How to Increase Your Sales on Shopify (With Real-Life Examples)

In this guide, we'll show you how to increase your sales on Shopify.

1. Use chatbots to boost customer experience

Shopify did a short survey on LinkedIn asking people the type of support they prefer from brands. 

Live chat support led the charge.

Image source

Chatbots have the same mission as live chat support: helping customers with their queries. The only difference is that customers interact with bots that answer their queries in real time. 

And that’s not even the best part.

Research shows businesses can save up to 2.5 billion customer service hours using Chatbots. That equates to around $11 billion in annual costs. 

So why are chatbots a big thing? 

Three reasons:

• Quick: Chatbots work much faster in fetching and providing information, boosting customer satisfaction.

• Cost-effective: While the initial cost of setting up a chatbot might be a lot, you can’t compare it to the long-term costs of hiring, training and paying human customer support agents. 

• Vacuum for Growth: There’s a limit to the number of customers a human customer support agent can manage. Chatbots don’t have a limit. They can handle many customers simultaneously while keeping personalization intact for each contact. 

A  brand that’s killing it with Chatbots is the shoe brand, Giesswein. Their Shopify store has a ready-to-serve chatbot to answer all your queries in real time.

Before adopting the Chatbot, Giesswein had to hire tens of customer support agents across 17 markets in 13 languages. 

Handling customers was complicated due to the influx of customer messages. They couldn’t even offer customer-friendly communications. 

But with the chatbot, they reduced the pressure, as it handles 90% of incoming messages. The support team only handles a few requests that need human intervention.

2. Send targeted emails using segmentation

Email marketing ROI stands at $36 per $1 spent. But the truth is that only a few Shopify stores can achieve that. 

Why?

Email marketing works, but your customer's inboxes are already flooded with marketing emails from your competitors. A study found that a person receives an average of 120 emails daily. 

It’s becoming harder for customers to decide which email to open. You must find a way to stand out to get their attention.

Enter - email segmentation.

What is email segmentation?

Email segmentation is email personalization on steroids.

Here’s why. Email personalization is addressing your customers with their names. On the other hand, email segmentation is sending customers a special email on their birthday. 

In short, email segmentation is dividing your email list into smaller segments based on set criteria.

For example, as a writer, I spend much of my time reading articles on Medium, an online publishing platform. 

Over time, they’ve accumulated data on the stories I like reading and occasionally emailed me similar articles.  

Here’s an example.

How to use email segmentation to boost Shopify sales

This study found that customers who experience over-personalization have a negative experience with a brand.

The solution is segmentation because it lets customers receive the information they rarely get as they’ve been divided into a specific group with unique needs.

There are three popular methods of segmenting customers for Shopify stores:

• Segmentation by Gender

As hinted, this segmentation means you divide customers based on their gender.

Lucchese, a retail bootmaker, used this approach to record the highest CTR rate in their history. In the campaign, they made “Roy” boots to target men and “Gabby” boots for women.

They sent an email campaign of a man wearing the “Roy” boots in a hero-like image to their male email subscribers. They did the same for the women. 

• Geo-location segmentation

If your Shopify store has customers from all over the USA, it’ll become harder to employ a one-size-fit all email marketing strategy. 

For example, you may want to offer same-day shipping to your customers in New York but don’t want to email your customers in other states.

Luckily, most email marketing software lets you segment your recipients based on location. This way, you can email audiences in a specific area without confusing the whole mailing list.

• Loyal customers

The goal is to present your product to new faces. But don’t forget about your existing customers. They bring in 60 - 70% of sales compared to new customers, who bring in 20%. 

Segment your email list to find customers who’ve purchased from you several times. Once done, launch a targeted campaign with coupon codes. This seals their trust in your brand and keeps them coming back.

3. Create a custom Shopify blog

New Shopify store owners spend countless hours designing their shops with the hopes of attracting loads of traffic. 

Like any other website, your Shopify shop design doesn’t attract traffic. It’s what you publish on your blog section that does. 

