Shopify is a brilliant ecommerce platform that makes it easy to get your store online.
But setting up your store is only the first step. You need customers.
So, how do you start generating more sales, or even your first sale?
We asked 22 Shopify store founders and marketing experts to share their best tips for getting more Shopify sales in 2021.
We've broken out the top 20 tactics, but you can read the individual responses at the end of the post.
1. Retarget with Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs)
(Source)
Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) are one of the best ways to create ads that are more targeted and more relevant. They automatically show the right products to people who have expressed interest on your website, in your app, or elsewhere on the Internet.
Basically, instead of creating ads for individual items in your catalog you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your product data feed for things you’d like to advertise.
In Shopify, you connect your product feed using the Facebook Product Feed app from the Shopify App Store to sync and fuel the DPAs automatically.
They are ideal for a warm audience who have already shown an interest in your products. Rather than just retarget visitors of specific pages with generic ad creatives, you can make the experience super personalized by showing them the exact product they were just looking at again.
As Aaron Orendorff says: "For remarketing, DPA are the money makers!"
2. Integrate Shopify with your Facebook shop
Facebook is an excellent platform for combining your social media and ecommerce marketing.
It’s relatively straightforward to set up your Facebook shop and start making sales. But it’s even better to integrate your Facebook shop directly with your Shopify store so that you don’t have to keep a separate inventory.
3. Use video testimonials on conversion pages
Customer reviews and testimonials are a powerful form of social proof that attracts and converts more customers. To ramp things up, you can use video testimonials to tell other shoppers what a fantastic experience you provide.
You can add video testimonials to any of your main conversion pages, including your product and collection pages, homepage, and checkout. Let your existing satisfied customers spread the word about your product quality and value, plus your first-class customer service.
Using a tool like VideoPeel, you can expect to increase conversions on your Shopify store by 20% or more:
4. Rent remarketing pixels from authority sites
Another way to get more sales for your Shopify store is to rent remarketing pixels from authority sites and highly-relevant niche blogs, and then retarget that audience with Facebook Ads for your store.
Because you’re targeting a highly-relevant and interested audience that is looking to buy the type of products you sell, you can reduce your ad budget considerably and get more sales faster.
It’s probably one of the easiest and most under-rated ways to get more sales. The only thing you have to do is optimize and test your ads for the best results.
5. Offer free shipping on minimum order values
Free shipping is a sure-fire winner when it comes to increasing online sales. If a customer has to choose between free and paid shipping for the same product on two possible stores, they’ll opt for the free shipping.
If you implement free shipping correctly, you can increase your average order value (AOV) significantly. So, rather than include free shipping on all orders, only offer it above a specific threshold.
For example, Vagabond Cookies doubled their AOV when they introduced free shipping on all orders $100 and over:
6. Launch Instagram Live shopping campaigns
Instagram is already proven as a product discovery and shopping channel:
- 70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery.
- 87% of people say that influencers have inspired them to make a purchase.
So, if you’ve not yet set up your Instagram shop, now would be a good time.
Recently Instagram added a new dimension with Live Shopping. Now you can showcase and sell your products, interact with your fans, and collaborate with influencers in real-time via an Instagram Live broadcast.
7. Add live chat on your Shopify store
According to research by the American Marketing Association, visitors who engage with your business using live chat are 3 times more likely to buy.
You can use live chat to engage visitors proactively and trigger messages based on combinations of browsing behavior, page visited, and more.
Adding a live chat app like JivoChat on your Shopify store allows you to answer shoppers’ questions and overcome their objections. It also provides an omnichannel experience, as you can contact people through live website chat, phone, email, Facebook, WhatsApp, or Apple Business Chat.
8. Add upsells and cross-sells at checkout
When a shopper adds one of your products to their shopping cart, you’ve got an excellent opportunity to increase the total order value by offering related products.
If it works for Amazon, it can work for you, too.
In Shopify, you can show upsells and cross-sells on a popup when a customer adds an item to their cart. Or, you could add a checkbox option at the checkout.
For example, when you add a product to your cart on Beardbrand, you get the chance to add a "Mystery Product" to your order:
9. Offer personalized product recommendations
Personalization is another marketing tactic you can use to get more sales. Personalized product recommendations are based on a visitor’s previous actions and preferences.
You can also tailor recommendations based on a shopper’s location. For example, if you know your visitor is from California, you might want to recommend swimwear, but if they’re from New York, you might want to offer something warmer.
For example, Alloy Apparel shows a personalized "most popular" carousel of products based on trending items local to the visitor:
10. Use exclusive discounts to build an email list
Building an email list is a tried-and-tested marketing strategy. The most significant benefit of email subscribers is that they’re an "owned audience" – in other words, you’re in control of when and how you contact them.
