How to Grow Your Shopify Store: 3 + 1 Awesome Tips

1. Build an email list of potential customers

Building and maintaining an email list of potential customers is a very efficient way of growing your Shopify store. But how do you get people to sign up to your list? A good method is to provide your visitors something of value in exchange for their email address. People love free stuff!

What are good examples of free stuff your store visitors can benefit from?

1. Offer to send them a discount code for their first order.
2. Give them a free shipping code.
3. Give away a free resource, if feasible. For example, if you are selling clothes, you could create an ebook with fashion advice.
4. Create a drip email campaign in order to establish a communication channel with them. An example could be a series of tips relevant to your industry.

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI

- CampaignMonitor

Here are some good ways to collect emails:

Add a newsletter signup form in your website

The most common spots for newsletter signup forms are your home page, the footer of your website or pop-ups.

The pop-up format is a great choice and there are many email pop-ups in the Shopify store. Some of popular apps are Privy, MailMunch and Coupon Pop.

Don't forget to clearly mention your offering. Another tip that can increase sign-ups is to create a sense of urgency, e.g. "Sign up to our newsletter and receive a $10 coupon code. Offer expires in 2 days!"

Add newsletter opt-in in your contact form

If you have a contact form in your store, you can add a way for your visitors to opt-in to your newsletter. As with pop-ups, it is important to include your offering close to the opt-in checkbox in order to provide incentive.

Ask for email in your physical store

If you have both a physical store and an e-shop, you can build an email list out of the customers of your physical store. When they are checking out, explain your offering and mention the benefits of subscribing to your email list.

The DONT's of email list building

Building an email list takes time and effort. Because of that, you may be tempted to use some "quick and easy" ways. Specifically, scraping emails from other pages or purchasing email lists. Both of those methods are inefficient and, admit it, a bit shady. In terms of efficiency, both ways perform poorly, because the leads you get are almost always irrelevant.

Tip: If your store does business with EU customers as well, don't forget to have their consent for sending them marketing emails.

Useful resources

If you are interested in learning more about email list building, here are some useful articles:

• 27 Tips on How to Get More Email Signups
• 17 Easy Ways to Collect Email Addresses — Expert Tips
• How to Build an Email List that Builds Your Ecommerce Business

2. Re-engage your existing customers

New customer acquisition can be 5 times more expensive than retaining existing customers. We're sure you know it from your own experience and research confirms that, too.

Re-engaging your customers is, thus, a great way to grow your shopify store. Email is a cheap and efficient way to communicate with your customers and there are a lot of tools that help you build, send and measure your email marketing campaigns.

Contact your customers regularly

A good way to keep in touch with your customers is to contact them regularly. There are lots of suggestions about the right frequency of newsletters, but this also depends on your industry. A good rule of thumb though is sending out a newsletter every 1-2 weeks, as long as you have some valuable content to share with your customers.

Some ideas of content that qualifies for a newsletter:

1. Share some information about your store that help your brand (e.g. "We've turned 5 years old" or "We have reached 100 thousand orders")
2. Upsell and cross-sell products. In order to do this effectively, you need to have customer segments based on specific products or product categories they have purchased in the past
3. Provide a coupon discount or free shipping for product categories you want to boost
4. Share with your customers some learning material like ebooks, tutorials or a how-to video

80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.

- Emarsys

Re-engage inactive customers

Apart from regularly contacting your customers, re-engaging inactive customers is really important, as it can reveal potential issues with your store. First of all, it is important to define what an inactive customer is for your store. For example, if you are selling perfumes you might expect that customers use 6 bottles of perfume every year, so a customer should purchase a new perfume every 2 months. In that case, inactive customers will be the ones that placed an order on your store more than 2 months ago.

A good strategy is to be proactive and contact the customers that are about to become inactive with a periodic email campaign that reminds them that it's about time to place a new order to avoid running out of your product.

Nevertheless, customers might remain inactive despite your efforts to re-engage them. In that case, it is crucial to identify potential issues, whether it be customer support, pricing or anything relevant to their experience on your shopify store.

