Shopify is an amazing ecommerce platform - no doubt about that. But like with any platform, sales won’t happen on their own 🤷
In this episode, we're talking about real-life tactics that will help you get those first (and most difficult) sales and continue attracting customers.
Specifically, we'll cover the following strategies:
Prepare your pen and paper, because you'll probably have plenty of ideas while listening.
An expanded text version of this episode is published on our blog.
Here are resources you might want to bookmark:
How to grow your list using Shopify email popups
How to promote coupon codes on Shopify
How to upsell products on Shopify
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
Shopify is an amazing ecommerce platform - no doubt about that. But like with any platform, sales won’t happen on their own 🤷
In this episode, we're talking about real-life tactics that will help you get those first (and most difficult) sales and continue attracting customers.
Specifically, we'll cover the following strategies:
Prepare your pen and paper, because you'll probably have plenty of ideas while listening.
An expanded text version of this episode is published on our blog.
Here are resources you might want to bookmark:
How to grow your list using Shopify email popups
How to promote coupon codes on Shopify
How to upsell products on Shopify
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
Hi,
You're listening to Getsitecontrol Insider. And today we're talking about selling on Shopify. If you've just launched your store, and now thinking about ways to get more sales - stay tuned. We have plenty of ideas.
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Shopify is an amazing platform that can help you launch an ecommerce store quickly and efficiently. But like with any platform, sales won’t happen on their own.
Making sales on Shopify can be as simple as reaching out to your friends, or as complicated as launching a complex Facebook ads funnel. But we all need to start somewhere!
In this episode, we’ll talk about winning those first conversions and increasing your momentum, so you could make even more sales as you progress.
Specifically, we'll cover the following strategies:
But before we jump to those strategies, let’s answer a very popular question.
How long does it take to get sales on Shopify?
The length of time it will take for you to get your first sale on Shopify depends on a variety of factors:
For instance, it may take forever to make a sale if you have no existing network and launched a site that doesn’t make sense in the current market.
If your products aren’t priced adequately, or if you don’t offer incentives like free shipping over a certain amount and coupons for first-time buyers, it will be difficult to pierce through the market.
That’s especially relevant if you are operating in a competitive niche.
However, you can still expect to make your first sale on Shopify in a respectable amount of time (a few weeks or months) even without a large existing network. The key is to leverage what you have and optimize your store.
So, let's assume you’ve done your due diligence with market research and already have a store up and running.
Your first step should be figuring out ways to get traffic.
Here’s why getting targeted traffic is key for your store.
Many newbie store owners rush to drive traffic – ANY type of traffic – to their store in order to make sales quickly.
Yes, getting traffic should be your first objective to get sales on Shopify.
However, this can result in a massive waste of your resources if you try to send the wrong people to your store!
The wrong people won’t buy – not because your store sucks, but because your products and your brand aren’t meant for them.
When using paid traffic, you can create highly targeted methods to attract the right crowd to your site. But before you’ve had real buyers, you won’t be 100% certain of exactly who those right people are.
This is why you can start by leveraging your free sources of traffic first.
Step 1: Leverage free sources of traffic
By tapping into free sources of traffic, you’ll start generating analytics on your Shopify store. You’ll see what type of people visit, who opts in, who leaves without performing any action, and ultimately, who actually ends up spending money with you.
Once you have that data, you’ll be able to target lookalike audiences using paid traffic methods.
Here is what you can do:
Step 2: Create and monetize an email list
Now that you have free traffic coming in from your previous efforts, you need to maximize the value of each visitor. You can do that by creating an email list and optimizing your Shopify store not just to make sales, but to turn visitors into subscribers, too.
Having email subscribers interested in your product means you’ll be able to reach them and using the right tactics, get repetitive sales on your Shopify store.
Before you start collecting emails from your store visitors, you should have an idea of what your communication with them will look like and how your list will help you get more sales. That means you need to come up with a minimum vital email marketing strategy.
Once you have it outlined, you will need to sign up for an email marketing platform. There are countless options available on the market, such as Klaviyo, Drip, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, and more.
Now, you may be wondering how you can grow your email list.
That's actually easy. As an ecommerce shop owner, you have simple ways to entice your visitors into subscribing. You can offer a discount, a free add-on product, free shipping, or multiplied loyalty points to entice them to join your list.
