Shopify Expert Insights

Picture this, your product sales are high and coming 95% via a marketplace (Amazon, eBay, Etsy etc..), things are good and you are building your revenue. Next thing you know the marketplace says that you violated one of their policies or knocks you off. You’re done!

This is a common scary problem for businesses just starting out. How do I diversify my income streams? The upside is that you sell your product on a marketplace and validate the idea. The downside is that you don’t own your customer or brand.

A great strategy is to incorporate both income streams. Use a marketplace, but also build your own brand via a Shopify store.

The first step is to figure out what data points you have on your customers via the marketplace. If you ship your items, utilize their addresses.

• Ship your product with a coupon that directs them to your Shopify store
• Include a pack in card with instructions or a warranty that needs to be registered on your website
• Figure out what keywords people are using to search for your product on a marketplace and start using that information to form a SEO strategy

Pro tip: When the customer is registering their warranty, give them the option to add their email and get on your newsletter list. Boom! Now you have their email and can start retargeting them with ads.

What is a sensitive niche product? Basically anything that comes with a purchase age restriction.

In this case, assume you won’t be able to do any sort of pay per click advertising. Also assume that you are going to need to make double the effort on content strategy to make up for this.

These strategies can apply across the board, but might specifically help certain merchants more if you are at an ad disadvantage.

1. Creating an educational article about your product with some SEO can drive a lot of traffic.

If people Google a problem, find your article with reliable expertise, that automatically ups your credibility. You can then take those people and retarget them with products referenced in the ad (possibly based on your product). You could send your cold traffic to the article, people who visited your website homepage or Instagram profile.

2. Having a strong social media presence.

Certain types of content are more successful depending on the platform.

What type of content do you excel at creating and where could it live best? If you love creating videos, YouTube might be the place for you. If you like writing, maybe you try Facebook or have really great website content.

If you encounter saturation about a certain topic, how can you zig when everyone else zags?

Think about the community of people you are trying to target, find out where they go to educate themselves and applicable content. What’s great is that you can experiment and try different strategies until you find your crew.

Yes! You acquired the customer and made the sale. The hard work is over right? Unless you find odd joy in spending lots of money acquiring new customers, the answer is no. Giving a good customer experience pre and post-sale is what keeps them coming back and remembering you.

Let’s review some top post-purchase email strategies to help you increase your customer lifetime value. The timing of all this would happen in what I like to call, “the lull”. The in-between time that occurs after the initial purchase excitement and the final product arrival. This window gives you a lot of opportunities to provide good service.

Education

Here you would give information around the story of the product or brand, a thing it can do, how to take care of it, how to clean it, how to maintain it, etc… These pair nicely with a thank you, offering resources to answer questions and an expectation of product arrival.

Cause marketing

This one applies only to brands that have a cause at their core. You want that story baked into everything you do. You can thank the customer for their purchase, acknowledge the good it did and explain what the purchase is doing for the cause.

Procedures

Giving the customer directions upfront is a perfect service opportunity. For example, pretend you are a clothing brand, you will want your customer to try the item on right away. Give them the directions to return the item if it doesn’t fit. Maybe there are special care instructions for maintaining the material.

Cross-sell with a discount offer

What other products or services do you offer that the customer might be interested in? Highlight one with a 10% off or free shipping offer if they order within ten days.

My personal favorite… the combo

Offer the coupon or discount right away, sandwich it with any of the customer service feel-good emails mentioned above and close with a reminder to use the discount before it expires.

Pro tip: Klaviyo has a lot of these email automations built-in, just rework the flows for the specific messages you want to send. Get 15% off Klaviyo for 16 months with my affiliate link: klaviyo.com.

When considering migrating from Shopify to Shopify Plus, ask yourself one question:
What is the problem I’m trying to solve?

Some stores can sell millions of dollars a year, be totally fine and not on Plus. Others can solve a specific problem utilizing the tool box of resources available with Plus. It all depends on what you are trying to fix and having a plan in place.

Let’s go over what some of these extra tools are that come with Plus to help you figure out if it is the right solution for you.

1. Customizing the checkout experience and receive access to Plus exclusive apps

The checkout experience is one of Shopify’s key benefits. There are a lot of editable features that can help maintain your brand and improve the customer experience. These customizations could help you see a lift in conversion rates and average order values.

Use cases:

• Change shipping payment methods
• Update pricing on products, discounts and coupon codes
• Sell in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments and get paid in your local currency
• Utilize the ap Launchpad to schedule sales…..think of holidays like Black Friday for example
• Utilize Shopify Scripts to automatically create discounts and sales without coupon codes

Alternatives: If you don’t want to migrate to Shopify Plus, there are some 3rd party check out aps such as, Bold Cashier and One Click Upsell. The potential problem is that optimizing checkout is one of Shopify’s core benefits, if you swap it out, you might hobble through the process and not see desired results. Again, make sure you have a good understanding of the problem you want to solve.

