How to increase your sales on Shopify

Shopify merchants like you want to increase their ecommerce store’s sales. This includes both newcomers who just started their ecommerce journey and those who are already getting decent sales but want to scale up.

How to increase sales on Shopify

Did you know that, apart from technical queries, most questions on online forums and communities are related to increasing sales?

We’ll save you some time here and just give you the usual response: Try email and social media marketing, go for paid ads, and invest in SEO.

We bet you’ve probably tried most of those suggestions already—and maybe you even saw good results with them. Or not.

Since you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re highly motivated and are always keeping an eye out for new ideas to increase your Shopify sales.

We all need more sales, but general marketing tactics are becoming stale—things like sending the same cart recovery emails to all customers and spending more on ads and promotions.

However, there’s a new, and better, way: data analytics.

Shopify generates a whole bunch of data based on your customers’ actions, and now is the time to put that data to efficient use.

But before starting to extract insights from your data, ensure that some conditions are met:

  • Your Shopify website is user friendly
  • You’re targeting the right audience
  • Your Shopify store is optimized for mobile and desktop
  • Your product page is well designed, and the checkout flow is smooth
  • Above all, your products’ quality is top notch

    Boost your Shopify sales by focusing on 4 key areas

If the basic items above have been taken care of, you can move to advanced strategies, which come under four focus areas:

  1. Marketing
  2. Conversion
  3. Customer satisfaction
  4. Customer retention

1. Marketing

Marketing for businesses of any size involves a variety of activities, such as SEO, email and social media marketing, paid ads, branding, and much more. You may also be using a few third-party apps for your marketing activities for email campaigns, social media marketing, etc.

To get the expected results, you should always analyze the performance of your marketing efforts and then optimize them based on the insights gathered.

For this blog, let’s consider a popular marketing channel: email campaigns. With Zoho Advanced Analytics, you can import data from your local drive and blend it with your Shopify workspace. The data can be from any ad platform or service provider, like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Zoho Campaigns.

Below is an email campaign performance report from our sample gallery.

Email campaign conversion funnel for Shopify
Email campaign performance

From the funnel above, the emails have a good open rate (12.8%). That’s great! But you only got 40 clicks in total from all your campaigns, which is only 0.6%.

According to Mailchimp, the average open rate and click rate for the ecommerce industry are 15.68% and 2%, respectively. You’ll need to optimize your email campaigns to resonate with your audience better.

Here are a few tips on improving the conversion rate for email campaigns:

  • Make it personal. Emails with ultra-relevant content and personalized offers convert more.
  • Revisit content and design for clarity.
  • Ensure offer codes and links embedded in the emails are working.

2. Conversion

You only make sales when you convert a visitor into a customer. However, conversions don’t happen easily. One of the major problems that hamper your conversion rate is cart abandonment.

What is cart abandonment? When your customers add products to their cart, but don’t check out.

Let’s visually analyze this problem in the form of a report.

Abandoned checkout trend in Shopify
Abandoned checkout trend

From the report above, you can see the number of carts being abandoned keeps increasing.

Some of the common reasons for cart abandonment are high or hidden shipping costs, slow delivery, and a complicated checkout process.

So what can you do? You can access the list of visitors who abandoned their cart from Shopify and choose to send the same recovery email automatically to all of them.

If you’ve been doing this for a while and are wondering why your cart recovery rate is low, you’re not alone.

Here’s the reason. Those recovery emails aren’t personalized enough.

What else can you do?

  • Drill down into the report based on different parameters, and split these abandoned checkouts into multiple groups, such as location, product category, etc.
  • Send personalized recovery emails to each group with custom offers.

3. Customer satisfaction

One of the main reasons consumers prefer to shop online is that they can always cancel and return the order if they don’t like it. For any ecommerce business, returns are inevitable.

By analyzing the reasons why your customers are cancelling their orders, you can reduce the number of cancellations.

Below is the cancellation reasons report from our demo store:

Cancellation report for Shopify
Cancellation reasons report

As you can see from the report above, around 55% of cancellations that happen are related to shipping—that is, late delivery and damaged products.

What action points can you take?

  • Talk to your shipping vendor or service and take the necessary action to deliver faster.
  • Improve your packaging to avoid damage during shipping.

4. Customer retention

If you want to increase sales, it’s not only about acquiring new customers. Acquiring new customers costs more, as you have to spend time, effort, and money on marketing.

You already have customers placing orders, and if your customers are satisfied with your products, they’ll place more orders from you. Plus, returning customers can refer more people, which will help you in the long run.

First, let’s start with analyzing how many orders are placed by returning customers. Below is the first-time vs returning customers monthly trend report:

New vs returning customers trend in Shopify
New vs returning customers trend

From the report above, we can see that the percentage of returning customers is declining, and most of your sales are coming from new customers. This means the orders you’re getting currently are mostly based on your new-customer marketing efforts.

As such, customer retention is an area you need to focus more on. So roll up your sleeves—it’s time to create some strategies and retain more customers.

Here are some of the tactics you can use to help increase your customer retention rate:

  • Create a customer loyalty program and let customers earn loyalty points every time they place an order.
  • Offer special discounts for returning customers.
  • Start a referral program and allow your customers to do the heavy lifting—acquiring new customers.
  • Best of all, improve customer experience by analyzing feedback from customers and taking action.

    Extract actionable insights using Zoho Advanced Analytics

Just by analyzing the four reports above, it’s evident that you can increase your Shopify store’s sales by a considerable amount. However, Shopify analytics doesn’t end with just these four reports.

To leverage the power of data analysis for Shopify completely, you’ll need a modern reporting app like Zoho Advanced Analytics—a Shopify-certified analytics app.

With Shopify reporting, you’ll get 100+ pregenerated reports, including the four above, to help you understand your customers better and increase your sales.

Install Zoho Advanced Analytics and try it free for 15 days. Start extracting meaningful insights from your data, and make better decisions.

You can also book a free personalized demo with our Shopify experts, or write to us at support@zohoanalytics.com.

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