Platforms like Shopify have made online shopping easy and convenient. And while the setup is pretty straightforward, things start getting tricky when it comes to consumer focus.
Whether you are just starting out or already own an established shopping destination, you might face specific difficulties with traffic, either with getting it or understanding why its high volumes do not bring sales.
This is where effective Shopify marketing strategies come in handy. The latter helps build better brand awareness, gain and retain clients, and improve sales.
This article will explore the reasons for unsuccessful sales and explain what marketing strategies are there to help you build a brand that works, gets revenue, and provides a decent consumer experience.
Reasons for Poor Sales
One of the problems that many Shopify sellers face is a lack of sales with good traffic. So what’s the trick?
While good traffic is likely to bring in your potential target audience, the experience they get with the brand through the website, various social media channels, and consumer support influences their decision to stay or leave.
When people don’t trust the brand they are just getting acquainted with, the possibility of sticking around is extremely low. Many things might change their mind. Your website can lack the required information; its navigation can be relatively poor, it might not address consumer queries or its average handle time is exceptionally high.
It is about many small things that build your brand’s image.
Let’s learn about Shopify marketing strategies, how they work and how they can help you increase sales.
Marketing Strategies to Increase Sales
Create Engaging CTAs
⇒ Problem
Many brands either stack their website with multiple CTAs that confuse people or leave a few ones that are hard to find. When consumers visit the site and see too many buttons that encourage people to click on them, they will likely leave. The same happens when potential clients want to buy, but there are no signs of the needed call to action to complete it.
⇒ Solution
To nudge purchases, you need to ensure there are clear and engaging CTAs both on the website and social media. Besides, making your Instagram and Facebook feeds shoppable contributes to converting people into clients. The latter allows Instagram users, for instance, to shop directly from your Shopify catalog while remaining on the platform:
Source: PageFly
The easier the process of completing a purchase, the better.
Collect Consumer Contacts
⇒ Problem
Not collecting information from people who just visit your website, blog post, or social media page will not lead you to fantastic sales as you miss out on potential clients. There are so many touch points where you can get consumer contact information. Missing on adding to the contact base people who are about to abandon a shopping cart, for instance, or excluding from email marketing inactive users, will result in a missed opportunity to return them.
⇒ Solution
While people love surfing the Internet for things to buy, not everyone makes instant purchases. Someone needs time, others – tons of reviews to analyze before buying. Conduct a Shopify data export, segment users, and think how you can reactivate them and return:
- Collect phone numbers to send direct messages about sales and current offers
- Send reminders about abandoned shopping carts and add an additional offer to encourage them to move to a checkout page
- Promote on social media not only on your brand page but also through direct messages
- Automate remarketing through emails and web pushes
People tend to forget abandoned carts, websites they visited a few weeks ago, and unfinished queries through direct messages. If you have consumer contacts, you can remind them about your shop, inform them about the newest launch, a good discount on products they have recently viewed, or tell them about the perks they gain by joining your referral program.
Research your target audience
⇒ Problem
Not knowing who your buyers are might result in ineffective Shopify marketing strategies. If the traffic is coming from non-buyer personas and you are not processing them, you might be missing a huge segment of potential clients to attract and retain.
⇒ Solution
You need to research who is visiting your Instagram profiles, where the traffic is coming from the most, who these people are, their age, gender, interests, what they search for when surfing similar sites to yours:
Understanding your consumers will help you with personalized communication, better retargeting campaigns, product segmentation on the website, and regaining consumer focus.
Invest into SEO
⇒ Problem
Many brands either ignore SEO or treat it incorrectly. Many companies roll out websites without SEO optimization, not thinking about indexation, and hoping to gain traffic. Others believe that SEO is about creating blog posts and stuffing them with keywords. Not investing in SEO might result in lousy site rankings, if any at all.
⇒ Solution
Over 50% of online shopping starts with search engines, so it is vital to present the right searchers at the right time to ensure clients click on the page with the exact information they are looking for. To ensure you have an SEO-friendly website:
- Search relevant keywords and insert them into page titles, image alt texts, and meta descriptions
- Ensure site URLs match the content you present
- Optimize site speed to avoid losing search rankings
- Make use of SEO features offered by Shopify
- Interlink your website pages with one another
There should be no duplicate content, not optimized images, or super slow loading pages. It is a direct influence on the consumer experience with the brand. Make it a good one.
Boost sales with Amazon and other marketplaces
⇒ Problem
With so many marketplaces out there, it is a huge mistake not to use them when trying to boost sales and improve your brand awareness. You are missing out on targeting potential clients and getting your brand out there on a wider market.