You can combine email marketing software with exclusive discounts in your Shopify store to build an email list. For example, you could use:
- Floating bars to display your current offer and encourage visitors to join the list.
- Exit-intent popups that display a special offer when visitors are about to leave your store.
- Slide-ins that trigger after a visitor spends a predefined period on a product page, like this example on the KEEN homepage:
11. Automate transactional email campaigns
You can also use transactional email marketing to get more sales on Shopify.
According to Experian, transactional email open rates are eight times higher than regular marketing emails because customers are expecting the information contained in them.
For instance, you could create specific email sequences that get triggered based on user behavior, such as:
a) A welcome sequence when people first subscribe:
Data from GetResponse showed that welcome emails have the highest open rates. On average, 82% of welcome emails get opened because customers expect them to land in their inbox.
b) A cart abandonment sequence when subscribers leave items in their cart:
According to the Baymard Institute, 69% of shopping carts get abandoned for various reasons, including:
- Unexpected shipping costs.
- Mandatory account creation.
- Complicated checkout process.
- Unsatisfactory returns policy.
- Website crashed.
c) A re-engagement sequence when subscribers stop opening your emails:
According to Email Monks, 45% of recipients who received a re-engagement email read the subsequent emails in the series:
12. Build "out of stock" waitlists
One way to generate more sales is to pre-sell items and see how many people place orders. You can use this tactic if you’re unsure whether a new product will appeal to your audience. Or, you can use it to generate scarcity, getting visitors to join your waitlist. When you know there’s enough demand for the product, you can contact people and let them know the product is now in stock.
For example, footwear brand KEEN gives shoppers the option to receive an email notification when their chosen product is available again:
13. List products on external marketplaces
Shopify includes an option to list your products on external marketplaces.
But why would you want to do that?
Well, marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon already have their own traffic. Plus, shoppers are more familiar with those places and might also have memberships like Amazon Prime, where they get free delivery.
For example, you can purchase Leather Honey products from Amazon as well as their Shopify store:
14. Bid on high-intent keywords
If there’s a lot of search demand for your products, but you are not ranking organically yet, then you can bid on Google ads using high-intent keyword modifiers like "buy", "discounts", and "product names" to attract purchase-intent buyers.
Read the official guide from Shopify: The Google Ads Playbook: 13 Campaign Types to get started.
15. Use post-purchase information to drive future campaigns
Collecting some additional information from customers during checkout and post-purchase can help you get more sales on Shopify. For instance, you could request the customer's birthday, gender, age, or other information to drive future marketing campaigns.
For example, post-purchase, you could encourage customers to sign up for a free account and "complete their profile" to receive incentives, such as a discount code off their next purchase or bonus points in your shopper reward program.
16. Focus on your storefront user experience
When you’re trying different tactics to increase sales, it’s easy to forget your Shopify storefront. Things to optimize include:
- Overall store design with colors, fonts, and mobile optimization.
- Getting the right balance between visuals and text.
- Easy navigation and menus, so visitors can find what they’re looking for.
- Building security and trust with established payment options.
17. Test ad creatives and audience targeting
When you’re running ads, it’s super important to test your ad creatives and audience targeting.
Running A/B split testing is the only way to find out which of your ad creatives works best. Is it the one with image A or image B? Is it the one with short copy or long copy? Does the ad resonate with a young audience? When you discover your best performing ad for the right audience, you can use it to drive more sales.
18. Set up a loyalty program
Word-of-mouth marketing is a guaranteed way to get more sales, and loyalty programs work exceptionally well for this.
Not only do your customers accumulate points for their purchases, but they also get rewarded for referring their friends and family.
You can implement a loyalty program on your Shopify store with dedicated apps, such as Smile, Growave, Rise, and more.
19. Partner with relevant influencers
Another way to grow sales is by partnering with relevant influencers. As long as you choose the right influencer for your audience and product, they can generate a substantial amount of traffic to your Shopify store.
If you’re just starting out, you can use micro-influencers with smaller niche audiences that cost less than mainstream influencers.
20. Optimize your Shopify store for mobile devices
In 2020, online orders via mobile devices had an average value of $90.82. Furthermore, almost 54% of all retail ecommerce is expected to come from mobile devices in 2021:
That’s why it’s so important to design your Shopify store for mobile from the start rather than trying to make it mobile-friendly afterward. Make sure you choose a mobile-optimized template for your store with an easy-to-read font, crystal clear images, and slick shopping cart functionality.
