How to increase sales quickly on your Shopify Store: Updated for 2024

Last Updated on January 5, 2024 by Dan S
Originally Published February 22, 2022.

Strategy is super important. Many small businesses fail to hit their targets, as they either fall out of line with their strategy or never implement one to start with. To be a top Shopify store, there are certain things you have to do.

Having a fantastic website design, excellent customer experience and a leading strategy. Trying to market a product straight away through Instagram and hoping for hundreds of sales isn’t going to cut it.

How to increase sales quickly on your Shopify Store (Updated for 2023)

With the ecommerce market becoming jam-packed and competitive, you have to have a unique selling point (USP) and amazing strategy that is going to help you stand out and grow. Ecommerce is set to grow to $5.5 trillion USD during 2022 and up to $7.3 trillion USD by 2025, so you’re probably wondering how you can get a share of it.

In this article, we will help you understand how you can get more Shopify sales, but first, let’s discuss why your store might not be turning its traffic into sales.

Are you getting website traffic to your Shopify store but no sales?

If you have a Shopify store with traffic but it isn’t converting to sales, you need to put yourself in your shoppers’ position. You’ve made the effort of getting consumers to your site, but for some reason, they don’t want to buy. Why is this?

We’ve put together a few reasons why your traffic might not be converting:

1. Website design: you need to make your website diverse and stand out from others. If it looks the same, it’ll just get lost or could look worse than your competitors. You can use Shopify themes and page builders to create exciting and engaging landing pages.

2. Poor navigation: get into the mind of a shopper. You want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find what they are looking for. This means ensuring your website navigation is clear and concise. Use your collections in your menu so your shoppers can get to what they want quicker.

3. Incorrect audience: it might sound silly but you could be attracting the wrong consumers. Having SEO that misleads searchers or paid ads that are showing to the wrong demographics could be affecting your store’s conversions. Ensure the right shoppers can find and purchase your products.

4. Incorrect messaging: the simple thing to do is send all your traffic to your store’s homepage. However, you’d be doing yourself injustice by doing this. Knowing your audiences is fantastic because it means you can create specific and targeted landing pages with messaging tailored to each audience and increase your conversions.

5. Products descriptions: consumers are visiting your website because they are interested in your products. Make sure you have put the work in to fully describe each product. If you haven’t, your shoppers aren’t going to hang around.

6. Poor-quality images: like your product descriptions, your product images are what sell your products. Having high-quality images will help your customers understand why they need and what they can actually get from your products.

7. Lack of trust: shoppers are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to shopping online. Consumers look for reasons why they can trust a brand, so showing customer reviews and social proof will help them feel safer when buying from your store. Trust badges are also a good way of increasing customers’ trust and can boost sales.

8. Not optimised for mobile: with more and more consumers switching to their mobile phones to shop, it is important that your website is optimised for mobile usage to increase sales quickly.

10 strategies to increase your Shopify store’s sales and conversions

To build a successful ecommerce store and increase sales quickly, you’ll need to form a powerful sales strategy. It’s not as easy as creating a store and waiting for customers to come to you. You’re going to have to do things to make it happen.

Let’s talk through the strategies below that will drive traffic to your store and convert it into revenue.

Use fantastic SEO to build organic traffic

Getting free traffic to your website is a great goal. Search engine optimisation (SEO) allows this to happen. All you need to do is ensure your store is SEO-friendly to really seek the benefits.

The good thing with Shopify is that it has built-in settings to enable you to create SEO-friendly pages. This includes editable meta fields such as product title, description, URL etc, automatically generated sitemaps and 301 redirects.

This ensures that your homepage, product and collection pages and others are indexed correctly and can be located on search engines such as Google.

Although Shopify provides the platform to create SEO-friendly pages, you might find you want to create specific landing pages or create a highly engaging blog. Blog posts are a fantastic way to rank highly on Google. A great use for a blog is to answer questions your ideal customer is asking.

You can find relevant keywords for your industry that can help towards creating the blog by using a tool such as UberSuggest.

Use paid advertising on Google and social platforms

Paid advertising campaigns are a great way of targeting the right people that are highly likely to convert to buyers on your store. While you might want to get the top organic search results on Google, paid ads will always appear first.

