Before you even get started with your Shopify store, think about what activities will help you get the customers 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 large generalization, because, in order for you to notice increased sales with high traffic, at least two things must happen:
a) your offer must be tailored to the client’s needs ;
b) 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, that 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 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. Hard data will allow you to find out 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. 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 website (from what places the visitors came from) and how much time potential customers spent on the website, where they logged in from and what they were looking for on the website. The available filters will make it easier for you to 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, and 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, and 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 customers to your store.
5 methods to get customers to your Shopify store
We’ll show you some customer sourcing methods that you can start right 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 offer you?
# 1 Increasing the visibility of your store on 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 a lot of SEO plugins to help you with that.
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 generic descriptions that 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, which 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’re not sure what keywords to choose, see what your competitors are doing or use keyword tools like Ahrefs, Senuto, and Semrush.
See how we handle shop positioning on Shopify
What if you have a small assortment? How to compete with huge stores that have lots of subpages? Running a corporate blog can be a fruitful source of the traffic to your website. Google and other search engines like pages that are updated frequently, so writing a blog that fits your field and responds to users’ problems can be a great strategy to attract traffic to your store. You may think there is nothing to write about in your field, but once you get into writing, the topics will start to appear on their own. Let’s say you run a spice shop, why not run a culinary blog that shows you how to use spices in your kitchen? Such articles will capture the imagination of readers as well as build an opinion about your business. If you don’t have ideas for blog articles, take a look at the Facebook group or private blogs and see if you can find inspiration there. Many of Shopify’s themes have a blog built-in right from the start. Make sure to add tags and meta descriptions to each blog post so it’s easy to find when searching.
SEO is not only about working on new publications but also tracking the structure and individual elements of the entire website – including those that have been removed. You may need to create a redirect because the product page is still showing on Google even though we opted out of selling the product. SEO is also about detecting duplicate content and improving linking and page speed. The makers of one of the leading SEO tools, MOZ, have published an article explaining to you how to take care of good SEO in your store on Shopify . Remember that SEO takes effect over time. You need at least six months to see a satisfactory increase in visits.
Paid traffic
SEO is the key 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. You can create such a promotion directly in the Shopify admin panel. 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 through search engines. What about other ways to reach customers on the Internet?
# 2 Sales and promotion on social media
If you want to attract customers to your store, increase your online presence by creating accounts on social platforms where your customers are. Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are especially 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 check 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. Do not 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 mug painting process or ask your audience which pattern they prefer more. All your activities on social media influence your image so 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 catalogue of products 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 or Pinterest . You will create a catalogue 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.
Many buyers go to the brand’s social media profile to ask a question about the product. Therefore, be sure to monitor Facebook Messenger, private messages on Instagram, or other communication channels through which your customers want to contact you. We’ll come back to that in this article, but now let’s move on to paid ways to get customers to your store on Shopify.
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 behaviour on Facebook, etc.
You can also use Shopify to run retargeting campaigns, which are people who have seen your inventory but haven’t made a purchase. Instructions on how to do this are available on the Shopify website.
You don’t have to advertise only products. You can also advertise blog posts where you talk about your products (e.g. a gingerbread recipe using your spices) or your fan page to get more likes or announce a contest. Experiment. You never know what will produce the best effect.
# 3 Gathering feedback and showing your most purchased products
Advertising campaigns, keeping accounts on social 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 might 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, and 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.
The simple Shopify Product Reviews app allows customers to add product reviews and ratings, and you have the ability to manage the entire process. Shopify also recommends apps like Yotpo, Stamped.io, and Loox for its blog alongside its own app, but you’ll also find others in the Shopify App store.
Most customers will not write their opinion on their own. You have to encourage them to do so. You can send a short, automatic email to ask for an assessment of when the product has reached their hands. To make your request even more effective, retell the message to those who took no action. Even though the email will be sent automatically, that doesn’t mean it should look like a system notification. Personalize your messages by adding the recipient’s name, a nice message from yourself, etc. The apps in the Shopify App Store will make this much easier for you.
Opinions of other customers will prove to visitors that they are not the only ones who found your store. And what else can increase the chance that the purchasing process will be successful?
# 4 Promotions, discount codes and shopping vouchers
Who has not 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 large number of loyal customers. The frequency of organizing discounts depends largely on the industry in which you are located. For example, seasonal, general sale discounts in the fashion industry are seen as the norm. It is different with 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.
Some online stores set a time limit to enhance the effect of the sale. According to this tactic, the fewer products you sell on, the smaller the sales window (e.g. 12 hours). Then a counter appears on the page, informing you how much time is left to the end. The Shopify app store has several applications of this type on offer. You can generate a discount code – be it for a product or a delivery – in the Shopify admin.
Promotions, discount codes or special shopping vouchers must be promoted in order to be effective in bringing new customers to the store. You can use social media or a newsletter for this purpose. We will talk about the latter tool right now.
# 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 the value of the cart . Remember that you don’t need to have 24/7 chat enabled – to start with, you can set an hour or two when the chat will be active.
Shopify offers many chat plugins that you will find on the App Store, and thanks to add-ons such as 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 about other ways of communicating with customers? One such option is email marketing, which involves sending email messages to a list of subscribers. E-mail marketing in e-commerce brings to mind the handing out of flyers – emails are visually polished, feature products or announce sales or special offers. Usually, clients do not reply to such messages, but they can enter the site directly.
Maintaining a newsletter is a great way to gain loyal customers. Email addresses are powerful. However, be sure to read the GDPR before you decide to send your newsletter. Customers should agree to receive marketing communications by you via email, be able to unsubscribe as well as update data easily. The Shopify plugins will allow you to connect your email marketing tool to your store.
What will you do to get customers to your Shopify store?
Regardless of which method you choose, your store is the basis – if there is no well-optimized shopping path, the subpages are slow to load or the 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. And if you are already implementing one of your marketing methods in your store, be sure to keep a close eye on the statistics – they will tell you if your actions are leading you in the right direction.
