3 Easy Marketing Methods to Increase Conversions on Your Shopify Store

Driving traffic to your Shopify store is only half the marketing battle (see our easy marketing methods to drive traffic here). Once a visitor is on your store site, you have to convince them to make that purchase. Increasing conversions on your site will be a lifelong battle for ecommerce marketers, but there are some really good marketing workflows for new stores to utilize. Let’s check them out.

1. Put sales before branding.

Some companies in retail make the mistake of prioritizing branding over making sales. Yes, your brand is an important part of developing your business, but there are some ways that it can hold you back. On ecommerce websites, the use of color is especially important in drawing the customer’s eye to certain areas of the page – if you stick too rigidly to brand colors, your ability to do this can be limited.

A great example of this is Childsplay Clothing, a luxury children’s clothing store that focused its branding around a stylish black and white color palette. The company were reluctant to change the color of its call-to-action buttons (such as Add to Bag) even though this had been recommended as a way to improve conversions on the site.

“We were sceptical about changing the color of our ‘Add to Bag’ button from black and white,” said Moby Latif, Head of Business Strategy & Development at Childsplay, “however, since making the button a brighter color, the results have been excellent – we have seen a significant increase in conversions”. The company now not only has a bright orange ‘Add to Bag’ button, but also highlights the added value proposition of ‘Free Shipping’.

Testing out various colors on your Shopify site is very easy with our Page Studio app. The app makes it easy to build pages that are both gorgeous and sales-focused. (Try it out for 14 days free!)

2. Incorporate reviews.

Reviews and testimonials are one of the most important tools in your arsenal in order to increase conversions. Customers understand that every shop is going to tell them that their products are fantastic and worth buying – and this can make them sceptical about buying (especially from websites that they are not familiar with).

Adding reviews onto the site shows customers that other real people have bought the product, reassuring them not only that your products are good, but also that the store is legitimate. The majority of online shoppers will want to read reviews of the product before they buy, and if they can’t see them on your site, you can bet they will click away and go elsewhere to find them.

Better yet, it’s really easy to add customer reviews to your Shopify store – take a look at the video below for instructions:

If you’re having trouble generating written reviews, there’s an even simpler solution: emoji reviews. Our Shopify app, Smile, enables you to collect emoji reactions from your customers – granting you social proof with very little work on your customers’ end. (Get one month free!)

3. Focus on page loading speed.

Google has released research indicating that as page loading speed increases so does the chance of the visitor bouncing from the site. A reasonable page speed would amount to sites loading in under 2 seconds, and getting under one second puts a site in the top 10% of all websites. However, when page loading speed takes up to three seconds it increases the probability of bounce by 32%, and when loading takes up to six seconds that probability rises again to 106%.

Robert Belgrave, CEO of web hosting specialists Wirehive, recently commented “one of the major reasons that our clients work with us is for our ability to deliver fast loading speeds for their website. Page loading speed has become such a significant factor in driving conversions, it is something all ecommerce businesses need to take seriously”.

So if you want to improve page loading speeds, what can you do? The first move to make is to look at the size of the images on your site. It is important to have large, high quality images to promote products and make your website attractive – but you should check the size of the images on your site to ensure that they are not so large that they are slowing down the loading. You can compress images to keep the same quality but with a much smaller file size, which can be ideal for websites.

Other issues such as excessive redirects, broken links, and having too many apps installed on the site can also slow your site down. Our friends over at Huemor put together this truly exhaustive piece on improving your Shopify site loading speed, if you’d like to learn more.

Make Your First Sale

Making that initial sale takes a lot of work, but the good news is that once someone has purchased, they are far more likely to continue purchasing from you. Ready to encourage your customers’ loyalty? We’ve got advice for you on that, too.