4 Ways to Use Your Shopify E-Commerce Store to Grow Your Customer Base

Growing a successful e-commerce business can be seriously complex. Regardless of how much time it takes you to go from your first sale to your hundredth, sooner or later you’ll need to consider things like promotional strategies, fulfillment partners, and conversion optimization tools.

But in the early days of your new store, you’re likely focused on one key thing: how to I get more customers?

Maybe you began by sharing your Shopify site with all your friends and family, and asking them to share it with people they know. You’re focused on making sure each sale has a happy customer, hoping they’ll return and buy again. But other than word-of-mouth, how can you grow your customer base (with little-to-no upfront cost)?

Do a quick online search, and you’ll find a lot of ideas that cost money. Buying ads on social platforms or paid search are two super common tactics.

But if you’re just starting out, chances are you don’t have a lot of profits laying around to re-invest into your fledgling business.

That’s why I’m going to suggest four easy-to-implement ways you can use your Shopify site to draw in more new customers to your store.

1. Subscription Email Sign-Up

The first time someone visits your site, they may not be ready to buy yet. They may just be taking a look around, checking out what you have to offer, and getting a feel for your brand.

If you don’t catch their email on this first visit, chances are they’re not coming back again.

To have a shot at a future sale – and even better, a future repeat customer – you need a way to remind them of your great products. An easy way to create trust, entice them to return and maybe make a purchase.

Email is a great way to do all that.

Compared to other marketing channels, email subscribers are more responsive, they have a stronger connection with your business, and they buy more of your products.And email has a median ROI of 122% – over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search.(Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric)

So how do you get your visitors to give up their highly coveted email address? It comes down to a combination of trust, the promise of delivered value, and ease of opportunity.

Trust: For new visitors, your online store needs to present itself as a legit merchant. It needs to look like a successful e-commerce site. With the right guidance, this should be easy to do using Shopify’s pre-built themes.

Promise of Delivered Value: What are you going to give them in exchange for their email address? Maybe your product is so unique and exciting that the simple promise of learning more about it will be enough value. But for most of us, we need to dig a little deeper.

This promise of value may be a promotional discount (like Taza Chocolate offers on its homepage pop-up: 15% off the next order), or news about an upcoming launch like Joe Grooming.

Ease of Opportunity: The email subscription sign-up box should be easily visible in one or more locations such as in the header, footer, or a homepage pop-up.

At the end of the day you need the right mix of incentives, sign-up forms and high quality, valuable content.

2. Social Sharing Widget

Every Shopify pre-built template has social sharing icons built in. These icons connect people to your social media accounts make it easier for them to follow you and get updates on your products, promotions, and other social news.a

Although sending visitors to your social profiles is less of a guarantee of future follow-up than getting their email address, it’s also better than no potential for follow-up at all. As your business grows, your social following will also grow and can become a great source of traffic driving to your site.

In a survey from Statista of more than 600 senior marke39% said they saw a medium return on investment from organic social media posts, and 20% said they received the highest ROI from this form of marketing channel.”ters,39% said they saw a medium return on investment from organic social media posts, and 20% said they received the highest ROI from this form of marketing channel.”

So make your social icons easy to find, and consider how you’ve integrated those social icons into your site. They should be positioned in a way that is noticeable and functional yet unobtrusive, like The Black Dog social icons in their footer, or Johnny Cupcake’s social block located above their site’s footer.

You’ll have choices to make, such as:

  • Which social icons do you want displayed? (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) Your choices here should relate to the type of products you’re selling and your brand identity.
  • What should the social icons look like? You may have options for different colors and graphic styles. Both of these considerations should also support your brand.
  • Where on your site do you want social icons located? Your options include the header, footer, sidebar, product pages, and more. It’s good to have social icons in a few different places in case people miss them in one location, they’ll get another chance to notice them elsewhere on your site.

Other social widgets like Facebook’s “Like” button can add social power to your site, and can help attract customers who are further along in the buying process. Or consider creating a unique hashtag for one or more of your most popular products to encourage shoppers to post about it, like Johnny Cupcakes has done with #JCHappiness.

