An online store, just like a stationary store, needs sales to develop (let alone maintain). Launching an online store does not guarantee success. Even if we have an attractive offer, a well-defined group of recipients, an optimized shopping path, but we lack a plan on how to get sales, we can fail.

Before you even get started with your Shopify store, think about what activities will help you get the sales you want. Shopify is helpful in this because it has advanced analytics and a number of integrations that make reaching customers much easier. In this article, we will introduce you to the most popular customer acquisition methods. Let’s get started.

More website traffic = more leads in your Shopify store

Website traffic is nothing more than the number of visitors to your e-commerce site. As a rule, the more people visit your store, the greater the chance that someone will make a purchase.

Of course, this is a big generalization, because, in order for you to notice increased sales with high traffic, at least two things must happen:
● Your offer must be tailored to the customer’s needs;
● You have to bring the appropriate target group to the e-shop.

This means that even if the majority of your visitors fit into your customer base but your offerings are not attractive to them, it doesn’t mean you will see an increase in sales. Likewise, you can get a lot of traffic on your website, but you are not attracting the people you are targeting – the number of customers is not growing. How to deal with this?

First of all, watch the data

Do you know how many people find their way to your store? How many have visited you again? What sources did they come from? Website traffic analysis is the basis for further planning of marketing and sales activities. The hard data will let you know which of the methods used to increase the number of visitors worked. You may discover that your traffic is decent but no one is buying your goods – a deeper analysis will show you why
this is happening. Perhaps your customers do not want to register with your store and you require it, so at this stage, they abandon their shopping cart.

Proper configuration of your store on Shopify will give you access to this data. Shopify automatically informs you about the sources of traffic on the site (from what places the visitors came from) and how much time potential customers spent on the site, where they logged in from, and what they were looking for on the site. The available filters will help you analyze selected customer groups so that you can personalize your marketing activities.

You can also connect your Google Analytics account to your Shopify store. All you have to do is paste the code from Google Analytics in the appropriate field and switch to the e-commerce module. Google Analytics will allow you to define goals, monitor the e-commerce sales funnel, UX optimization. And if you run advertising activities, for example, in the Google search engine, a GA account will allow you to track the revenues from individual marketing activities.

When you build a habit of observing data and start tracking the sources of traffic on the website, conversions from individual places on the web, you will be able to answer the question of what methods of acquiring customers work best for you. Now that you know why analytics is so important, let’s see what are the methods of bringing sales to your store.

5 Ways to Increase Sales on Your Shopify Store

We’ll show you some sales sourcing methods that you can start now. Some of them will take some time (at least six months) to start working, but in this case, patience pays off.

What methods do we have to offer you?

#1 Increase the visibility of the store in Google and other search engines

One of the primary sources of traffic in digital stores is an Internet search engine, such as Bing, Yahoo!, and most often Google. Internet users search for products by typing a phrase or word in the search bar, browsing the results, and clicking on those that attracted their attention. You have probably entered the name of the product in the search engine more than once if only to compare the price or read reviews.

Organic Traffic

Make your store visible on Google and other popular search engines. Google pays attention to, among other things, how quickly the page loads and whether it is adapted to mobile devices. Fortunately, Shopify has no problem with that – the templates are responsive and load smoothly. But that doesn’t mean Google will automatically give you a high ranking. You need to take care of the other SEO components. First of all, work on product and category descriptions, tags, and links in the store. Shopify has many SEO plugins to help you with this.

When adding new products, make sure that each of these elements is legible, fits well with the structure of the website, and contains all the necessary information, e.g. the composition of the cosmetic or the material from which the clothes are made. Do not use the generic descriptions you got from the manufacturer. Add something from yourself. Prepare content that captures the spirit of your brand and attracts the attention of your dream client. Remember that a well-structured description and title of the product contain the keywords you want to rank for.

E-commerce owners often forget about meta descriptions and meta titles, and these are the first pieces of information that customers see after Google offers them search results. These should also contain the keywords you choose and inform the user what is on the page. If you are not sure what keywords to choose, see what your competitors are doing or use keyword tools like Ahrefs, Semrush.

Paid Traffic

SEO is the basis when it comes to increasing the visibility of your e-store on Google. But you have other options, such as Google Merchant Center and Google Ads, which are paid ways to get direct traffic from Google. These are options worth taking advantage of. Google Merchant Center works well when promoting a single product and works on a similar principle to Ceneo price comparison websites. You can create such a promotion directly in the Shopify admin. Some search terms display results enriched with product
photos and their prices. After clicking on such a result, we are transferred to the product page of the online store. Google Ads will help you primarily with product category advertising, display campaigns, and remarketing.

