5 easy ways to increase sales and conversions on your Shopify website.
With over 2.7 million live websites in the US alone and 33% of the market share, Shopify is the most popular hosted eCommerce solution. The company has been on a tear lately in their efforts to topple Amazon and Walmart for the top-spot in retail. Throughout 2022, they’ve entered partnerships with Google, Crypto.com, and YouTube to help attract and support small-medium businesses (SMBs) and combined with their longtime connection to the hit ABC reality show Shark Tank, Shopify stands as the leading eCommerce software provider for both new and upcoming online business ventures as well as famous established brands such as Slate, Vanity Fair, Sears, and Vogue.
Shopify’s public brand awareness, as well as their easy-to-use eCommerce software, makes them one of the most requested solutions by our clients. But with so many online retailers using the platform, many of whom have achieved great success using Shopify, not all of them know how to harness Shopify’s sales prowess effectively and efficiently. At Diztinct, we are officially-recognized Shopify Design Partners and with our extensive experience in creating custom Shopify websites, we have built this list of 5 easy ways for Shopify users to help boost their sales and conversions.
Getting the Most Out of Your Shopify Website
Shopify offers three subscription package tiers and the level of functionality depends on the selected option. Naturally, it makes sense to choose the package which best suits your budget and business scale but all three Shopify subscription packages come packed with useful sales and marketing features to give your online store an advantage over your competitors and those on competing platforms.
Shopify makes posting products and selling online quick and easy, but the software alone can’t change your business overnight. For Shopify users that find themselves wanting a bit more out of their software, here’s our list of 5 tips to help improve sales and conversion rates on your Shopify website.
- Personalize the Shopping Experience
- Add Trust Signals
- Connect to an EMail Marketing System
- Sell on Multiple Channels
- Market Yourself through Google and YouTube
Personalize the Shopping Experience
Having the right products and the right prices only goes so far; what it is that really draws consumers to your brand is the warm and fuzzy feeling they get through personalization. This study by Epison found that 80% of consumers were more likely to do business with companies that went above and beyond in providing personalized shopping experiences. Meanwhile, another study conducted by McKinsey & Company showed that 71% of consumers expected a degree of personalization in their shopping experiences. Whereas in a physical retail environment, shoppers interact with live humans, the eCommerce experience can be inherently cold and impersonal. But by creating a website that is user-friendly, creating campaigns that appeal to the emotions of shoppers, and offering special incentives to make shoppers feel welcome and invited, eCommerce retail can, in many ways, surpass the physical shopping experience.
You can improve the shopping experience for your visitors and returning customers by:
- Add Website Accessibility – Web accessibility makes it easier for all people to visit and use your website. This can entail simple navigation, dark mode, mobile-friendly design, and ensuring that your website’s loading speed performance is at its maximum to compensate for varying degrees of connectability across users from multiple regions.
- Offer Personalized Product Recommendations – Upsells and cross-sells are good ways to increase a shopper’s average ticket value by suggesting accessory items or alternative products within a common category. However, you can achieve greater success by specifically targeting products based on the shopper’s past website activities such as searches and page views. This can help custom-tailor suggested items that appeal directly to the shopper. Apps such as Product Options & Customizer and Customify can add these functions to your Shopify store.
- Allow for User-Generated Content – User-generated content is any media created by a user that can be disseminated to other users. The most effective type of user-generated content in retail is the product review; past customers can share their experiences with specific pieces of merchandise–or your brand itself–for others to view. It’s word-of-mouth marketing for the 21st century. With this, be mindful to not give your visitors and customers any reason to leave negative reviews by providing the best and most courteous customer service possible as to not give them any reason to publicly trash your company. Remember: people don’t really pay attention to the mundane, but they’ll more than happily share their best–and definitely, their worst–experiences to others.
- Provide Multiple Payment Options – If you offer consumers a variety of ways for them to complete their purchases on your website, you can reduce abandoned carts and bounce rates, increase conversion rates and revenue, encourage repeat customers, and improve trust between your business and the public. By using alternative checkouts such as PayPal Checkout, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, you reduce your risk of identity theft and speed up the checkout process. You can also entice shoppers to make purchases by offering a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service which splits the total purchase price into multiple portions.
- Speed Up the Checkout Process – Checkout speed is just as important to online shoppers as is website loading speed. One-click checkout streamlines the checkout process and reduces bounce rates and abandoned carts. Shopify’s own Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify merchants. The app saves, encrypts, and autofills checkout fields on other Shop carts, making items ready to buy in one tap. New customers can also use Shop Pay’s 1-click checkout, even if they haven’t previously purchased from your store. Shop Pay checkouts have a 1.72 times higher average checkout-to-order rate than those going through regular checkouts.
