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In the last 5 years, Amazon’s biggest competitor in the e-commerce space Shopify has become a quick way for new entrepreneurs to enter the e-commerce selling from home space without having to spend thousands of dollars on a brand new website. In fact, with about 50 bucks in your bank account and all your inventory work prepared, I think you could have a good-looking Shopify site up in 3 hours – but that doesn’t mean it will be successful. So today’s article will discuss all the best marketing practices you should know before starting your first Shopify website.
Building a Shopify Site is Not Cheap or a Get Rich Quick Option.
If you search on YouTube for common advice on starting an Ecommerce store, you will be bombarded with misleading thumbnails and clickbait titles like “17.25k in sales!” And “1 hour drop shipping tips.”
Here’s the real kicker, more than 90% of Shopify sites that get started have a tough time maintaining enough momentum to continue to justify the cost of a monthly Shopify plan.
That’s not because a monthly Shopify plan is too expensive and not worth it…
Even the basic Shopify plan comes with integrated CRM tools, domains, hosting packages, and even integrated tools like payment processors and email drip funnels that can come in as low as $15 per month.
As somebody who has worked with a lot of e-commerce sites, that is a very good deal. Just paying for a decent hosting package can cost as much as the base Shopify package, and that’s not to mention all the tools that you need to build yourself like integrations into online marketplaces like Facebook and Google.
No, the reason a lot of Shopify sites fail.. is a misunderstanding of what creates online store sales.
There are a couple of ways that you can go about getting more people to visit your store to buy something, but I would wager that almost every single free Shopify theme and even paid Shopify theme are going to make it very easy for new users to convert into sales on your website. So here are the top things that I think are important to know in order to increase the conversion on your store’s website.
1) Make sure Your Shopify Site is Optimized for SEO
2) Shopify Stores Require a Lot of Patience and Learning
Shopify has a lot of built-in tools that users can effectively turn into an enterprise-level CRM. However, most users will complete page setup, then focus most of their energy on figuring out how to bring people to their site. The problem with this attitude is it fails to recognize the importance of conversion rates.
Let’s divert from the digital space for a moment. Imagine you are at the mall looking for a pair of pants. There are 20+ stores that all want to sell you pants and most of them are right in your price range or just above your price range. If you want into a store and have trouble finding pants, wait times at the cashier’s stand are unclear and it’s unclear if they have your favorite pants in your size… You’re going to leave to find a store that has all these answers readily available.
Now let’s change this analogy to your online store. If you don’t have clear discounts, don’t show the products you are advertising first, and don’t have a clear checkout process… You are going to lose clients!
My advice is to take yourself through a single one-time shoppers experience. Most stores have to nail this UX 3-click funnel before they see actual growth.
Build a Shopify SMS and Email Marketing Plan Quickly.
Especially in e-commerce, users tend to make really quick decisions before leaving your website or converting to a sale. Your job is to make it really easy for users to determine if they want to a) buy a really cool product b) leave for something else that’s more their speed or c) sign up for emails or text messages to reconvert later on.
With this last option, most e-commerce stores fail to execute or fail to execute well. The biggest trend right now is SMS marketing. Converting individuals from semi-interested browsers to passionate buyers is extremely important and the SMS text is an easy low-friction way for people to give you their information to reconvert at a later date.
One page that does this really well is Thread Beast. Their text messages offer low-friction offers to keep their name brand at the top of the user’s mind while also delivering what feels like a good value offer. They also send messages infrequently enough that users don’t opt out of messages instantly.
Sms conversion rates and read-through rates are extremely impressive. 9.1% conversion and up to 30% read-through rates are almost as high as in the early days of email marketing.
I highly encourage new e-commerce businesses to hop into SMS marketing. It’s a great way to reconvert lost leads and an even better way to get information from lost web leads.
Even if you don’t use SMS marketing, make sure you give users options to reenter your site at a later date like email drops or site notifications on new blog posts.
Using Great Images for Shopify Products is Very Important.
Now I don’t mean professional-priced photography. I mean photos of your product that portray your product in the best possible manner.
Do you sell clothes? Are you showing your products to models that compliment your product? Are they against a proper white background? Do you also organize products in a way that helps upsell combinations of clothing?
Do you sell smaller products? Have you taken the time to get pictures of the way it looks in scale? Do your stock images LOOK like stock images?
The way your site looks in the image and video department is so so so important when it comes to selling products in Shopify that if you haven’t spent a few hours a week improving it, you aren’t competing at the same level as your competitors.
To Optimize Your Shopify Site for Organic Search, Write Blogs Weekly
I have seen this issue time and time again where people know that a blog ads some sort of value to their website but they don’t understand what value that is. So most users will add a couple block pages on their website about some of the features of their product or something about how the product is made in the good old United States.
It’s not that these content pieces are bad for your web page, but they add very little and are in the wrong place. These pieces of information or what we call unique value propositions, and they should be very brief and specific.
Furthermore they shouldn’t be any further than the third section on your homepage. When people land on your shop page, they should immediately be told the ways that you differ from every other product that’s similar to yours on the market and also be able to find that information extremely quickly.
But your blog is for an entirely different purpose. Your blog is not to talk about your product, it’s not to talk about what makes your product unique, it’s not even to talk about you… that’s what you’re about page is for.
Your blog page is where you need to talk about the problems that your clients face on a day-to-day basis that are adjacent to the product you might sell. The easiest example is a cooking page. Despite whatever a cooking page myself, they always have recommended recipes for users to find and readily participated. Some of the ingredients on that list might include some products that are sold through a shop page. However the primary incentive that is not to read about the ultimate products sold.
The ultimate purpose for the blog post in this situation, is deliver some sort of information to the user that is important to them to have. That might be a nutritional recipe for the holidays or a way to replicate homemade cinnamon rolls.
So whatever product manager needs to do, and talk to their users and understand what problems they experience in their own life, that might lead them to look up your website and then sell themselves on the product through your blog.
If you have any questions, leave a comment or reach out directly.
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Disclaimer: None of the information presented on this site constitutes legal, business, tax, or medical advice. In each scenario, it’s recommended to first chat with a medical, legal, business, or tax professional before making any decisions.
