Shopify Expert Insights

E-Com Advice from our experienced in-house team
Revenue Hack: Upgrade Your Order Confirmation Emails
by Kurt Elster

Smart marketers know that the first sale is the only beginning of a relationship with a customer.

If your marketing stops after the first sale, you are leaving money on the table.

Moreover, while there're lots of ways to extend that the lifetime value of a customer, there's one thing you should be doing first.

Upgrade your order confirmation emails!

A typical email open rate is 20%, and even in my best campaigns, I get an average of 55%.

But order confirmation emails? Those consistently get opened three out of four times.

Using MailChimp’s email marketing benchmarks, we’ve discovered our open rates are 4x higher than common email rates (for eCommerce as an industry).
Source: Receiptful

And yet the majority of Shopify store owners don't do anything with them. They never update them from the Shopify default template.

Get Personal

I want you to rewrite your order confirmation emails. Put them in your own voice, make them personal, and make them come from you as the store owner. Sign them. Own them. It's an easy way to start building a personal relationship between you and your customers. The easiest way to do this? Thank them.

This one modification alone will improve customer experience because they're getting a personal thank you from their new friend, instead of a transactional email from a brand.

Plain-text: Keep It Simple

Don't worry about crazy visuals and HTML email. Those things are fine, but it's not how you'd write an email to a friend. You'd write an email to a friend in plain-text, right?

After you've made your connection and thanked them, you can put your money where your mouth is by offering your customers something to show your gratitude (and hopefully get a second sale before the first item has even been delivered.)

The Upsell

Offer a 10% discount on their next purchase and suggest a few best-sellers. This combo removes all friction, and it's being offered at an incredibly relevant time: directly after the first order!

I'd also experiment with offering free or upgraded shipping coupons, product bundles, and limited time offers.

Going Social

Then lastly, get them involved with their community. If you have an active social media presence, pick your single most dominant channel, and invite them to *post* their new purchase. This level of micro-engagement is so much more important than just following you in yet another place.

I'd offer this as a PostScript, and in an ideal world, it's a stepping stone to user generated content, engagement, and word of mouth marketing. In my experience, it's harder to get people to post about your product than it is to get them to buy it, but it's potentially worth even more sales down the road.

What are you waiting for?

What are you doing or planning on doing with your transactional emails? I'd love to hear, share your thoughts or questions with me.
The not-very-quick & dirty method for creating your own eBook.
by Paul Reda

We recently launched a book, and one of my requirements for the project was that it had to be available in real ebook formats - not just a crappy PDF that people were supposed to read on their computer screens. I do most of my reading on a Kindle Paperwhite, and I love it. It does one thing, and it does that one thing great. Of course, now the onus fell on me to make the ebook happen, so here's the process I used. I'm not saying this is the "correct" or "only" way, just the one that worked best for me. You'll end up with EPUB and AZW3 files that should be readable pretty much everywhere.

Kurt and I wrote Ecommerce Bootcamp collaboratively in a Google Doc, then I did a final pass on it in LibreOffice. The fact that we had already written it in word processing software made the GUI-heavy iBooks Author feel like more trouble than it was worth (plus WYSIWYG editors are tools of the devil). So I just took our ODT file and used Calibre to convert it to EPUB. If you read a lot of ebooks, Calibre is a must-have tool for converting between file formats, tagging your books, and fixing them so they (correctly) use left justification instead of (clearly incorrect) full justification.

This resulted in a sloppy EPUB file. The words themselves were correct, but the font sizing, spacing, alignment, etc were inconsistent and not what I wanted. Now here's something your might not know: EPUBs are just zipped-up HTML and CSS files with a little bit of extra stuff thrown in. You can use a simple tool like eCanCrusher to “unzip” your EPUB and you get this:

From here you can use a text editor to edit the HTML and CSS to do whatever you want. You're essentially making a visually pleasing text-based website. Because I'm picky, I just put in the raw text and hand-coded the whole thing. I wanted to make sure all my heading sizes were correct, what would be ordered lists vs. what would be unordered lists, blockquote margins, etc. TextMate's Option-Shift-W is your friend. The CSS is pretty simple and you can use it to define exactly how your text is laid out. Chapter breaks are done by adding page-break-before: always; on each H1.

See the Pen EPUB CSS by Paul Reda (@paulreda) on CodePen.

Calibre's EPUB exports use an older standard of the format that was based on XHTML and CSS2, so when you're marking up your book, pretend it's 2004 again. Complete with weird browser quirks! (Such as Nook readers might barf if you use CSS shorthand like margin: 10px 0;)

Everything else in your unzipped EPUB should be pretty straightforward. A folder with images you may be using, the title page of your book, and content.opf, which acts like a for your book. A file you will need to worry about editing is toc.ncx, which is the Table of Contents.

See the Pen EPUB TOC by Paul Reda (@paulreda) on CodePen.