Add Trust Signals
Because eCommerce deals with the handling and transmission of sensitive personal data, first-time shoppers–including those who are shopping with major retailers for the very first time–are often wary and distrustful when visiting a new retail website. Trust signals help put the visitor at ease, letting them know that your business is legit and that you will protect their personal information as vigilantly as your own. This is especially important as Internet crime has been on a steady rise, increasing year by year. Displaying the official logos of your chosen credit card processors, as well as providing secure hosting and SSL certificates, can earn trust with your new website users. In addition to the cybersecurity aspect, some shoppers are just naturally wary of unfamiliar businesses. Put their minds at ease by openly advertising your shipping and privacy policies, offer a money-back guarantee, and make sure that your return and refund guidelines are easy-to-digest.
Connect to an EMail Marketing System
EMail marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase sales, but it can be a time-consuming process and if you have hundreds (or even thousands) of users subscribed, it can even be an impossible one to do manually. EMail marketing systems such as MailChimp or Shopify’s own Shopify EMail make it easy to create professional EMails and automatically distribute them en masse to your entire EMail subscription list. You can use these mass EMails to advertise special sales offers and promos, advertise new arrivals, or to just generate business interest at will. For specific use EMails, there are options within the Shopify App Store to coincide with whatever function you need. For upsell items, you can choose One’s Upsell. For personalized marketing, try Klaviyo or YotPo’s SMSBump. Marketing through EMail can help maintain the relationship between you and your past customers, with the intent on keeping the lines of communication open to result in additional future purchases over time.
Sell on Multiple Channels
You can broaden your customer reach by importing your Shopify inventory and selling through third-party channels such as Amazon, eBay, and Google–all of which have just as much, if not more, public brand awareness and consumer trust as the Shopify name itself. Multi-channel selling helps spread your company’s name and reputation by piggybacking off of other established brands. Selling through multiple channels or third-party retailers can improve your SEO ranks, lower your company’s overhead, provide customers with greater support, and remove some of the risks associated with the technical involvement of running a website.
In 2015, Shopify introduced Multichannel Shopify to Shopify’s POS system. Multichannel Shopify simplifies management and sale of products across all channels for merchants. Many online and offline sales channels are now available to modern merchants, resulting in a spread of their customers and sales. Merchants can sell their products online, in brick-and-mortar locations, in pop-up shops, on online marketplaces, and on social media in addition to their online stores.
Market Yourself through Google and YouTube
Google and YouTube are the two most popular websites in the world. Therefore, it makes sense to use the marketing and advertising abilities of both to boost your own brand awareness to the public. Just as they’ve done with Shopify competitor BigCommerce, Google eliminated the required fees that merchants had to put up front in order to sell through Google. The COVID pandemic brought attention to SMBs that were struggling against Amazon’s stranglehold over eCommerce, so Google specifically launched new campaigns to cater to these businesses specifically. Google’s Google Sales Channel for Shopify takes advantage of Google’s free listings and allows Google stores to sell their products onto other third-party websites, thus improving the customer reach by latching onto the brand recognition of other major retailers. In addition to the Google Sales Channel for Shopify, last July saw the announcement of a new formal partnership between Shopify and YouTube. Shopify aims to cater specifically to the growing market of digital content creators and social media influencers building their own eCommerce stores. According to YouTube, creators can incorporate Shopify into their YouTube channels in a variety of ways, including below videos and during livestreams. Viewers will be able to monitor in real time whether items go out-of-stock as inventory syncs with Shopify. Furthermore, YouTube will enable viewers to purchase products directly on the platform without having to leave the platform, in addition to enabling on-site checkout for US-based creators. The goal of Google is to transform YouTube into a major eCommerce player; the company wants users to look to YouTube when they need to buy and where to buy. Both YouTube and Shopify aim to make this process as seamless and unobtrusive as possible.
Conclusion
The preceding 5 tips are intended to help Shopify store owners and operators learn how to use Shopify’s native features and additional apps and integrations for the purpose of improving earnings, customer retention, and promoting business growth. However, these tips are not standalone remedies and should be incorporated into a larger, more comprehensive overall marketing plan. If you require further assistance in improving your sales with the Shopify platform, Diztinct can help. We are truly dedicated eCommerce experts and professionals with nearly two decades of experience in custom website design and development. We also provide supplementary services to help you sell more online, in addition to our custom web design and development solutions. When you hire Diztinct to handle your Shopify website project, you can purchase these services individually or as part of an eCommerce website package.
Are you ready to give your website and your business the Diztinct advantage over the competition? If so, let’s talk. Get in touch with us today and get ready to make your website work for you.