A great way to get feedback from your customers are customer satisfaction surveys. A popular kind of surveys are NPS® surveys. An NPS® survey consists of one question: "How likely are you to recommend our store to a friend or colleague?", with an optional reason for the rating.

Simply, extract a list of your inactive customers, send them your survey via email and wait until you get enough results to draw conclusions.

Alternatively, you can be proactive and send your survey to your paying customers: schedule an automated email X days/weeks after a customer places an order in your store. This process enables early discovery of potential issues (See Bonus Tip below for details).

There are some tools in the Shopify app store that simplify the process of sending NPS® surveys. Our app AskBeat Customer Feedback allows you to easily send both manual and automated surveys and analyze the results in a meaningful way.

Useful resources

Here are some nice resources about email marketing:

• Email marketing: The Definitive Guide
• 13 Examples of Re-Engagement Emails for the Subscribers You Miss
• Customer Retention 101: Grow Your Business by Selling More to Current Customers

3. Reach out to customers with abandoned carts

Every store, and shopify stores are no exception to that, has lots of incomplete checkouts. Most studies show that over 50% of the visitors of stores abandon their cart!

Given these facts, it goes without saying that dealing with abandoned carts can really help you get more sales on your Shopify store. Before contacting all those customers, though, it is really critical to understand why people abandon their cart. There are several reasons that may lead to cart abandonment. Let's see some of the most important ones.

Checkout process is complicated

Visitors browse through several product categories, view photos and descriptions of each product they like and add the ones they like to their cart. Hooray!

Completing an order is the last step in a long process. You should try to make it dead simple. Sometimes people don't like having to create an account in order to complete their purchase.

Consider making the account creation step optional. You can ask your customers later (perhaps in the order confirmation email) to setup an account, mentioning the benefits (e.g. no need to fill-in their address and contact info again etc).

Customers have security concerns

Everyone thinks if the store they're on is secure before entering their credit card details. This is why everything on your store should make people feel safe.

First of all, make sure the payment form details are transfered securely. Noticed the little lock next to the address bar of the browser? This indicates that the connection to the website is secure. Your store should have that, too. It is important to have a valid SSL certificate from a trusted authority.

Second, consider using several payment methods apart from asking for credit card information. For some security conscious visitors, not having PayPal as a payment option is a no go. The good news is shopify makes it really easy to setup PayPal.

Provide shipping information and costs early

In many cases, stores do not provide shipping costs or information early in the checkout process. This can lead to abandoned carts, as the shipping methods or costs might not be what your customers expect. It is a good idea to have your shipping information in a prominent spot, so that it is available to your visitors even before starting the checkout process.

Also, a good idea is to have a calculator for the shipping cost of the order based on the address / location of the customer quite early in the checkout process. This makes the whole process more transparent and customers don't feel like there might be hidden costs down the road.

Be clear about returns and refunds

Another important piece of information that helps your customers check out are returns and refunds policies. As with shipping costs, these policies should be readily available to your visitors. Also, in many countries there are laws about consumer rights regarding returns and refunds, so make sure your policies are not violating these rules. As a side benefit, having clear and easily available terms and policies will make your store look more professional, too.

In 2019, the average cart abandonment rate was 77%

- Barilliance

If you are confident that you have handled all issues mentioned above, another way to uncover more potential issues is to survey your customers. Use AskBeat Customer Feedback Shopify app to manually or automatically email NPS® surveys to your customers with abandoned checkouts and investigate why they didn't complete their order in your store.

If you prefer to send a custom survey to your customers with abandoned checkouts, there are several survey tools that can help you build and send out a survey. Popular options are SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Zoho Survey and Google Forms. A quick tip: keep your survey short. 3-5 questions should be enough.

Once you have identified and handled all of the reasons that lead to cart abandonment, it's time to contact your customers!

Use one of the apps available in the Shopify app store to send them browser notifications, WhatsApp messages or email reminders about their abandoned carts.

Useful resources

Find out more about abandoned carts:

• 13 Amazing Abandoned Cart Emails (And What You Can Learn From Them)
• Mastering The Abandoned Cart Recovery Process