Aaron Orendorff
Common Thread Collective | VP of Marketing
First and foremost, build your Facebook account structure around single-product CBO (campaign budget optimized) funnels that combine prospecting and remarketing.
Set an overarching CPA target that is profitable — on either the first-purchase or within 60 days based on your recurring customer rate (LTV) — and simultaneously ensures you achieve at least 50 conversions per week. That’show many conversions Facebook needs to propel your campaign out of the Learning Phase (i.e., into truly optimized spending).
Second, from that base and within your remarketing ads, connect your product feed using the Facebook Product Feed app from the Shopify App Store to automatically sync and fuel DPAs (dynamic product ads). For remarketing, DPA are the money makers.
Jerry Abiog
Standards Insights LLC | Co-founder/CMO
Score your customers on their potential profitability based on R,F, M techniques. R=recency of last purchase, F=how often a customer has purchased, M=how much that customer has spent.
Patrick Tedjamulia
VideoPeel | Co-Founder & CEO
Video has ushered in a new phase of eCommerce focused on customer experience, and customer-generated video testimonials and reviews as a powerful way to show exactly what your customer experience entails.
Add video testimonials to your Shopify product page, homepage, collection pages, and check-out experience with our video players and let your existing, satisfied customers speak on behalf of your product, building authenticity, strengthening trust, and affirming product performance, quality, and value.
By using VideoPeel to automate the collection, management, and publishing of video testimonials, Shopify stores can increase conversions by 20% or more.
Zawad Iftikhar
SlyEcom | Founder
Easiest and most under-rated way to get sales for your shopify store is to rent marketing pixels of highly relevant niche blogs and authority sites and retarget that audience with Facebook Ads.
You are already targeting a highly interested audience who are looking for products you are selling and your ad costs are lower this way. Only thing you need to iterate and optimize is your creative.
Anna Rillahan
Talkoot | Director of Marketing
Tell a consistent, relevant, engaging story all the way down to the product page. Monitor your brand voice throughout the consumer journey (especially at the most critical moment, the PDP).
Consistency leads to trust. Trust leads to higher conversion, more loyal customers and fewer returns. Investing in traffic driving campaigns is great, but if your featured product pages feel like a departure from that conversation, you’re probably throwing away majority of those visitors you paid for.
Rewrite your product copy to be relevant in the current moment and match your outbound campaigns. There are some contextual cues like seasonality, holidays and events that are easy to plan for. Then there are the unexpected moments, like an election, run-away hit documentary or a global pandemic that aren’t as easy to plan for.
Being agile on your product page and keeping content fresh shows your shoppers you’re a brand that understands them. Stop neglecting the PDP. Inspired, detailed product stories are key to helping brands increase conversion, improve customer experience and strengthen brand loyalty.
But the PDP is often left out, missing key information, featuring meaningless bullets or worse, incorrect information that disrupts the buyer’s journey--prompting them to abandon their cart or return the product and write a negative review. Great product copy tells stories that help consumers understand why that product was created and why it matters.
Ademola Adelakun
Vagabond Cookies | E-commerce Consultant
Having a sticky add to cart (ATC) button on your product pages. Calls to action (CTA's) are powerful, but they're much less effective if they're not in your customers face. A sticky add to cart button on your product pages ensures that there's a persistent CTA on your customers screen, to make it easy for them to purchase.
Sometimes, the act of scrolling back through your product description gives the customer enough time to talk themselves out of the purchase. If you reduce the idle time that customers spend on your site, you'll increase conversions.
Offering free shipping over a certain threshold for your customers. Free shipping is one of the greatest joys of online shopping, and if it's implemented correctly, your average order value (AOV) will skyrocket. At Vagabond Cookies, the moment that we introduced our free shipping over $100 condition, our average order value doubled.
Saurabh Wani
automate.io | Content Marketing
In my prev company, we used an automation workflow where we integrated Shopify with stripe. So whenever we get a new order on Shopify we created a subscription on Stripe.
We also connected Shopify with MailChimp. This helped us in automatically subscribing customers to a particular list in Mailchimp & send targeted emails. This helped us in decreasing the user churn ratio.
Michael Hall
Helium | COO
More customer data -> more sales. Pre-purchase: Use product recommendations/quizzes to learn about customer preferences and drive them to a tailored solution. Conversion rates for these customers are more than double those who do not take product rec quizzes.
Post-purchase: Collecting a few additional pieces of information from customers during registration has been instrumental in driving repeat sales on Shopify. After purchase, encourage customers to sign up for a free account and "complete their profile" for perks-- a coupon code or points in your affiliate program. Ask for the customer's birthday, gender, or other information to drive marketing campaigns.
