Show Notes
In this week’s episode we’re talking about how to sell more on your Shopify store… it’s not what you’re thinking.
You’re going to learn about:
- Social proof and how important it is for eCommerce
- How and why your website speed should be your number one priority
- The one app that every eCommerce business must have installed
If you’re an eCommerce business and you want to find out exactly how much you should spend on advertising to hit your revenue goals, steal our free calculator here
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Transcript
Aaron [00:00:00] Hey, welcome to another episode of the marketing natives and today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to drive more traffic for your Shopify store. Whether you're a veteran or you're just starting out on Shopify, the number one thing you have to do is to continue to grow and to grow. You need traffic. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to drive more traffic. What happens when you drive more traffic? We're going to be talking about the one platform that you must be doing that one of our clients wasn't doing and missed out on five thousand dollars per week because she wasn't doing it. And how you can implement it today for very, very cheap and a couple of apps that we would recommend so that you can continue to reach more people and get all those who are eventually or all those who would have left your website and getting those people back. So all this and more on how to sell more on your Shopify store. Take a listen.
Narrator [00:00:51] This is the marketing natives, providing actionable ways to grow, improve and succeed in your business and now your host, Christian and Aaron.
Christian [00:01:07] How to sell more on your Shopify store? We're going to start with website speed. Now, imagine this. Imagine you go to a shopify store and let's say you click it from an ad and you're on, let's say maybe Instagram. You click on it. It takes one full second to for you to even see the logo. Let's just say that and then another second for it to load the big hero image and then you start to scroll. Right. But it won't scroll because the products are still uploading to your phone or download to your phone and it takes a full 30 seconds for that website to fully load for you to actually be able to see products like how many people do you think are going to stay that long? It's a good question. Very long, right? I mean, it depends I mean, the data depending on, I guess, how interested you are in that product, you actually want to see it, you know, obviously depends on their. Like the speed of the phone or whatever network they're on or they're on wi fi, like, obviously it's going to be different for each customer. So that's why it's always important to, um, I think, pay attention to website speed, um, because different people have different networks that they're using. Some people are using wi fi. Some people are using LTE and people are potentially using edge. Imagine. Um, so that's why it's always important to pay attention to website speed and also testing website speed on mobile phones and testing websites speed on computers, tablets and then different networks, wi fi, um, AT&T network, T-Mobile Network, et cetera. Um, because website speed is going to determine how quickly can someone buy from your store once they land on it and how easy it is for them to sort of navigate from page to page and still keep interest. Right. While they're waiting for things to load on your website.
Aaron [00:03:13] Right, well, and I think you give an example of three seconds is like, that's an OK, I guess speed, like some websites are five, six, seven seconds. And I think the like the way that they say they like, the way that Google has said that your site speed affects sales is that for every one second that it goes above three. So I should say it's for you lose, potentially 10 percent of your business for e-commerce, because it's just another second as somebody has to leave. So there's so many things like when you were mentioning that you have your network, that you can't really have anything to do with that such that person. But if your site loads on top of that, it could be five, six, seven seconds. And you've lost pretty much everybody at that point because that's just to go to one page. Imagine like clicking on the product going forward, whatever else. So, yeah, the focus on the site. And you can you can actually see this like a ton of sites that don't have really that much at all, but do better performance wise just because they have a faster loading site and more people can get to the product. So you've got to have a fast website and a good place to check that is like that. What are the metrics or whatever? Like that's a good that's a good free source for you to kind of see your speed and I'll give you a grading scale to tell you, like, OK, you could improve this or here's where you're at, here's where you're starting at. And I'll give you an idea of like how how long it takes to load or nowadays.
Christian [00:04:41] I mean, if I just added that that new feature where it actually tells you, oh, speed score,.
Aaron [00:04:47] I don't believe that thing, though. It's like I bought a new template with, like, nothing on it. And it still says like 30 or something like that of one hundred, which is like there's nothing on the site. So I don't know if I believe them. But yeah, it is cool to kind of see or have it like right there though.
