3 Proven Ways to Increase Sales on Shopify.

Opening an ecommerce business is easy. It does not take much time, effort, or capital to ‘start’ a business. Time, effort and capital come into play when it comes to running and growing your ecommerce business. Anyone can be a ‘business owner’ or an ‘entrepreneur’ – but not anyone can be a successful business owner or entrepreneur. Shopify, along with other platforms, has enabled anyone to be able to participate in the world of commerce almost instantly. Every Shopify owners asks me the same questions – how can they increase sales on Shopify. This appears from small brands just starting out to multi-million dollar companies.

These tips are more for operators who already started and are slowly growing their revenue. How can you maximize your growth? Focus on these three tips.

Launch a Successful Affiliate Program with Your Shopify Store

One of the most overlooked (and for some reason the most intimidating form of marketing) for ecommerce merchants is affiliate marketing. Working with so many Shopify merchants, we see that this method is quite underutilized. like email marketing, it is withstanding the test of time and technology evolution.

Some of the better performing affiliate networks include Share-a-Sale, Commission Junction (CJ), Tapgerine, and LinkShare.

Take a look and evaluate all of them. Some of the affiliate networks will only work with certain products and services. Make sure to evaluate what is a good fit for you as well. Once you start generating a lot of traffic you might want to consider creating an “in-house” referral program. You can utilize one of the affiliate marketing applications within the Shopify App marketplace.

Launch an Influencer Marketing Campaign

Starting an influencer marketing campaign is not as easy and simple as it sounds – but when done correctly, it can reap benefits (and sales) for you and your ecommerce store. Do not close your eyes and hope for the best, you have to…you have to do your homework.

Take 20-30 influencers and take a look at their following overall – this includes Instagram, Facebook, blog, Pinterest, etc. Understand their brand, understand them, and most of all – try to grasp who their followers are. Once you get going, and you are able to take that list from 30 down to 5-7 influencers, start to engage them. Create and nurture a relationship with them, and then find ways to collaborate with them. One golden rule…some influencers are nice, some are difficult, some will give you a reasonable price and others will make you want to swear at them – influencers know influencers, influencers talk with influencers…they will gossip about how you treat them, they will discuss your product, they might even mention to others how well or poorly you pay, if you pay on time, etc.

You can start this work on your own (manual process), or you can utilize tools and platforms to speed up the process. Feel free to evaluate platforms like AspireIQ, Dovetalke, Julius, Klear, etc. This will be a good place to look to if you really want to increase sales on Shopify.

Create a Useful “Buyer’s Guides” and “Insights” to Elevate your SEO

There are several frequent questions or inquiries that we endlessly receive – improve my SEO, create interesting content on my website, get users to trust my brand, and improve my conversion rates. All valid requests. So, how can you create trust with a consumer? How can you improve conversion rates? How can you create interesting, helpful content on your website? And, how can you maximize the effectiveness of your SEO strategy? You can, with one simple step – create user guides and insights for consumers.

Whether you have your own brand or whether you resell other brands, whether you sell fashion apparel and accessories, or whether you sell electronics – users love and appreciate guides and insights to cater to their shopping and decision-making process…

For example, if you are in fashion and you have your own brand, create a guide or insights on fashion trends for the upcoming year or season. This also works for resellers of apparel. If you are an electronics reseller, you can focus on “Top 10 Audio Systems for your Home” or “Best 65″ LED TV.” etc. You will not reap the benefits of this approach right away, but once people start sharing your content and linking to it, you can slowly crawl up Google rankings, and then, if you put enough time and effort you can see your guide start to appear under “Google Shopping” listings.

Also, do not feel like you have to do everything yourself. Think about the previous point of influencers and niche experts. Approach them to write something as well and tell them that you will link to their website or blog. They’ll do the same for you because they’ll want to share the article they contributed to.

Take one of these three and put some serious time and effort into it. If you want more immediate impact, go with Influencers or Affiliates. If you want a long-term plan (6-12 months), go with Guides and Insights. Or, do a mix of both. This should be a great way to start to increase sales on Shopify. Let us know how this pans out for you!