⇒ Solution
Marketplaces like Amazon can help you gain a lot of new clients interested in the products you offer. There are people who are used to certain marketplaces and rarely go shopping beyond them, so you will benefit from showcasing your brand there. The more places you cover, the better sales you get.
While you can benefit from working on such platforms, every marketplace comes with its own policy to follow. Don’t ignore it and ensure your brand’s page ticks all the policy boxes to avoid bans and negative consequences.
Grow product awareness through relevant platforms
⇒ Problem
One of the many mistakes on the way to a successful Shopify marketing strategy is not building brand awareness with the help of different social platforms. Sticking to a single website or a social media page will not help you cover a bigger audience and increase sales (unless you are happy with the number of consumers you currently have).
⇒ Solution
Utilizing other platforms, staying active on forums, and letting people know what your brand offers will help you attract potential clients, increase trust towards your services and bring in more revenue. If you are active only on Instagram, time to launch a brand’s website and ensure people have multiple channels to view your goods and complete a purchase.
Join relevant online communities and engage with consumers to reach more people faster. There are many groups on Facebook, topics on Quora, and online blogs dedicated to different industries and interests. Research the relevant ones, see where the target audience stays active the most, and make sure you promote your brand there.
Create partnerships with influencers
⇒ Problem
If you are not trying to collaborate with influencers, you are missing a chance to attract a new audience and get them acquainted with what you offer. However, while influencer marketing is vital, picking up a random blogger and asking to promote your brand may result in unpleasant consequences too. If your clients don’t like the influencer you picked or disagree with their social position, you might lose consumers instead of gaining them.
⇒ Solution
It is essential to collaborate with influencers whose opinion is valued by your target audience and relevant to your Shopify store. Here’s where you need good research before starting. As influencer marketing can bring massive traffic, you don’t want to pick up the wrong person to be your brand’s image. Besides, the influencer should also share your values and convey them correctly.
Once you have chosen the influencer, there are a few ways to collaborate with them:
- Sponsorship: here, you can either send them free products to test or pay for their review on their social media platform. They can feature it either through an Instagram post or include it in a Youtube video. Here is Gigi Hadid promoting Maybelline mascara in her Instagram post:
Source: Instagram
- Featuring bloggers in ads to make the latter more attractive and noticeable for clients. People tend to gain trust towards brands chosen by well-known influencers
- Working on products together to get them designed and named after them. A limited product line can add to exclusivity and boost brand awareness.
Use sensory marketing
⇒ Problem
In the new online shopping reality, it has become rather difficult to win over new consumers through a computer monitor. If you don’t give them enough details about products you sell, the possibility that they complete a purchase with you is rather low.
⇒ Solution
To show consumers they are dealing with a trustworthy brand, ensure they are able to get a feeling of the product they are about to buy as if seeing it in person. Add 360-degree images, photos from multiple angles, upload videos, and complete product descriptions. For clothes and shoes, ensure there is a clear size guide. If your brand has an Instagram page, add photos from other clients in highlights. The latter helps see how things look in real life without added brightness and professional light.
Implement wishlists to encourage future purchases
⇒ Problem
When people go hunting for a particular item, be it clothes, shoes, or electronics, they usually check the price and prefer to monitor it to get things on sale. If you don’t inform them that the price has decreased on time, they will probably get it from a competitor.
⇒ Solution
Implementing wishlists and certain notifications about price falls work great when it comes to consumer retention. Wishlists allow people to add things they love but are not able to buy yet or things out of stock. In both cases, when the price changes or the product is back in stock, you will be able to notify them and encourage them to complete a purchase.
Launch a referral program
⇒ Problem
When crafting a Shopify marketing strategy, there are certain mistakes made when it comes to referral programs. Some brands don’t have any. Others make them too complicated and obviously invaluable. People can clearly identify a referral program that is nowhere near to benefit them. Not only will people not want to choose the brand, but they will also get a rather negative first impression which is hard to change.
⇒ Solution
Referral programs are a great encouragement for clients. The latter get reward points for purchases, signing up for a newsletter, or even product reviews. Points can be exchanged for gifts or used to cover a certain part of the product price. Besides, such referral programs offer other pleasant perks like special discounts, birthday gifts and help bring people back and repeat purchases with you:
North Face brand referral program
Source: TheNorthFace
Conclusion
When it comes to a successful Shopify marketing strategy, the latter is all about ensuring your clients, existing and potential ones, are getting a smooth and pleasant experience through each step of their engagement with the brand.
While there are a lot of valuable strategies, it is crucial to test each of them and see whether it works with your brand and adds to positive changes. There is no strategy that is the ultimate solution for each company. Something that works for your competitor might end up a failure for your brand. Implement things deliberately, make timely analysis and improve if needed.