Andre Oentoro
Breadnbeyond | CEO
When it comes to generating more sales, many Shopify sellers have invested in emerging tactics such as social media campaigns, email marketing, even loyalty programs. But, there's one simple tactic they often overlook: making it easy for buyers to get what they want with a great user experience.
I was one of them. I was guilty of taking my site appearance for granted as I was busy running other trendy eCommerce campaigns, like I said above. Slowly but surely, all the campaigns I've put extra effort in to bring me a better conversion rate, of course.
But, I realized I have to make my store easy-to-navigate in the first place in order to get more buyers to convert. That's why I've been paying attention to my store's design. I always make sure that my potential buyers won't have a problem with the navigation so they can explore my store and find the product they're looking for with ease.
I focus on making the store trustworthy by choosing the right template, give the right balance between text and visuals, use the right font, and mobile optimization. These efforts have been giving an extra boost to my conversion rate in no time.
Romas Juskevicius
sixads | CEO & Founder
We, at sixads, have recently examined our app users’ ads on Facebook for their Shopify stores. There were a lot of things we discovered, but a few that caught our eyes were the lack of remarketing ads and A/B testing.
As PPC experts at sixads, we cannot stress enough how important it is to continuously run remarketing campaigns for online stores. Remarketing campaigns are usually the ones that drive the most conversions as they show up as a reminder of the same or similar products potential buyer has already viewed.
They may not bring the most traffic to the e-shop, but they certainly bring the most valuable buyers.Another thing we noticed - the lack of A/B testing. Ad campaigns for e-commerce stores should have more than one ad set with more than one visual.
Creating more than one ad set with different visuals allows online store owners to find the best-performing audience and the best-performing ad, which then can be optimized and scaled to sell even more.
Renaud Tisdale
MyCustomizer | Co-founder and CEO
The way we shop is significantly shifting from mass production in retail to more accessible and mobile channels, making room for the demand of mass customization to grow. Today's consumers are looking for unique and personalized products.
Companies, from major brands to startups, across all verticals understand this and are now turning to mass customization as a key differentiation strategy. In 2021, this trend is gaining even more momentum.
Here at MyCustomizer, we have done research and development in the past decade to provide a self-serve and user-friendly Shopify product customizer software, which we launched under a year ago.
Customers such as Pure Hockey, Luna Sandals, and B45 Baseball are some of the companies we have worked with that have experienced great success using our app, but the list goes on. For Shopify store owners, product customization has definitely proven to gain terrain and they should definitely consider exploring this avenue! Statistics reveal that customers are ready to pay up to 20% more for a personalized product.
A Deloitte consumer review also reveals that over 50% of consumers are ready to purchase personalized products. The latter also mentions in its findings that companies who adhere to this product personalization should experience augmented sales, traffic and conversion, as well as securing a competitive edge.
Shopify merchants will definitely benefit from exploring product customization as a strategy to increase their sales in 2021 and MyCustomizer provides them with a powerful software to design, set up and manage their product customizers, that is fully compatible with Shopify.
Mike Walton
Bloom | Director of Growth
Idea #1:There is no denying the power of Instagram as a discovery channel but now it’s become a powerful shopping one. That being said, set up an Instagram Shopping, optimize your shopping feed and start posting!
Once your shop is ready, activate your camera to go live and select shopping. We predict live shopping will become more and more the norm in e-commerce as it creates a unique shopping experience.
Idea #2: Word of mouth is so powerful. We recommend setting up a referral/affiliate program. Start promoting it with those that have bought from you for quick wins. Typically you pay less for acquisition, but best of all, you’ll know exactly what you will pay for acquisitions, unlike ads that fluctuate.
Tomaz Diaz
FlexEngage | CEO | Cofounder
Use your transactional emails - Transactional emails have some of the best performance metrics in email. With recency of purchase being the largest contributor to whether a customer will buy again, store owners should use these messages to increase brand affinity and increase their customer lifetime value.
Shane Hale
Repeat Growth | CEO / Founder
While many marketers focus on attracting new customers to their Shopify website, very few seem to focus on the usability of the site and it's direct relationship with conversion rates.
You've spent marketing dollars to get users to your shop make sure they have a good experiene so they can convert. When reviewing a shopify website for usability and conversion rate optimization, we typically run into multiple shopify apps all promising to increase sales.
Shop owners add these without considering if they are hurting their user experience and causing to leave their store. Pop-ups, Hello Bars, Animations and. AI Chat Bots can all cause anxiety, distraction, and confusion, leading to visitor abandonment.
We always recommend testing these apps to see if they are truely increasing sales and revenue... and don't use their data, use your own Google Analytics. Remember the app's objective is to sell their service, not necessarily increase your sales.