You can also create review space that is connected with a social platform like Twitter or Facebook, like Bottlekeeper. This invites shoppers to share a review of your product with their network, or share a promotion or offer.

Or directly ask shoppers to follow you and share their own posts and tag you.

Consider trying your social icons in a few different locations, and for different platforms, to understand what works best for your shoppers.

Start a Blog

Shoppers often won’t buy the very first time they visit your site. So once you collect their email or connect to them on social media, you need a way to continually reach out and remind them of your store and products. But frequent emails about sales promotions can get repetitive and may not support your brand identity. A blog or other content is a great way to stay in touch by providing useful, entertaining information that relates to your products.

Publishing high quality content also helps your store’s search engine ranking, which makes it easier for new shoppers to find your site.

There is tons of content out there with tips and strategies for starting a blog (including this great post from Shopify,Start Your Own Blog).

Some ideas to consider are writing posts about:

  • Your product category. For example, if you sell apparel, write a post about the upcoming trends in your category for the next season. Or if you sell lawn equipment, write seasonal posts about the kinds of lawn maintenance that people should plan for and tips and tricks to make it easier.
  • FAQs. You probably get the same questions over and over again from customers. In addition to creating an FAQs page on your site, you could also write a series of blog posts that give longer answers for common questions – like the post above from New England Outdoor.
  • Complementary products and services: Guest post on related companies’ blogs, and invite other companies to post on yours. Not only will this broaden the topics that you present to your followers, it will also introduce you to a whole new audience though the other company’s blog followers.
  • Start a podcast. If you love recording audio or video, this can be a fun opportunity to build your audience in a different medium.

There are many different options for creating content for your audience. The key is to figure out which will connect best with your shoppers, and then to focus your time and energy into those. Content marketing can be a time-consuming venture, so find your laser focus and give it a try. Adjust as you learn about what works (and what doesn’t) and keep going. It takes awhile to build a following this way, but the results are stronger, more loyal relationships with your customers and partners.

Build a Referral or Affiliate Program

People trust recommendations from their friends and family. Statistics from Nielsen show that consumers are four times more likely to buy after getting a recommendation from a trusted person.

You could sit back and wait for the word-of-mouth marketing to come to you. Or you can be proactive and create a referral or affiliate program to encourage these kinds of recommendations.

Shopify gives some great advice on getting started with a referral program here and here. You can also integrate a formal affiliate program into your site with a provider like OSI.

The biggest difference between referral and affiliate marketing is the relationship. Typically, referral marketing stems primarily from friends/family/customers who are individually incentivized to casually share your products or content to their immediate personal networks. Affiliate marketing stems from professional publishers, marketplaces, and influencers that have a sizeable network and the chance of producing a larger volume or higher consistency of sales.

There are so many options to grow your customer base using your Shopify store – these are only a few to get started. It can be overwhelming to learn all about what your store can do, and determine what is the right strategy for you and your brand – not to mention figuring out how to integrate the various tools into your site and get them all working well together. Get help with choosing which apps to use and getting them up and running from design and development firm like Growth Spark. We built all of the sites featured in this post, and we love helping Shopify brands make the most of their online store.

About Ross and Growth Spark

Ross Beyeler is the Founder and CEO of Growth Spark, an agency that provides strategy, design and development services to e-commerce companies. Since its founding in 2008, Growth Spark has completed over 350 projects with brands including Newbury Comics,Johnny Cupcakes, BottleKeeper and many more. During that time, the firm has also received awards from Interactive Media Awards, Internet Retailer and BusinessWeek.

5 Response to "4 Ways to Use Your Shopify E-Commerce Store to Grow Your Customer Base"

  1. Comment From Michael Neri

    This is surprisingly good. I wasn’t expecting this, your blog should actually reach more people.r.com



  2. Comment From Jim Morris

    These tips are unique and very well said.



  3. Comment From Mark Donnovan

    Learned a lot in just a few minutes. My time was definitely not wasted.



  4. Comment From Kurt Freeman

    Woah, surprisingly good. You should get more people to read your blog posts.



  5. Comment From Hazel Kerstrat

    Entertaining and at the same time educational. Great job!



Comments are closed.