Christian [00:05:01] I mean, I think it's literally Google's they're using Google technology. I think they're using White House. Oh really. Yeah. To to run that. So it's pretty reliable then.
Aaron [00:05:11] Well I don't know how how Shopify slows it down to that much, but regardless, it's good, good to kind of test yourself across I guess, different areas or metrics or whatever or the one inside of Shopify and see which side is faster. And that's the point is you want to make sure that your site is going quickly. All right, and I think the next main thing to talk about is the like the line outside of the restaurant, and this has nothing to do with the restaurant obviously, this is a Shopify store, but the line outside the restaurant where the Yelp reviews or anything like that, those are all just examples of social proof. And when you have good social proof, it actually costs you less to reach more people because there are more people telling others around you about you. So, for example, you could get like online. What's good if you're talking about, like online advertising or anything like that, it could be the likes or comments or shares or build social proof, but it could also be the social proof on your site. So could be the reviews like some websites have product reviews and you could have this product has been purchased know a hundred times and there's five star rating like that's going to add quote unquote, social proof to lower the cost of or like, I guess the amount of hurdles that somebody has to go through if they're choosing your product versus somebody else. So if I was about to buy it, I don't know a new hat from somebody from like branded bills or whatever that we bought has before. And they've sold six thousand products and they're all five star reviews. I'm going to buy a hat from them versus like somebody who has nothing and it looks the exact same, but there's no proven model. So I think social proof has so much more of a play or like so much more of an effect on what we purchase without us even noticing it, too.
Christian [00:07:00] I mean, I think that goes back to I'm thinking back in high school the things that I would buy clothes wise. Right. The North face stuff, the Nike, the Adidas. The only reason why we would buy those brands is because your peers were using those brands. Right? I actually think about the iPod, for example. Um, literally everyone in my school had an iPad or an iPad, an iPod, either the Nano or like the full screen one or whatever. Nobody had Zune. Maybe there was one weird kid who had a Zune. Yeah, everyone had an iPad, iPod. And I think that's part of the social proof is like you seen the peers around you. Right, using these products. And I think on a regular basis, yeah. We see this everywhere. Are you using our MacBook is like, oh, maybe I need to use a MacBook too. Right. You're wearing a. Does it bring in bills and bills that then, OK, maybe I need to check out Brandon.
Aaron [00:07:59] Technically, it's Richardson, which is a really good year, has probably Richardson too. Yeah, they're very popular.
Christian [00:08:06] So, yeah, it's a it's a way to incorporate that aspect, you know, that we use and see every day into your website. And there's different apps to like is a called social proof. I feel like there's an app that just pops up in Little Corner So-and-so from Saginaw, Kentucky. Just purchase this iPhone case. You're like, oh, OK. There's actually people buying this case. And I feel like I, I do that whenever I'm looking at especially. Paid advertising on Instagram. I feel like I have a pretty good. Targeting like people are targeting me really, really well with there, because, like I'm constantly saving ads that are being targeted to me for a number of different things. Um, the other day there was these. Um, like sandals or flip flops or whatever slides, actually, and the brain I didn't recognize, but the video, they look really comfy and there were like showing like how like cushiony and bouncy they were and all the stuff there, like literally bouncing balls off of this, like sandal. I was like, oh wow, that looks pretty cool.
Aaron [00:09:19] My feet would be happy.
Christian [00:09:20] Yeah. My feet were like, oh yeah. Amazing. And they're like, oh these are normally fifty dollars or thirty eight or whatever. But in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I'm looking at this website and it just looks like one of those drop shipping like they bought these for I don't know, a dollar from China. Right. And like they're just selling me, selling it to me for 30 bucks and I'm like that's just like to me it didn't have the social prove that, right. Like, OK, my wood, my friends are my friends even, you know, buying this kind of stuff. And it makes it feel like cheaper, I guess. Yeah, right. Because that's the first thought that came to my mind, was like the brand was kind of iffy and then there's really no such proof. There's no no one that I follow I guess like that. I've seen.
