.
Repurpose Blog Content via Email
Your buyers, like you, are busy individuals. So provide value to them by sharing links to your published content – blog and social media. Include a crisp call-to-action so they know what awaits them. The more they engage with your content, the more likely they are to turn to your store when they need what you offer.
Create Multiple Content Channels.
70% of e-commerce customers prefer to hop across channels before committing to a purchase. And these customers spend at least 10% more per purchase than the average buyer.
Create content across Twitter and Instagram. Repurpose your Instagram reels into TikTok posts and YouTube shorts. Combine two or more tweets into a Facebook or LinkedIn post. For effective omnichannel content distribution:
Maintain brand voice
Your audience should receive the same “vibe” across your content channels. Use similar visuals on platforms that favor images and videos. Recycle your call-to-actions from newsletters to tweets. Reflect your brand colors on your website’s landing page, your social media banners, etc.
Promote store content
When distributing content, don’t be modest with the frequency of promotions. You don’t always have to post about your products, but customers should get a good feel of what you sell and who you sell to when they leave any of your pages.
Twiice Boutique, a modern Australian fashion brand who converts with Adoric, keeps the same brand consistency on YouTube, Instagram and website. It’s easy to see that both images – though on different platforms – speak of the same brand.
Set Up a Loyalty Program
It costs at least 15% more investment to attract new customers than it costs to keep current ones. Rewards and coupons are great customer retention tools, which ensures continuous conversions and increased sales.
With a well-designed loyalty program, you can foster customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and build a network of brand advocates who think of your store whenever they or their acquaintances need a product you offer.
To do this:
Personalize Your Coupons
Tailoring rewards based on individual customer preferences can further boost engagement. For example, if you run a Shopify store selling skincare products, you could offer personalized discounts on products that match a customer’s previous purchases or interests.
Manage Your Loyalty Programs with the Right Apps
Shopify offers various apps to set up and manage loyalty programs, such as Smile.io or LoyaltyLion. These apps can help you create customizable reward programs, track customer activity, and integrate with your store’s existing systems.
Make sure your customers are aware of the loyalty program by promoting it on your website, through email marketing, and via social media. Smile.io lets you customize your loyalty program as care coins that buyers redeem on subsequent purchases.
You can also award a reward system like Mirenesse, Australia’s leading sustainable cosmetic brand, does. Their two-level loyalty program rewards buyers with two points and one point each per $1 spent. The points earns them perks such as free shipping and birthday shout-outs
Create Social Proof
Word-of-mouth marketing, through user feedback and reviews, fosters brand trust. When buyers can see other people leave a good word about their sales experience, they’re more likely to buy from you. The more reviews you get, the better your social proof.
Below is a screenshot of users’ feedback about Adoric. Having social proof – via user reviews – is like having someone leave a good word for you in your absence.
To enable customers to leave user reviews in your store, you need to add a third-party review app from Shopify. From your Shopify admin, enable customers to leave reviews on all products by navigating to the “Customers Account” tab in your settings.
If you’re not sure how to get reviews without coming across as intrusive, check this guide on getting positive reviews for Shopify.
Explore the best way to pre-launch in 2024 here.
Provide 24/7 Customer Support
Integrating live chat into your store is one of the quickest ways to suggest convenience to customers. With live chat, you interact with your visitors in real-time and provide instant support whenever they need one. Customers are thus more enthusiastic to start shopping.
MVMT integrates a live chat feature on their website. New and returning customers can send a message and get their questions or concerns clarified within minutes. This shortens the purchase cycle for many buyers.
Adoric prioritizes 24/7 customer support. You can directly chat with the support team from your Shopify dashboard and get responses within an hour. On the Shopify app store, a customer notes, “Excellent customer service. They answer very quickly and provide quick solutions.”
We recommend installing a live chat app in your Shopify store to provide real-time support to customers.
Deliver Quality Service.
Good customer service improves Shopify sales. It’s so important that Hubspot, a global leading resource for all things marketing, researched the impacts of quality service on sales.
To create a quality customer service experience:
Ensure High Quality Products
Regularly review and test your products to ensure they meet or exceed customer expectations. When customers receive products that are well-made and perform as promised, they are more likely to return and recommend your store to others. At least 8 in 10 customers say so.
Improve Shipping and Delivery
In addition to product quality, provide transparent shipping information and ensure timely deliveries. You can offer tracking numbers and updates so customers can monitor the status of their orders in real-time.
Encourage Customer Feedback.
Invite customers to share their experience shopping with you. Use surveys, reviews, and direct customer feedback to understand their experiences and expectations. Make it easy for customers to provide feedback, as this improves the client-seller relationship.
Persuade with Free Shipping
Customers expect free shipping, so much that this is a major reason why customers abandon their carts. The right way to handle free shipping is to:
Set Within Profit Margins
Don’t set free shipping that would cut into your costs. If, for example, you earn a 12% profit on every unit of an item sold, you can set a free shipping of 3% per unit, leaving you with a 9% profit.
Use Free Shipping Ranges
Your free shipping range should be defined. You can define this based on the total number of items bought or total cost of items bought. MVMT grants free shipping for purchases worth $75+.
Integrate into Your Loyalty Program.
Unsurprisingly, 40% of buyers are willing to sign up for a loyalty program if it comes with a free shipping package.
You can also combine free shipping with FOMO to persuade customers. For example, you can create push notifications containing social proofs (customers earning free shipping for completing an order).
Approaching a peculiar sales season? You can offer free shipping to boost sales during this period. Customers will hold up on purchasing an item until a special sales season if it includes free shipping.
Factors That May Cause Low Sales on Shopify
Some of the factors below can prompt low sales, even if you’re not conscious of them:
- Low traffic: If you’re a new Shopify seller, your store may not pull as much traffic as you’d imagine. To fix this, invest in promotion and marketing.
- Competitive pricing: Setting frequently low prices, in trying to outbid your competitors, could turn away customers looking to purchase high value products.
- Poor user experience: 67% of shoppers complain about a poor navigation experience when mobile shopping. This can pummel your sales level.
- Complicated checkout processes: If your checkout is complex and confusing, most customers will not bother to complete their purchases. Reduce the number of fields. Work with progress bars so buyers can track their progress.
- Lack of upsell and cross-sell strategies: Good upselling strategies shorten your customers’ shopping time. If you’re not upselling or cross-selling on Shopify, you’re missing out on opportunities to sell more products.
Expert Summary
“Many Shopify sellers struggle to reach their target revenues due to a mismatch of strategies that work. The strategies reviewed in this article can help you improve your sales experience, showing how to attract and retain customers, increase conversions, market with social media, and more. Put these to work to better your results.” – Tal Revivo, CEO, Adoric.
Conclusion
E-commerce is on an upward growth trajectory. Position your store to stand out from the competitors with the strategies covered in this article.
You can simply start by defining your brand strategy, figuring out why customers should buy from you. You should also set up converting popups for creating an email list, promoting offers, and recruiting returning customers.
Want to get more results with Shopify sales? Install the Adoric Shopify app to set up converting popups. With only $5, you can join 3000+ Shopify merchants who create high-converting campaigns with Adoric. Click the link below to get started.
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