A Shopify blog has the following benefits:

• Creates a content library for your store

• Strengthens your Shopify brand

• Increases time-on-page, which has SEO benefits.

• Attracts traffic from search engines.

• Converts the traffic into sales.

Shopify offers a built-in blogging tool that enables you to create an engaging blog for your store. This means you can tap into the benefits of blogging without using a third-party blogging tool like WordPress.

However, the in-built blogging platform has some flaws. For example, It has a small text space for writing articles and has limited SEO features. It can only work for basic, no, frill blog articles. 

Steve Chou from mywifequitherjob.com shares another disadvantage of using Shopify for blogging which makes some sense.

This means only one thing. Use WordPress if you want a fully-featured website that gives you all the benefits of a blog.

Here’s a video guide from Steve Chou on how to add Shopify to WordPress.

There’s another approach for users who want to meet somewhere in the middle. That’s using a Shopify blog app. It’s a blogging tool that gives you powerful WordPress-like blog features and functions inside your Shopify store.

With a Shopify blog app, you can create SEO-optimized content, embed products in blog posts, build a design-responsive blog, and even integrate it with email marketing solutions.

4. Giveaways

Want to create a buzz around your product? There’s no better way than hosting giveaways on social media. Giveaways can quickly go viral, getting you more eyeballs on your product.

Before you start your giveaways, first define your goals. 

Do you want to create brand awareness, get many engagements, or drive sales? 

Answering the question will help you choose the right social media platform and the best product to promote.

Once done, you need to draft down your entry requirements. These are the actions participants must do to enter the giveaway. For example, tagging friends, liking the page, sharing the post, or commenting.

A brand that has nailed its giveaways is Gladly Family, which sells baby products.

Here’s an example from one of their latest giveaways which generated a ton of engagement. 

5. Start an affiliate program

Email marketing and affiliate marketing account for 16% of eCommerce sales in the US. 

It’s an effective way of increasing your store’s sales for two reasons. As the Shopify owner, you won’t have to spend money on a marketing budget. 

On the other hand, the affiliates don’t have to worry about shipping, inventory, or customer service. All they need to do is present your product to their audience, which is a win-win.

The best way to use affiliate marketing is to target bloggers who receive tons of traffic in their posts.

For example, when you search for “best sneakers for men” on Google, the first result comes from Fashion Beans.

Fashion Beans is a Fashion blog that doesn’t even sell fashion products.

It doesn’t make sense why they wrote an article on a product they don’t have. However, they’re leveraging their website, which receives millions of readers, to make commissions. 

The article that ranks high for the keyword “best sneakers for men” has listed 18 pairs of sneakers and linked them to a Shopify store.

For example, the first sneaker is Tropicfeel Monsoon sneakers. They’ve written a short review and placed an affiliate link to the Shopify page.

This means the Shopify store gets sales without investing in ads. On the other hand, Fashion Beans make lots of commissions by simply promoting a product to their vast audience.

That’s just one part of affiliate marketing. You can also reach out to YouTubers, Twitter users, and LinkedIn experts who create content in your niche and have vast audiences. 

Ask for a collaboration where they recommend your product to their audience in exchange for commissions.

6. Create shoppable videos

Shoppable videos are interactive and immersive videos that encourage viewers to purchase products directly from within the player itself. 

Research shows that shoppable videos can increase customer engagement and conversions by 30%. 

With an eCommerce video platform like Videowise, you can install interactive videos and widgets on your Shopify store in minutes. That’s how Busy Baby Mat, an online store for baby products, used Shoppable videos to boost sales. 

After trying plain and old imagery, which didn’t work, they contacted us to help them create shoppable videos. This would be the perfect way to differentiate themselves from competitors. 

They imported their existing videos from social media and embedded them in their Shopify store. Once done, they made the videos shoppable by adding links that would take customers to the checkout page.

Here’s an example they created using Videowise.

The results? Have a look for yourself. 

7. Ramp up your social media campaigns

If you don’t have the SEO muscles to start a blog from scratch, you can leverage social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok, where more than half the world's population spends their time daily.