Once you've built a decent-size email list and selected an email marketing platform, you can create pre-determined email sequences that will trigger when your subscribers act in a certain way. For example:
You should also consider segmenting your subscribers based on their purchasing history. Segmentation is important because it ensures you showcase relevant products based on the subscriber’s interests. And relevancy ensures you get more sales.
Step 3: Get more Shopify sales with paid traffic
If you have followed all the previous steps so far, you should have made at least a handful of sales.
This means you will have rich data on what real buyers actually look like – instead of relying on educated assumptions. It’s time to use that data to scale your efforts and get even more sales.
Here is what you can do:
Launch Facebook and Instagram ads. With Facebook and Instagram ads, you can scale the amount of traffic you’re getting to your site, and thus make more sales.
On Facebook, you can target a variety of different people, based on:
There are many ways you can attract the attention of your audience with ads. You can offer a discount, point out the main benefits of your product and all the perks that come with shopping on your store.
Plus, you can retarget warm traffic to get sales on Shopify. Warm traffic includes people who already visited your website or who are on your email list – to remind them that they left something in their cart, or that the product they looked at before is running out of stock soon.
In addition to Facebook ads, you can use Google ads
Google Ads tend to be more expensive per click. However, that comes with the added benefit of targeting only people who are looking for something in particular!
Google Ads are those search results you see at the top when you search for something on Google. They’re always marked as an ad.
Another idea is partnering with influencers for paid shoutouts
Regular ads aren’t the only way to make sales on Shopify anymore. Influencer marketing can be incredibly powerful to bring you a surge of sales – as long as you choose the right type of influencer for your audience.
Keep in mind that the bigger the audience, the more expensive it will be to work with an influencer. You can always start out small to test the waters first and see how certain audiences respond to your products.
Step 4: Optimize your store to make more sales
When you have tons of traffic coming through your store, you’re bound to make at least a few sales. However, you can always improve to maximize the value of each visitor.
Here is how:
Add a live chat on your Shopify store
Your visitors may have questions about one of your products or require assistance before they are ready to buy. If you don’t provide that support, they may decide it’s not worth the trouble and decide not to buy.
Avoid this by adding a live chat directly on your Shopify store. And don’t be intimidated by the idea of being online 24/7. You can always set up the chat button to stop displaying during the non-working hours or you can provide an option to leave a message.
Insert reviews with user-generated content
Remember when we discussed asking for reviews?
Make sure you make the most of those reviews by displaying them on your website. Reviews can show up on product pages directly, on your home page, and a dedicated Testimonials page.
To easily implement a reviews section on your Shopify store, you can use dedicated apps like Yotpo or its alternatives.
Start a loyalty program
Each paying customer could be generating even more paying customers. This will help you reduce your cost per purchase and allow you to reinvest more profits into improving your site, growing your team, or scaling your paid traffic.
Loyalty programs work extremely well for this. Not only can your customers gather points for their purchases, but you should consider rewarding them for referring their friends and family.
Optimize your site for mobile
If your Shopify store isn’t already optimized for mobile, you’re losing a huge opportunity to make more sales.
In the US alone, the mobile ecommerce market is estimated to grow to $3.56 in 2021.
A clunky mobile experience is most likely making you lose out on countless potential customers. Invest in a mobile version of your website, and if you’re already generating traffic, you should start making more sales on Shopify just from that effort.
Optimize your product pages
Your product pages can be stripped down and basic, with a few images and a product description… or, they can be loaded with bells and whistles. Our suggestion? Test out various additions on your product pages and see what works best for you.
For instance, you can try adding product quantities, especially if you’re almost out of stock.
If you offer financing, you can try mentioning this on your product page to see if this will help you make more sales.
If you’re in the middle of a sale, you can also add a countdown timer to add scarcity.
Create upsells for your products
When a visitor adds one of your products to their cart, they’ve shown an interest in spending money with you. You have an opportunity to make more sales on Shopify by offering them related products.
You can show upsells and cross-sells on a popup when they add an item to the cart, or at checkout directly.
To implement this tactic, you can look for dedicated upsell & cross-sell apps in the Shopify app store. Or you can manually add pop-up recommendations to the selected pages of your store using Getsitecontrol.
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The world of ecommerce is vast, and this is only the starting point to help you make sales on Shopify. Your first sales will most likely be the most difficult to obtain, but once that first step is taken, you will be equipped with the momentum you need to build on your success.
Make sure to check the links in the description for more advice.
Thank you for listening.
Until next time!