Did you know that Shopify generated a revenue of 1.2 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2022? Currently the third largest e-commerce platform with almost 11% of the market share, Shopify has more than a million active stores, generating sales predicted to reach half a trillion in 2022.
If you’re a business owner on Shopify or planning to become one, these numbers are really important for you!
Why?
That’s because they make it obvious that Shopify is a platform not just for big players like Tesla, LG, Sephora, or Kylie Cosmetics, but also for small and medium sized business owners! So don’t let the fear of competition or failure get to you. Take your Shopify business to new heights by following these tips and tricks:
HOOK YOUR CUSTOMERS WITHIN A SINGLE CLICK :
To run a successful Shopify store, you have to make sure that the moment a potential customer opens your website, they are so mesmerised, that they can’t click off of it! How do you do that?
Make a Killer First Impression:
One of the most important decisions you gotta make as a Shopify store owner is how you want your website to look like. Why? That’s because the overall look and feel of your website defines your brand!
Having an aesthetically pleasing website that catches the customer’s eye is therefore a must.
Shopify provides a huge collection of templates and ‘themes’, both free and paid, using which you can design an attractive website. The paid themes range between $140-180, so based on your budget, choose a theme that resonates best with your brand! Your secret weapon is using pictures, graphics, animations and other elements, to add a pop of fun and break the monotony of ‘text on text on more text’.
The themes available in the Shopify Library allow considerable options for customisations, but if you want a build a website that is completely your own, personalised and custom made specially for you, in that case you have two options,
- Shopify allows you to develop your own website from scratch, and design it as you see fit,
- Or you can even hire a custom web development agency to do all the work for you!
If you want to go for the second option, we are always here to help. Contact us for more information, let’s chat!
Let them know who you are:
The first few pages of your website are the most crucial, as they decide whether a viewer will stay on your website or click off to go somewhere else. So, it’s in these very pages, where you have to go an extra mile and try to create a connection with potential clients. Keep these key points in mind,
- Create a Homepage that is easy to view and comprehensive, where with one glance, the customers will get the full idea of what they are signing up for by choosing you!
- An About Us page, conveying your brand motto is essential. Remember, this is the section where you tell your story and establish a bond! However, that doesn’t mean you will write your autobiography here!
Your customers don’t need to know that you won first place in a Go as You Like competition in 5th grade. Keep it short yet impactful, and most importantly relevant to your business.
~Having a dedicated section for FAQs is also very crucial, especially for new customers! You gotta make sure they have no doubts about you or your products.
If you’re still confused, here are a few samples we designed for our clients. Hope they help!
Fast and Responsive Websites for the win:
When browsing through your store, your customers need to have a seamless experience. If your website is laggy, unresponsive on mobile devices and takes a century to load, you won’t be able to retain viewers. Every single second counts, so you gotta make sure that there is not even a 0.5 second delay! Here’s how you can work on this,
- Over 80% of the traffic in Shopify comes from mobile devices. So, be sure to pick a fully responsive theme from the Shopify theme store, check for an up-to-date copy of your theme and check the live preview of the theme.
- Compress images on your website, you can do this by using a tool like SEO Suite: Image Optimizer by AVADA, which compresses images but keeps their quality intact.
PROMOTE ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
If you want to grow your business in this modern, tech-savvy age, you cannot overlook the influence of social media websites like Instagram and Facebook. By promoting your products on these sites, you are sure to get greater rich, traffic and sales.
Shopify presents you with the perfect opportunity to do just that! You can sell your Shopify products on Facebook and Instagram using a few simple steps,
- Set up your Facebook Channel in your Shopify Store
- Create a Business Profile on Instagram and link it to your business’s Facebook Page
- Activate Instagram Shopping (it might take 2-3 days to get approval to activate this option)
- Link your Shopify Facebook Channel to your Instagram profile and you’re good to go!
- Add products from your Shopify Store in your Facebook Shop section and upload shoppable posts on Instagram.
Since your Shopify store syncs with your Facebook and Instagram, any updates made on Shopify automatically reflects on the other two as well! Awesome isn’t it?