Just add a navpoint for each chapter, and have it link to an anchor tag inside the text of your book. Again, it's just like making links within a page.

After you get things working right in your EPUB folder, run it back through eCanCrusher to get it back to a single file. Now you can take that, pop it back in Calibre, and convert it to whatever other ebook formats float your boat. Remember, we're back in 2004, so it's a good idea to load it onto different devices and do some "browser testing" to make sure everything looks fine.
Nobody Respects Digital Creators Because Digital Creators Don't Respect Themselves: A Twitter Rant
by Paul Reda
Shopify Tutorial: The Ultimate DIY SEO Hack
by Kurt Elster

I recently recorded a screencast for my friend Micheal DiMartini of Everest Bands to show him how I use a simple SEO hack to easily up his search rankings, yet another in the many small steps we took to help grow his business to seven figures. (I'll admit... I'm a wee bit jealous of his watch collection!) Last night, I recorded an even more in-depth version of that screencast, for you, showing exactly what real SEO pros don't want you to know.

This is just one of many actionable and in-depth screencasts I've prepared for the launch of Ecommerce Bootcamp: The Insiders Guide to Building a Million Dollar Sales Funnel for Your Shopify Store, for which pre-orders start next Tuesday at 10 am Central time.
Shopify Theme Optimization Tutorial
by Kurt Elster

Is your website turning customers away? Let me show you how I setup Shopify themes for stores with seven figure revenues. By the end of this webinar, you'll know what your store needs to boost conversion and your bottom line. Never be confused by your Shopify theme optimization again. Learn how to set up your theme for success.
Shopify Positioning Workshop Webinar
by Kurt Elster

"Uncover hidden profits by presenting & positioning your Shopify store in the best light to potential customers."
Are you cultivating your top 1% customers?
by Kurt Elster

This is a guest post by Michael Bower who joined us in season of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. He's spent twelve years running and servicing ecommerce companies, which means Michael gets the growing pains merchants feel. We're big fans of his offering BLLD ME.

I just learned a great stat from RJMetrics: In the average ecommerce store, the top 1% of customers spends 30x more than the average customers!

RJM expanded on this in their white paper report. I was so excited about this I got their permission to link directly to it.

30x more spending above average. That's an insane amount!

This is similar to a phenomena I first noticed years ago when working with a nonprofit client— most of their revenue consistently came from a few donors.

This is a great example of Pareto's Principle in action. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's often called the 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Those are your VIP customers. You want to segment them in your marketing and customer service and give them preferential treatment because they're the most important to your business.

Rather than try to find and court new VIP customers, you'd be better off saying thank you to your known VIP customers by providing them with additional value.

Some quick wins you should try:

  1. Make smart, personalized recommendations to your top 1% (if it's an automated or batch email, make it look like it was crafted just for them. Klaviyo can do this.)
  2. Segment them and reach out to them with special "VIP" offers.
  3. Show your appreciation by giving them the occasional freebie. Offer upgraded shipping, free sample of other products, promotional swag, whatever makes sense. Just something to say thank you.

As a brand, it's hard to have a one-to-many relationship. By identifying and segmenting your top VIP customers, you may be able to reach out to them personally and build a 1:1 relationship with them. Depending on the volume of your business, this could be 20% of your customers, or 2%, you should be doing it.
"How do I SEO my Shopify store?" For Dummies
by Kurt Elster

Yesterday I spent the whole day at the Shopify Retail tour. They'd invited me, along with a few other folks, to answer questions about Shopify and Ecommerce from existing and potential Shopify customers. From 10am until 4:30pm, I talked to a diverse and interesting lot of folks.

But every single person asked me some variation of one universal question: "how do I SEO?"

I get why they're asking. If your site appears at the top of google searches for a variety of things related to your products, you'll have loads of traffic. And potentially you didn't pay for it, if only you could crack the code on SEO! If only you knew the magic formula of H1 and alt tags to make the google machine happy.

But that's not realistic. It's at best an attempt to game a hugely complex and constantly changing algorithm into giving you traffic you don't deserve.

I say you don't deserve it because you're trying to cheat the system. Instead, let's come up with a real strategy that works.

Step 1: Let's forget about obsessing over html. If you're using a new premium theme from a good developer like Pixel Union or Out of The Sandbox then you've already done 99% of everything you need to support technical SEO efforts. Open graph, schema markup, etc. All there and done. Don't waste more time and money on this because you'll never get a good ROI out of it. Let's face facts: google engineers are smarter than you.

Step 2: on site SEO. Google wants what your customers want: relevant, valuable content. You have to write articles, guides, interviews, and all the other valuable content you enjoy on other sites. My most successful Shopify Plus couldn't care less about SEO. Instead of fussing with alt tags, he hired three writers to produce great blog content for him. It only costs $1200/mo which is way cheap for the ROI he gets. Here's the best part: he never worries about writing the perfect SEO copy, because he's instead creating on-topic and relevant articles. You can do the same thing. Write on your own or hire someone.

