How to Get More Sales on Shopify: A Guide for Business Owners

Odds are, the seed of the idea that has now grown into your business was planted for one simple reason: you had a need. Upon looking around for a company or solution to fill it, you thought, “I bet I could do this, or do it better myself.” And then you did what few people do—you put your idea into action.

Now, you’re taking the next smart step: asking how to get your great idea to reach the maximum number of customers in the most effective way.

The key to Shopify’s success is its unmatched platform agility. Early on, its developers realized that they were only ever going to be as successful as the businesses they hosted. So, Shopify opened its API as an app store to give other developers a home to market the tools that they had expertly designed to build businesses.

That synergy, which has grown to over 2,000 apps in only 10 years, gives businesses like yours the tools and sales channels that you need for success. Here’s how you can best put them to use.

Customer-first marketing is not the same as customer-centric. It means targeting your audience, understanding their basic wants and needs, and how your product can service them or solve their problem. Customer-first marketing is the way of the future. Millennials and Gen Z-ers, in particular, care deeply about businesses having a customer-first mentality, and they vote with their feet.

In a 2016 survey, MECLABS Institute asked 2,400 participants about reasons they were either satisfied or dissatisfied with a company. Unsurprisingly, what satisfied customers the most was “consistently hav[ing] good experiences.”

More important, however, is what customers were most dissatisfied with: The most popular answer was, “The company does not put my needs and wants above its own business goals.” The second-most popular was closely related: “The company doesn’t make me feel like I have a relationship with them.”

This is the keystone of customer-first marketing—letting your customers know that you are:

• listening to them;

• making business decisions as a direct result of doing so;

• making your customers’ lives better and easier; and

• connecting with your customers rather than trying to make a quick buck.

With careful market research, you can tap into your customers’ needs and wants and figure out what motivated them to come to your store. But just getting them there is like taking someone on a first date—that’s where Postscript’s analytics and customer segmentation features come in. It can teach you about your customers so that you can show them just how important their needs and wants are to you. You can then turn these early learnings into a solid relationship, and that is customer-first marketing.

It’s been said that customers vote with their feet. But that’s not entirely true—online, they vote with their carts. Cart abandonment is shockingly prevalent in ecommerce. Every time it happens, your conversion rate lowers. By far, the most common reason for cart abandonment is customer friction, which is anything that drives customers away from your site before conversion.

It’s a huge problem in ecommerce. So large, in fact, that Facebook recently released a report which concluded that 80 percent of customers say that the experience an online business provides is just as crucial as its goods and services. It also pointed out if customers do not have a frictionless experience with your business, they’ll leave.

By far, the most abandonment (85.6 percent) occurs on mobile. Here again, Shopify got out ahead of the ecommerce platform competition early. Their shops are optimized for mobile. This removes the friction customers feel when they have to work too hard to complete a transaction through a shop that’s not designed for the mobile platform.

In 2017, Google reported that 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive mobile experience. However, 57 percent of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. Mobile now accounts for more than half of all ecommerce sales and is getting a bigger market share every year, which means it’s critical that your mobile-optimized business has access to the best SMS marketing tools.

Effective SMS marketing allows the type of personalization that is crucial to the success of your Shopify business. Postscript was built to interact with Shopify, so its integration is as deep as it gets. Want to learn about your customers, increase their trust in you, and reduce friction to maximize your revenue AND your relationships? Postscript has a tool specifically designed to help you grow into a force to be reckoned with. Here are just a few examples:

Through segmentation, not only can you divide your customers into groups based on their buying habits and spending tendencies, but you can also choose how to segment so that you can learn about your audience in truly granular, deeply personal ways.

According to the Facebook study we talked about earlier, 89 percent of survey participants expect a brand to respond to them within 24 hours. Surprisingly, 56.6 percent of businesses still can’t be contacted by social media. Luckily for you, yours will not be one of them.

Want to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions? Develop on-target campaigns that are sent only to those customers who are most likely to want to learn about them. The general response rate of SMS is 45 percent (email marketing campaigns have a response rate of…6 percent). It only gets higher, too, the more your customer trusts you and wants to engage with you.

Customer-first marketing; best-in-class UX; SMS marketing tools that were literally designed to do the hard work for you. That’s your Shopify business paired with Postscript. We have the tools you need to change the way that you approach ecommerce, and take full advantage of the benefits we outlined above.