This is good because it means you have the chance of being up there too. Utilise Google paid search ads and Google Shopping ads to get your products in some of the top placements. This happens by bidding for search keywords you would like your ads to show for and then paying for clicks. Every time a consumer clicks on one of your paid ads, you pay for it. But overall, it’s a direct and easy way to increase sales quickly on your store.

Some brands are more successful with paid social ads. These are normally on social platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Paid social ads work differently, as you target specific audiences instead of keywords. Using the information social users put on their profiles, you can target pages they like, geographical locations, interests and behaviours, brand associations and politics.

You can continuously edit and change your ad copy, images and targeting until you get it right. Just ensure you are making more than you spending for it to be a good way to drive traffic to your store.

Converting email marketing campaigns

Having a way to capture consumers’ email addresses is key to creating a successful email marketing campaign. If you can get a customer’s email when they enter your store, you have a way of marketing to them in the future, even if they don’t purchase from your store the first time they visit.

Once they visit your store, you want to keep your brand in their minds and drive new purchases. For every $1 spent on email marketing in ecommerce, the return on investment (ROI) is $42. Getting 42x return is a no-brainer, so ensure you’re using your email marketing to the best of its capability.

If you have gained a large list of customer emails, you want to ensure you utilise it effectively. Use segmentation and drip email sequences to really make the most of it. You will have three types of emails:

• Transactional emails: for example, order and shipping confirmations
• Lifecycle marketing emails: abandoned cart, welcome emails, re-engagement or post-purchase emails
• Promotional emails: special offers and sales

You can also look to segment your customers into different audiences, such as the following:

• First-time users
• Regular buyers
• Abandoned carts
• Large order buyers

Targeting specific emails at different audiences means you can tailor the content and messaging to increase engagement and conversion.

Lookfantastic uses email campaigns as a powerful way to market sales and offers.

If you’re looking for a good email marketing platform to use, Klaviyo has everything that you need. You can integrate it with your Shopify store and it’s a great way to increase sales quickly.

Social media marketing strategy

It’s important that you have a strong social media strategy to complement your overall marketing strategy. It’s clear to see that some of the top Shopify stores put part of their success to social media marketing.

Instagram has become the platform that ecommerce brands turn to when starting their social media strategy. With the main focus on images and the ability to tag products, it creates a super easy shopping experience.

As of 2022, Instagram has over 1 billion global users and this is set to grow in 2023.

Kylie Cosmetics has a super engaging Instagram account with over 25 million followers.

As well as Instagram, many brands use Facebook too. Although it’s not as visual as Instagram, it can still contribute to the success of your business. Interacting with Facebook groups is a great way to drive awareness of your brand without cost.

TikTok is expected to reach 1.5 billion users by the end of 2022. It is now the leading social app and many brands are switching to it. TikTok focuses on short videos compared to images, and the engagement can be higher. If you haven’t already, it might be worth investing some time into TikTok, as it’s only set to grow further.

Zara is a brand that has gained a huge following on TikTok creating fun and engaging content.

Powerful product descriptions, images and video

Your products are the most important asset on your Shopify store. You therefore want to do as much as you can to highlight them and make the customer want to buy them. Just because more and more shoppers are now switching to online shopping, it doesn’t mean they won’t want a good store experience.

Ensure that your product descriptions are detailed and include everything that the customer would want to know about the product they are viewing. The size, weight, dimensions and material of the product should be mentioned.

As your customers are unable to actually physically touch and hold the products, you need to create a product page experience that gets the customer as close to reality as possible. Having amazing images of your products from all angles, to showing the smallest details is super important when you want to increase sales quickly.

Gymshark showcases their products with great imagery and descriptions.

Don’t dismiss video either. It’s a powerful tool that is great for showing the full product to your customers and has been known to significantly increase sales quickly. Consumers can relate easily to videos.

You can try adding a delivery countdown timer to the product pages. This gives a sense of urgency and the customer feels compelled to checkout by a certain time to get additional benefits. These can include next day delivery or an offer.