INDULGE IN GOOD SEO PRACTICES:
Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most crucial factors you need to focus on if you want to grow your business. The reason is very simple,
- If you have a solid SEO strategy, your website will rank higher
- Higher ranking will result in higher traffic
- Higher traffic will fetch you more and more clients
Here is the good news, Shopify is equipped with some of the most powerful SEO features that help you optimise your website. These include,
- Auto-generated canonical tags are added to pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results
- You have the ability to add and edit Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions to match your website’s content accurately. In case these words sound like archaic Latin to you, here’s what they mean- Meta Titles are the page titles that show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs for short) and just underneath them are Meta Description, i.e. a short description of the website appearing on the SERPs. Having a catchy Meta Title and Description, perfectly summarising your website’s content can come in real handy, as they are the first thing a buyer comes across when searching for a product online.
Here are some more practices that will help you boost your SEO score:
1. Find and Utilise Relevant Keywords:
You need to spend a considerable amount of time researching keywords and effectively using them to boost your SEO. You can find relevant keywords by yourself with the help of Google’s autocomplete suggestions, Google trends, Tubebuddy etc or you can even make use of keyword research apps available in the Shopify App Store like Ahrefs (we will dive deeper into some of these apps in a later section of this blog). Once you get a good collection of keywords, sprinkle them in different parts of your website like meta titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions, title tags etc. This allows search engines to show your website to anyone who searches for those very keywords.
2. Optimise your Images:
Add Alt Text (containing relevant keywords) to the images in your website Not only does this make your website more accessible to people with visual impairments, but also enables your website to rank higher.
3. Organise your site in a hierarchy:
Having a well organised website, including sections and subsections that are linked to each other, makes it easier for search engines to crawl each page, giving a basic idea of which sections are most important.
For instance, you can create navigable pathways from your homepage to product pages. This will make it easier for the buyers to browse through your website and also ensure they don’t miss out on any of the important pages.
BUILD A SOLID LOYALTY PROGRAMME:
Let me tell you how an awesome Loyalty Programme can transform your business with a simple example. Imagine you are looking to purchase a product and there are two stores selling it, Store A and Store B. The difference is, Store A will give you the product, you will pay for it and then it’s bye-bye. Meanwhile when you purchase it from Store B, you get a free gift. Which store will you opt for? If you chose Store B, then Congratulations! You’re just like most other customers, who prefer brands that offer rewards over those that don’t.
The bottom line is you have gotta incentivise your customers, so that they keep coming back for more! Reward points, freebies, new product samplers, are just some ways you can create a close knit community of loyal customers!
INTEGRATE SHOPIFY APPS :
If you’re looking to grow your business on Shopify and haven’t yet checked out the Shopify App Store, you are missing out!
The Shopify App Store provides a wide array of apps and plugins (both free and paid) that you can utilize to boost your store’s growth. From marketing and inventory management, SEO optimisation, customer relations, to secure shipping and checkout, the Shopify App Store has it all!
Let me take you through some cool apps for Shopify that can take your business one step closer to a skyrocketing success.
Shopify Email:
While Email marketing is an awesome way of improving customer relations, it can be a tedious task to do manually.This Shopify Email is a free app that allows you to create personalised branded emails within minutes! The icing on the cake is that you can send, manage and track your email campaigns within Shopify itself.
Sixads:
Sixads’ is a free app, whose targeted ads can increase your traffic and revenue from social media! Don’t worry, this app is really intuitive and easy to navigate, you can get on just fine without any prior experience or technical knowledge!
Referral Candy:
With Referral Candy, you can give your customers a unique referral code and encourage them to share it using gifts and rewards. The more they share the codes, the more your customer base will expand!
Subscription cost for ReferralCandy is $49/mo
Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is a powerhouse for keyword research and makes your SEO planning so much easier. It is a comprehensive app that crawls search engines to come up with a list of accurate keywords.
This app is not for free, prices range in between $20/mo to $50/mo. You can opt for a 7 day free trial before making the actual purchase.
Joy: Rewards, Loyalty Program:
Using this free app you can boost your customers’ loyalty and encourage them to buy more from you through a system of rewards, points, gifts etc!
CONCLUSION
This was probably a lot of information to digest at once, right?
But trust me if you can effectively implement the above mentioned techniques in your business, you will definitely see your numbers going up. It might t take some time, but don’t be discouraged and just remember,
If millions of people spread across 175 countries can do it, well then so can you!
- Explore further: If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide on growing your e-commerce business with Shopify, our blog post on Shopify: Your One stop solution for E-Commerce provides all the essential information and strategies you need.