Resources:

1. Shopify Multi Currency
2. Shipping Profiles

2. Lower credit card processing fee
If you are big enough, the lower processing fee could pay for Plus itself.

3. VIP support
You get additional and priority support to help with regular and more technical questions.

4. Create up to 9 clone stores and have a multi-store dashboard

Cloning stores could be beneficial if you are in any type of wholesale or multi-market business. You can have different stores for different languages, prices, currencies and manage them all on your multi store dashboard.

For more information check out my guide to Shopify Plus.

Merchants tend to worry about annoying customers, but people's tolerance for pain with emails is very high, especially if you deliver any kind of value or entertainment in the slightest.

My general rule of thumb is weekly.

Certainly don't spam people, but you can get into an issue where if you don't email them enough, they forget. They're like, who is this? When did I sign up for this? And you'll get more unsubscribes by sending too few emails. Some people might want to buy right away, others will need more contact. It all depends. The key is giving informative and entertaining content, with a PS of “hey you could buy this now here.”

The other approach to get comfortable with sending more email is through segmentation. That way you are optimizing your communication and not just spamming your entire list.

It’s no secret that new customer acquisition costs are high, so it’s important to focus on customer retention. These are some of my favorite short and sweet ways to keep those customers coming back.

Have a good product and give the customer a good experience

Providing good service and quality can be what separates you from the pack. Think of all the times you have had a great customer service experience, it sticks with you and creates loyalty. Ask the key follow up questions. “Did everything work out with your purchase?” “Let us know if you have any questions.” Take any feedback, iterate and listen to your customers.

Add value and stay top of mind

Emailing here is the key without being salesy. Is there a story behind your product you can share? Any instructions, tips or tricks that apply specifically to the item they bought? Can you tell them about different accessories that compliment their purchase?

For an example of a Shopify merchant that does this well, listen to my podcast interview with Jake Starr from Recycled Firefighter. After every purchase he emails the customer the story behind that specific product, with a sale offer to a related item.

Pro tip: Leverage follow up segmentation opportunities. Dive into your product or service

An easy way to start is by considering the same language countries that your product is originally sold in and website is written in. So if your product sells well in North America, what are the other English speaking countries you target? Start with some top performing Facebook ads, duplicate those, target them to that country and go. See what happens.

When you are working with a same language market, the best solution is to use a currency converter on your site. When you are a Shopify Plus member part of your monthly cost is cloning up to 10 stores. Creating a new store would be beneficial when you are then moving into different languages. Using a Java Script to translate a site can get messy.

One of the most important things is establishing trust indicators, because if a customer is dropping a lot of money, it better be 100% exactly what you promised it was. Over communicate all the key product points. You are going to want polished and professional imagery and videos. Think of 360 product shots, listing all product materials in excessive detail, reviews, customer lifestyle images and offering warranties.

Instagram is a great tool for building sales funnels with high end items. There is a niche community for everything. Find that community your product or service is a part of and jump in. You can consider doing a giveaway too that gets people excited.

To start, here are a couple standards to help you benchmark your customers and traffic:

• Over a 30 day rolling period, if you get 150 people a day to visit your store, you are getting traction in the marketplace and are building an audience
• 20-30% is a target average for repeat customers

Let’s talk strategies:

1. Set up the remarketing funnel: When you increase the total number of touch points with a customer, you will convert better and you’ll make more sales. With remarketing, you’re really only paying when traffic comes to the site and clicks through. I’d recommend setting up your Facebook remarketing. You don’t have that top of funnel costing you money yet, but you’ve got that remarketing in place for when you achieve a threshold of traffic that works. And you can set that up natively in Facebook, or you could use an app like Socio.
2. Build an organic social media following: Try to engage with Instagram influencers, give freebies. That is a gateway to cheap, top-of-funnel traffic. If you start to kill it on Instagram, then when those Instagram people hit your site, you are building a Facebook remarketing funnel.
3. Facebook like ads: These ads provide a little bit of social proof and brand awareness. Once you have a good organic social media following, Facebook like ads are extremely cheap. A good one can be around $.15/per like. You can then also set up ad campaigns to target people that have liked your page.

Pro tip: Look for all they ways you can drive alternative traffic to your site

Resource: A company like Workmacro will manage a follow/unfollow campaign for you on Instagram and get you several thousand followers quickly. You can now remarket to that audience.

I have not had direct experience with someone who was successful with only Pinterest ads. Pinterest tends to bring a lot of drive-by traffic that you can use to drive awareness. You can use it to fill remarketing ad funnels, but those people are not wallet out, ready to buy. They won’t convert directly into a sale necessarily.

If your Facebook ads are already a successful channel, keep spending your money where you know it works.

Pro tips: combine Pinterest and Facebook efforts

1. Drive your Pinterest traffic to follow you on Facebook. This will fill the top of your Facebook funnel with remarketing ad potential and already established familiarity. Remarketing ads are much cheaper.
2. Something to experiment with.…. You’ve got 100% of your ad budget on Facebook. All right, keep spending on Facebook. If you think you haven’t exhausted it, spend more on it till you get it to a place where you’re comfortable. Then divert some of that money into driving cold traffic from Pinterest and see if that works.