I already know your objection: "Kurt I'm a lousy writer and I can't afford a writer." I've got a hack for you that I use. Dictate your articles using the text to speech already built in to your device. Macs are great at this. Then send it to a copy editor. I pay $30/article on average for copy editing.

Step 3: off-site SEO. Links to your site from sites with a similar audience are massively important. (Note: The spammy blog comment links you buy from a snake oil salesman SEO pro for $500/mo are the opposite of this.)

Here's where we need to again forget about SEO; start thinking like a public relations firm. The best SEO strategy I've ever seen is PR outreach. Find blogs, forums, YouTube channels, and Instagram rockstars who are in your niche. Now email them. Email them and offer them free product in exchange for an honest review. This is a numbers game but it's the only way you'll get relevant links with qualified traffic. This tactic is powerful in that you'll be able to trade up the chain. You'll start with small blogs and as word of mouth grows you'll be able to build relationships that move you up to blogs getting millions of daily visitors. This tactic isn't particularly difficult but it is time consuming. You can hire someone to do it for you which will save you time and speed things up because outreach professionals already have a network to leverage. (I personally recommend Kai Davis for this kind of work, he's pulled great results for my clients.)

What's the takeaway here? Instead of trying to learn the finer points of semantic HTML while guessing at google's algorithm, all you need to do is share your passion. Make your love of your niche infectious and the SEO will follow.
Quick-tip: name your shipping rules to reduce cart abandonment
by Kurt Elster

Here's a quick tip this week that will work in 99% of stores.

What's the number one reason for abandoned carts? Unexpected shipping costs. People have weird anxiety and feelings about shipping.

So how do you have your shipping rules setup in Shopify? I bet it's something vague like "Standard Shipping" and "Free Shipping," right?

The problem with that is you're only selling one question about shipping: cost. What about expected delivery time? Or carrier?

Here's the quick fix. Rename your shipping rules with the specific carrier and service that you use, and the expected shipping time. For example, "USPS Priority Mail (2-4 Days)" is so much clearer than "Standard Shipping."

Here's a good example from Everestbands.com:

Image

They way their rules are setup, the customer will only ever see two shipping options: standard or free, and express. That's another good point: avoid choice paralysis by only offering people 1 or 2 shipping options.

Give it a shot! (This even gives you a leg up on Amazon who doesn't tell you what carrier you're going to get.)
What Your ‘About Us’ Page Needs To Boost Conversions
by Kurt Elster

There are two pages every Shopify store I’ve ever set up has: a Contact Page and an About Page. (If I can toot my own horn, we totally nailed our own Contact page. It gets more compliments than any other page on our site.) If you’re like many people, you’ve struggled to write an about page because you don’t know what to put on it. But more importantly, you don’t know what to put on it because you don’t really know the purpose of the page.

I’m going to clear up both of those things for you.

I was talking to my friend Jordan Gal from CartHook about some of his experiences running a wildly successful ecommerce store with his brothers, and he shared with me an anecdote that gave me an ah-ha moment.

Jordan had LiveChat on his site, and it let him track people in real-time. And by doing that, they quickly noticed a pattern: shoppers would find a product and add it to their cart. (At this point they’ve decided they want to buy that product.) Once in the cart, some folks would proceed to checkout, and others would do something strange: they’d visit the about page. This is because they were making a second and often overlooked decision: “Yes, I want to buy this item, but do I want to buy it from this store?”

Think about it, when you’re in a brick & mortar store, you know it’s a legitimate operation. Leases were signed, licenses paid for, etc. The web doesn’t have that same implicit trust factor. No matter how nice the website is, if the visitor hasn’t heard of it before, it inspires about as much implicit trust as a guy selling t-shirts out of a van in the parking lot.

So in lieu of any physical location to visit, some visitors may visit the about page to get a sense of how trustworthy you are. (And why not, your website is, after all, an anonymous stranger asking for their credit card number in the dim parking lot of the internet.) So the first and foremost thing to do on your About page is to introduce yourself. Get out of the shadows, and include your photo, and a little bit about yourself. How did you come to run an ecommerce store? What do you love about it? Things that personalize you. Then go a step further in building trust and include your store’s contact information. A toll-free number especially boosts trust. Being accessible is important.

After you’ve given the visitor a sense of who you are with your about page and how to get ahold of you, they may start to wonder about what a relationship is like with you. This is where you trot out everything you have that minimizes risk for the customer:

  • Guarantees
  • Easy Returns
  • Free Shipping
  • Guaranteed Fast Shipping
  • And even Testimonials

When you offer all of the above, you’re going the extra step that your competitors haven’t. A customer choosing between two sites, may go with the more expensive site if it’s more trustworthy. So get out there and update your About page. It may only take you 15 minutes and it could boost your conversion rate.