Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Shopify was already an e-commerce powerhouse, with over 1,000,000 merchants using the software to run their businesses. With retail losing even more market share to online sales and shopping, a platform as robust as Shopify is only going to offer more possibilities for growth. If you already own or manage a Shopify store, there has never been a better time to explore new ways to hook new customers and increase sales. Let’s look at some strategies you may not have thought of.
Start Doing Content Marketing In Your Shopify Store
Source: https://www.freepeople.com/clothes/
When people hear content marketing, the first thought that usually comes to mind is starting a blog. However, there are other methods of content marketing that can help you increase sales that you may not have thought of.
Instead of starting a blog, you can add content to your main product category pages. This content will help Google figure out exactly what you sell and who would be interested in it – especially if you do some thorough keyword research and make sure to sprinkle in that keyword magic throughout. If you do this for every main product category page, you’ll get a nice SEO boost and make your website more findable. Of course, when you boost your traffic with SEO strategies, you boost your reach and (ideally) increase your sales.
Free People does this remarkably well. The image above is a screenshot from their main “clothes” page. As you can see, by describing their clothes and the type of girl that would love them, they’re absolutely killing it in the keyword game. They use both short and long-tail keywords throughout, from “free spirit” to “festival” to “boho clothes,” all terms their ideal customer might search for.
Source: https://www.freepeople.com/dresses/
As you can see, they don’t stop there. On every main category page, they have one of these descriptive paragraphs – it’s basically SEO eye candy.
Write Guest Posts Within Your Niche
Whether or not you’ve decided to pursue a blog, writing articles for other sites within your niche is a great way to boost your DA. Often sites will accept content for free (unless they’re extremely high DA sites, in which case they will likely charge), and in exchange for writing content for them, you can get a backlink or two to your website. The more links to your site that exist on other websites, the higher quality your website is perceived to be.
Guest posting is one of the pinnacles of white hat SEO. It takes a bit more work and effort than black hat SEO(think keyword stuffing, redirected URLs, and hidden backlinks), but it’s worth the time. You’ll have to do some research on high-ranking websites that produce content of interest to your audience, then craft a pitch to the editor in charge of the blog.
Integrate Your Social Media Channels With Your Shopify Store
The overall advice here is to make your different platforms start working together instead of working separately. The more you can integrate the two into a seamless experience, the better – but we have two suggestions for where to start.
First, allow your customers to shop on your social media. Every platform is rolling out ways for businesses to integrate their stores, and there are countless apps available to integrate your Shopify store with every platform from Facebook to Instagram. Using Instagram as an example, once you make it possible for followers to shop your posts, every post becomes a conversion opportunity.
Second, start displaying your social media feed on your store. Using an application like Instafeed you can showcase your shoppable Instagram posts on your store, increasing sales and potentially even increasing your Instagram following. Content is content, and you should be getting as much out of it as you can.
Referral Program For Current Customers
We all know that our customers can be our best advocates – with a referral program, you can leverage those happy customers into future sales. By using a Shopify application like ReferralCandy you can set up your referral program, decide what rewards to offer, and track it all to make sure it’s working for you.
Rewards Program For Current Customers
Source: https://www.ae.com/us/en/c/men/mens?pagetype=clp
Want your customers to know how much you value their business? Try creating a rewards program that lets them accrue points with purchases that they can redeem in the future – it boosts your overall sales and starts motivating customers to return again and again. American Eagle is a great example of this strategy; not only do they have a strong brand image and cultivate relationships with their customers, they also reward loyalty through their Real Rewards program, in which customers get a $5 reward for accruing a certain amount of points (which they get through purchases).
Setting up a rewards program for your Shopify store is a breeze with Smile.io. You can set up any kind of loyalty program you want, and it’s free.
Email Newsletter Pop-Up On Your Shopify Store
A customer you don’t convert is a bummer, but it happens – but if you aren’t even trying to collect any information from them to retarget, that sale is lost forever. If you can convince them to give you their email you can try to reel them back in with a new product, great sale, or other promotions you might be running in the future. This is also a breeze to set up with an app like Optinmonster, which can help you set up a pop-up (and they have dozens of types and templates to choose from) so you can start recapturing those leads.
Bonus: Allow for Backorders to Happen
This last one is a bit of a gray zone. You may have noticed that because of COVID-19, some of the orders you placed online that supposedly were going to be delivered to you within a couple days ended up taking weeks. In a nutshell, that’s backordering. A lot of times, it happens because companies don’t have very accurate inventory management software and don’t reorder products until they’re already out. But sometimes, it’s done on purpose. Why? Because backordering guarantees demand for production, keeps cash flow up, engages new or returning customers, and keeps them from buying from your competition. Of course, there’s a tremendous risk to allowing backorders: You can piss a lot of people off if you take too long to ship the item they bought from you.
But those extra sales…
Worth it, or not? You decide.
Conclusion
You know your Shopify store isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal, but it can be exhausting trying to come up with innovative new ways to increase sales and draw in new customers (or bring back old ones). Hopefully, this list gave you some ideas of where to start with some strategies you may not have thought of.
Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an e-commerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of e-commerce. He has years of experience in e-commerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.
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