Another way to boost sales conversions from your product pages is to upsell other products. For example, if you sell phone cases, you could upsell screen protectors or chargers. It’s a fantastic way to increase your average order value (AOV) and furthermore, overall sales. SellUp does just this.

Simply add upsells to product pages under the Add to Cart button, or as a popup after the Add to Cart button has been clicked.

Increase engagement by using push notifications and SMS

SMS marketing is often forgotten about when in fact it can be just as important as email marketing. As SMS marketing requires an authentic opt-in, consumers are more than happy to receive messages about discounts and offers.

It’s amazing to think that the average open rate of SMS messages is around 99%. It seems that when a consumer receives an SMS it has a personal touch, which feels similar to receiving one from family or friends. SMS messages are also opened a lot quicker than email, normally within two minutes of receiving it.

Web push notifications can be opted into by your shoppers. It nudges your consumers where they are shopping without having to collect any personal information from them. Show discounts to them quickly and efficiently to boost sales and conversions on your store.

Web Push by OneSignal is a fantastic Shopify app to help with web push notifications. It’s a super easy way to increase sales quickly on your Shopify store.

Use opt-ins and pop-ups

To get as much value from the traffic you do have, it’s important to use opt-in forms. These come in many ways, such as popups, flyouts and chat windows. Offering shoppers first-time discounts is a great way to increase sales and convert them to buyers.

Once you have customers’ email addresses and/or phone numbers, you can market to them to drive future sales also. Opt-ins are a good way to boost store conversions. The average conversion rate for popups is around 3.09% with some top popups converting at 10%.

Skinnydip London use a quirky and cool popup to attract customers to get 10% off their first purchase.

Create high-converting landing pages

Now you’ve probably established a strong strategy for getting visitors to your website, you can look to build landing pages that are designed to improve conversion and increase sales quickly.

Using paid ad traffic as an example, you know who the audience is because you’ve been paying to target them specifically. With this, you’d be better sending them to a dedicated and targeted landing page rather than your homepage.

To make a landing page successful, these are some features to consider:

• Influential design and imagery
• A super engaging headline
• A convincing call to action (CTA)
• Fantastic social proof
• Features and benefits of the product you are selling

If you look to create one amazing landing page, you can then replicate this for all your individual audiences and tailor it towards each one. GemPages is a great page builder that allows you to customize and tailor each page independently.

Use social proof to build trust

Social proofing your store is a great way to build trust with your customers and increase sales quickly. It might be nice to think that your marketing effects alone are enough to persuade them into purchasing your products, but it’s not always the case.

Shoppers trust their fellow consumers when it comes to buying online. Displaying just how happy your customers are on your website can help in convincing new visitors to checkout. If you have fantastic reviews or have been featured in popular publications such as magazines, ensure these are prominent on your site.

Social proof your store with awards and logos of publications that mean well. It helps to transfer the trust over to your shoppers and push them into converting to buyers. Any social proof is good for boosting sales on your Shopify store.

SemRush is a great example of using powerful social proof. It uses ‘trusted by’ logos of big companies as well as awards too.

Convert your customers into brand ambassadors

Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is something a lot of businesses can pass by. Referral and loyalty programs are powerful marketing strategies that should be considered for your brand.

Your top and best customers should be rewarded and this is a no brainer when it means receiving future purchases. Customers believe that a brand with a good customer referral or loyalty program is the reason why they’ve stayed.

Not only do these types of programs boost your customer retention, but they can turn your loyal customers into brand ambassadors. A free method of marketing your products and business. What’s better than that? And the best thing is ensuring your products give your customers a reason to shout about them.

Social Snowball is an excellent affiliate program. You can also build powerful loyalty and referral programs with these apps too, which all help to increase sales quickly.

Even the small things can help

When finding ways of increasing your sales and conversions quickly on your Shopify store, you don’t always need to do everything above. Begin with the changes you know you can make and then go from there.

Your business is different from the next so the best thing to do is make constructive changes, listen to your customers and get valuable feedback. It will help to boost sales for future shoppers.

Many of these methods above can easily be implemented with tools or apps, so find out what works best you, your store and customers.