Tips to run a successful Shopify eCommerce store

Like every other business owner out there, your business idea started out as a discussion that you validated from many of your confidantes. You then brought this validated, thoughtful, incredible idea to life with the help of Shopify into an eCommerce store - and we couldn't be more proud! While you took all the time and effort setting up the store to offer a beautiful customer experience, we all know the real journey starts now. How do you plan on marketing your store? What is your conversion strategy? How do you plan to make the first sale? Or grow your business? Here are a few tips and tricks to run a successful Shopify eCommerce business:

Marketing tips

The most basic but rather misunderstood part of starting your business is Marketing. Most small businesses are of the opinion that marketing is an expensive affair and makes more sense to invest in once you've enough revenue and budgets. We're here to change that opinion. Digital marketing for an eCommerce store has a ton of organic or free options. With social media platforms, influencers, search engine rankings, review sites, and emails in your bag of free marketing arsenal, you can build a strong digital brand.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest LinkedIn, Quora, and Reddit all allow users to create their personal or professional accounts. Introduce your brand and products on as many relative social media platforms as possible. This makes your brand more visible. Continuously staying active on the platforms makes sure that the audience is aware of your business' ongoings and you stay on top of their minds. These platforms allow you to engage with your audience, collect feedback, even add channels of sales (eg. Instagram shop), and run low-budget advertisements for your specific target audiences.

Influencers are individuals or a group of individuals that command a following or have the potential to sway audience opinions. Influencers have grown in number over the last 5 years and are seeing tremendous response. Covering a variety of topics such as makeup, baking, food blogging, fashion styling, dance, and more these influencers form a strong channel of communication for testimonials and brand awareness. What's more, these famous instagrammers, bloggers, vloggers, and other personalities have a wide range of global and local audience for you to shortlist from. If your store sells local fresh everyday subscription meal service in Los Angeles, you might want to engage with a local food blogger whom your audience is likely to either follow or come across while browsing.

WhatsApp for business, emails, and a bunch of chat services are a surefire way to reach out to your customers. Newsletters with info on what's new in the market and updates on what's new at your store or even offers running at your store are some important communications that can be sent out to stay on your customer's mind.  

SEO

As an offline store, your physical location plays a very important role in building your business. If your store is in the middle of a market street or in a mall or next to a place with high walk-ins, your store is most likely to be noticed. Awareness and curiosity lead to a high number of customer walk-ins. Although, for an online store, this is difficult to replicate. The online way to attract browsing potential customers is through search engine optimization. Let's say your store sells fashion jewelry and you want the site to be visible to all those who search for fashion jewelry. A simple research on what are the trending and synonymous keywords to fashion jewelry on https://trends.google.com/ will give you an idea of what your audience is searching for. 

Once confirmed, ensure that your website content uses these keywords in product descriptions or blogs. This should help search engines catalog your site correctly and rank higher. Every time your website is ranked on the top, the visibility of your brand and products increases ultimately leading to a successful business.

Leverage Shopify app market

Shopify's extensive app marketplace is a treasure trove of tools - tools that can help you build a customer experience like no other! Now that you have started marketing your business and are probably experiencing growing website visits, it's necessary that you tweak and build your navigation to ease and improve customer experience. Every store has a beautiful theme, product and service lists and pages, so how do you differentiate yourself?

Applications that help you display the weather on your clothing store site, change the theme of the site as per the season, enable live chatting with online customers, link your site to your social media, enable appointment bookings for services, and many more are the answer. Differentiate yourself by customizing your customer journey to the T. Let's take an example of a children's toy and book-store that hosts children's activities for the community. Their online extension of the store requires to have integrations with the on-site technology and merge the two seamlessly. Simply speaking a ton of applications on Shopify help with the same. While these apps help manage inventory, some help give options of delivery or order pick-ups to the customers, and another is listed as an online appointment booking app to help manage the onsite activities and services.

As customers navigate through your site, certain tools that enable product suggestions, customer testimonials for the specific service that they are looking for, automated notifications for their appointments, updates for their orders, etc. go a long way towards building customer loyalty.

Analytics

Once you've set up all your marketing channels, started running social media campaigns, optimized your content, and created a mind-blowing customer experience on your site, it's time to measure the fruits of your effort. Reporting and analytics is a must-have feature for all eCommerce websites. Analyzing your website visits, bounce rates, conversions, sales, and many other metrics that help you optimize your business model and the website. You can either invest in a robust analytics tool or pull reports from Shopify's Analytics dashboard. 

Most tools on the app market, such as Appointo, the appointment management tool, sport an inbuilt analytics feature that can be leveraged. Data insights help you streamline your business operations and help build prediction models to build a successful and sustainable business model.

We hope these tips and tricks prove valuable and we wish your business success, wealth, and fame!