There are three ways to use social media to promote your products.

• Create brand awareness: Publish viral-worthy posts and videos that will generate a ton of buzz and let the world know you exist. 

• Drive traffic: SEO takes time. Luckily social media has a ton of users. Once your posts have driven engagements, direct the traffic to your site. Next, collect emails for lead nurturing.

• Sell products: If you can’t go through all the processes above, you can still fine-tune your posts to sell products. 

A better way is to use social media ads. They are expensive but can reach a larger audience. For example, with a monthly budget of $150, you can receive up to 1,200 unique website clicks per month.

Try to make your posts unique since many brands are vying for customers’ attention.

That’s how Tentsile stood out in one of their most effective campaigns. They researched and tested their tree hammock products against competitors. They then created a blog post and a YouTube video to show their results. 

To drive traffic to the blog post, they created a short Facebook ad with intriguing wordplay inviting users to check out the report. 

The campaign worked because they didn’t just create Facebook posts telling people why their product is better. However, they backed up their claim with empirical evidence and powered it with an ad to reach as many people as possible.

8. Promote your content on Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the best platforms to amass viewers for your product. Unlike other social media platforms, users on Pinterest have a high buy intent. 

Here’s a staggering stat. 

Only 26% of Facebook users make a purchase after seeing an ad. But on Pinterest, the number stands at 82%.

Therefore, you need the right edge in using Pinterest to boost your Shopify sales. 

You can start by copying what Beck Beach from Mombeach did to get these fantastic results from her side-income Shopify shop.

The first thing she did was convert her Pinterest account into a business account. This would allow her to promote her business on the platform and provide her with analytics.

Once done, she set up rich pins to get more exposure on search results. And since she was still working her day job, she subscribed to Tailwind for Pinterest, an automatic pin scheduling tool.

Finally, she stopped relying on bland product images and designed pins to boost conversions. 

9. Optimize your product and page content for mobile

56% of online sales come from mobile phones. That’s not the juicy part. A study by Asee found that the cart abandonment rate is 85.65%. 

One of the reasons for that shocking stat is that online shoppers find Shopify pages to have clumsy checkout processes that aren’t optimized for mobile.

Here are some things you can do to optimize your Shopify store for mobile users. 

• Use navigation bars: The navigation bar is like your shop’s GPS. Place it on top of the page so users can quickly jump to any product’s page seamlessly. 

• Optimize site speed. People don’t have time to wait for sites that take ages to load. Compress large images, choose videos externally, and use a fast Shopify theme.

• Limit the text on product pages: The goal is to show, not tell. Don’t add lots of text to the page. Include the product name, variant option, price, and CTA button. Here’s how Zara does it. 

• Use the correct font size: The most popular font is Times New Roman. The size should be around 14-16. That’s not large enough that it will take much of the product space and not small enough that users will find it hard to read the text. 

10. Display social proof

It’s easier to sell to people who trust you. The best way to earn trust is by using reviews that act as social proof. 

Even if you have the best product on earth, the message won’t be heavy if you’re the one saying it. It’s better if you let customers give feedback on your product. Even better, you can turn their video testimonials into shoppable videos. 

While requesting reviews, tell customers to be as honest as possible. The reviews aren’t just meant to make you glow. You also need to find those little qualms preventing a good customer experience.

The best place to add the reviews is on product pages, where you’ve listed the product descriptions and features. 

That’s how Makegear, a 3-D printing-making company, does it. Customers start by reading descriptions. As they scroll down, they get to the review sections with tens of customer reviews.

Over to you!

Running a successful Shopify store needs lots of spinning wheels. You must keep operational efficiency in check, strengthen customer support, and ensure you deliver orders on time.

But all these are only possible if you have customers to sell to. Want to boost sales in the easiest of ways? Start by using shoppable videos. 

At least, from our experience, we’ve seen what shoppable videos can do for brands. If you want to have first-hand experience, book a demo with Videowise to learn more.