We have learned about paid and free forms of gaining customers by search engines. What about other ways to reach customers on the Internet?

#2 Sales and Promotion on Social Media

If you want to attract sales to your store, increase your online presence by creating accounts on social platforms where your customers are. Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are particularly popular with e-commerce on Shopify. Most of the stores on the Shopify engine are lifestyle, beauty, and fashion stores, and such brands perform well on the above platforms. Customers look at brands’ social accounts to see if they can trust the brand, get to know its personality, and see if the brand has customer support. When you decide to keep an account on any of the social networking sites – do it wisely. Don’t leave your account empty, remember to add entries diligently and develop a strategy for reaching the customer.

Organic Traffic

Social media will help you build a conscious brand image and show your values and aesthetics. Thanks to them, you can earn the loyalty of customers who will follow your account to follow your publications and see what others think about them. If you are just starting out and do not have a large social media budget or do not want to hire a social media specialist, post reports on what is happening at your office, show how you prepare products for shipping, or record short videos with tips. Let’s say you are in the business of making ceramic mugs. You can show the accelerated cup painting process or ask your audience which pattern they prefer more. All your activities on social media influence your images before you post something, think about how the person you’re targeting might interpret it.

What’s more, you can sell products directly through social media, and Shopify can help you with that. This is a great help for your customers – they can see the product catalog on social media, see if the product they are interested in is for sale and make a purchase. All you need to do is connect your Shopify store with Facebook or integrate Shopify with Instagram. You will create a catalog of products and with a few clicks, you can add products from the store to company social media profiles. If someone buys your product, e.g. on Facebook, your store will lower its inventory – thanks to this, you will not have to run a separate CRM.

Paid Traffic

Social media is a great tool for keeping in touch with customers, but not only that. They are also a great method of bringing new customers to your e-shop. If you run organic activities, you have no guarantee that your fan page will be visited by your ideal client whom you would like to reach. It is different when you invest in a paid promotion. With an official brand account on Facebook, you can start advertising your store on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger – and set the ads in the Shopify admin. Facebook Ad Center allows you to run ads that don’t have to cost a lot and can be perfectly tailored to your audience in terms of age, gender, place of residence, interests or behavior on Facebook, etc.

#3 Gathering feedback and showing your most purchased products

Advertising campaigns, maintaining accounts on social media platforms, good position in search engines are activities that will allow us to get more traffic to the store, but how to convince the visitor to make a purchase? One way to do this may be to make visitors aware that others have bought products before them, i.e. collecting feedback and recommendations.

Enrich your Shopify store with the possibility of issuing opinions for the purchase of products, run a section in which the most frequently selected or top-rated products appear. Social proof is an excellent technique of persuasion. Consumers trust the opinions of others more than the assurances of producers and are willing to buy when others have already done so before them: whether to obtain a similar social status, demonstrate belonging to the same social group, or simply – make sure that the product is good, and thus the store is trustworthy.

#4 Promotions, discount codes, and shopping vouchers

Who hasn’t heard of promotions as a tactic for gaining customers in e-commerce? Apparently, consumers compare prices in several stores before making a purchase. Unfortunately, simply competing on price is not enough to win a mass of loyal customers. The frequency of organizing discounts depends largely on the industry in which you are in. For example, seasonal, general sale discounts in the fashion industry are seen as the norm. It is different in the case of luxury goods – discount codes will work only for selected ones, e.g. for newsletter subscribers, regular customers, or for people who like our fan page.

The promotion does not have to cover all products. When your goal is to gain new customers, focus on the most frequently purchased products, and then sell them at a lower price or generate a discount code that you will place e.g. in an ad on Facebook. Discounts don’t just have to be applied to products – free shipping is also a pretty good strategy.

#5 Chat and Email Marketing

The Internet made it possible to find useful information in seconds. What if we can’t find what we’re looking for? Most often, in this case, we ask a question on forums or social networks. We are used to it, so when we are in an online store and want to ask about a product, we try to contact the person operating the store. Installing chat will make it much easier. See if chatting in your store on Shopify affects the number of conversions or cart value. Remember that you don’t need to have chat enabled 24/7 – to start with, you can set an hour or two when the chat will be active. Shopify offers many chat plug-ins that you will find on the App Store, and thanks to add-ons like Shopify Ping, you can have a conversation with your customers using your iPhone. Thanks to this, you will not miss any news. Moreover, you will also be able to operate the Facebook message box.

What will you do to increase sales on your Shopify store?

Regardless of which method you choose, the basis is your store – if there is no
well-optimized shopping path, subpages are slow to load, or visitors do not match your customer group, your marketing activities will not bring the expected result. Take care of your store first. Perhaps you need to conduct a UX audit of an online store.