Watch a friend of family member unfamiliar with the site try to select and purchase a product without any prompting. If they get confused or annoyed with the process or design elements there's a good chance so do your visitors.
Akhilesh Srivastava
Fenix Commerce | Founder, CEO
Provide personalized customer shopping experience with 1) Accurate delivery promised dates on the product, cart and checkout pages 2) Personalized shipping promotions to improve conversion.
John Frigo
Best Price Nutrition | eCommerce Manager
If you're not A/B testing do some A/B testing, otherwise your basically aimless. It's amazed me how much a small change can make to conversions. We ran an experiment on one of our top selling products, to half our visitors we showed a stock photo of a pill bottle.
To the other half of users we took our own photo and spilled the pills out in front of the bottle. A tiny change like that had a big impact on conversions. Other examples are changing around the search function on our site ie making it more prominent over our navigation and making the navigation more prominent.
On one of our sites we noticed more users used the search bar, on another we noticed more users tend to use navigation. By AB testing you can learn more about your audience and how they use your site or how they shop and it can be very impactful.
Another thing in 2021 is UGC or user generated content. Many people are jaded to influencers. Influencer Marketing is by definition somewhat disingenuous ie paying a stranger with no relationship to your brand to tout the benefits of your brand. I'm much more so a fan of UGC or using your customers as social proof and as influencers. Its a more genuine promotion and they tend to work cheaper as well.
Lee Munroe
OneSignal | Design Director
Most stores have an abandoned cart email strategy, which is great, but don't ignore push notifications. The CTR is significantly better than email, and there are lots of one click setup plugins like OneSignal. Ideally you utilize all channels at per your shoppers preference including email, push and sms.
Ryan Raffel
ActiveCampaign | Channel Integrations Manager
With global competitors setting new standards of value to your customers constantly, you need to always be evaluating if the tools you're using are opening up your capabilities as much as possible.
Interoperability, significant functionality available through the API, webhooks, and the nurturing of their developer community have become critical factors to your ability to stay relevant to your customers through the increasingly sophisticated and complex strategies enabled by the most cutting edge tools.
CDP's and advanced analytics across your entire funnel are becoming table stakes to compete in increasingly niched-down winner-take-all competitive situations.
Krish Himmatramka
Do Amore | Founder & CEO
We don't ever have sales, discount codes, promo codes, etc. This may seem a bit counterintuitive, but let me explain. We keep our pricing the same year around, and don't even have sales on Black Friday.
While this may lead to a lower conversion rate on certain days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it leads to a much higher conversion rate on a normal daily basis. For a product like ours, sales almost cheapen the experience.
Instead, we keeps prices competitive all year around and customers can buy whenever they want and get the same price. This also means we don't have to advertise aggressively around typical peak sale seasons, and we can advertise with an overall lower CPC.
Not offering sales is the best decision we have ever made for our store and conversion rate. Over time, a lot of our customers have come to appreciate this too knowing that whenever they buy from us, they're getting a good deal overall and they don't need to wait a few months to purchase what they want to buy now.
Noah Goldfarb
Fire&Spark | Client Services Manager
Quit getting sucked into the time-trap of technical SEO! Since your business is already on Shopify, the foundation of your website is very strong. When we work with direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands, they often want to know how to speed time to predictable SEO from months to weeks so they can grow online sales faster.
When looking for that answer, they often focus on fixing technical issues, optimizing pages with SEO "best practices" and writing more articles rather than on establishing themselves as Google's preferred brand in their category. Small tweaks to your theme mean far less to Google than proving that you are authoritative and trustworthy.
We tell all of our clients to redirect funds from technical tweaks and focus instead on building search engine authority with a purpose-driven approach to SEO based on your organization's values.
That means leveraging what makes you special in order to form connections, collaborate with—and, yes, build links from—authoritative sites in your niche. To do this successfully, you need to wear your heart on your sleeve; do a good enough job of proving how you are different from (read: better than) your competitors, and authoritative influencers will view it as a no-brainer to endorse you.
Eric Schroeder
Guardian Self Defense | Owner
Biggest help in attracting customers: Long-form content focused on high search low competition keywords. Biggest help in converting customers: Tidio Live chat app.
Madison Schill
Livescale | Communications Manager
Shopify owners can and should create more immersive e-Commerce environments, that act and behave similar to how the social media platforms their consumers use and love, each day.
With Live Shopping, for example, we've built a technology that allows merchants to bring the social media experience to their e-Commerce store, and with the added benefit of integrated checkout, you'll not only see more sales, but a higher overall conversion rate, too.