Aaron [00:10:03] How many dollars that they have on instagram?
Christian [00:10:06] I don't know. I didn't check that. I just went from the ad straight to the website. The website. Yeah. So yeah, I think having that social proof on the website, I don't even remember seeing social proof on the website like either testimonials or I think video testimonials would have been really good or in a position like that. I think what would have probably sold me on it, maybe like a social feed of people using the hashtag like whatever the name of the sandal was. Yeah. And just seen other people using the product or posting about the product on on Instagram, um, like real life people using the product. Um, that might have been like, OK, and they're legit. People are actually buying this. Um, they actually have a following is not just like a was a fly by night. Yeah. You know, type company that just popped up just to make a buck out of this one dollars handlin.
Aaron [00:10:54] Right. They spent a bunch of money on the video but didn't focus on anything else. Right. Right. So I'm guessing they're getting yeah. They're getting some sales, but they're not getting as many as what they could have or they're spending a lot more because you would have been one of those purchasers, because even now, if I would say, like if they wasted money on marketing to you, they still probably wouldn't get you unless they had a bunch of like Carcillo, like testimonial videos like Kevin and Jill and everybody else were all super happy. So, yeah, I think social proof is a it could be a make or break, but it definitely will help you sell more online. And then you can see the opposite effect. The one that you gave where you don't have social prove it almost deters you away versus, hey, if you had, you would have told me about it and we would have been both wearing the same clothes or something. Mm.
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Aaron [00:12:15] All right, so this is goes without saying, but to sell more on Shopify, you have to have more traffic. We always tell our clients you should get to about ten thousand people per month, which if you're doing that organically, that could be I mean, that could be like Facebook or Instagram or whatever else. But like, if you don't get to ten thousand, you run into the issue of, hey, it's just a numbers game and you had a thousand people there and you normally get like ten orders per month. It's like, OK, well, we have a good spot or we have a good starting point, but it really just becomes like a, you know, a good website. Actually, an amazing Shopify site converts to like five percent, like that's a Rockstar site, but most are like two percent or three percent or whatever. So if you get a thousand people and you're only going to get one percent, two percent of those people, you're just it's a smaller number. So we want to get to ten thousand. And you can do that through like SEO or like search engine optimization, or you can do it through like paid traffic. But without traffic and especially starting a new site, it's going to be almost impossible for you to hit your sales goals because the other option is like direct messaging, somebody on Instagram or whatever else you like, doing it one by one, which is possible. But the whole point for I think for a Shopify store and to sell more online is that you do it kind of quote unquote passively. And there's only there's only two ways to drive traffic, organic or paid. Organic is, you know, we had a I guess we we tell our clients go with paid first and then add in the organic later for at least like the e-commerce site. And the only reason for that is because paid will send people there right away. You can get to ten thousand people per month pretty quickly. And then that would help pay for organic, which is going to take sometimes three, six, nine months before you see results. So it's, I guess, just that magical number of ten thousand to to become a ten to twenty thousand dollars a month Shopify store. And then you can always, I guess, expand or scale from that.
Christian [00:14:16] Yeah, I think that's a huge misconception that people have where you build a website or any website, not even website, but any website and automatically you're going to get people pouring in and visiting a website and making purchases and all this. That's not the case. Like, you have to work very hard to get people to visit your website and like you said, whether organic or paid, paid obviously being the the faster route. But you have to spend more money versus organic where it just takes a lot more time. Still, you know, you have to spend money and time, right. To grow those those organic, um, avenues. But I would say, yeah, one hundred percent traffic to your website is probably one of them. One ways to sell more of us. Or if you don't have people coming in, you're not going to get sales. Optimization and conversion strategies come later. But number one should be just getting people focusing on getting people to your store.
Aaron [00:15:14] Yeah, I mean, when we I mean, we really recently started or launched a new Shopify store where hopefully they're going to be doing marketing with us. But they I think they were under the impression like, OK, let's just get it up and let's just tell people about it. And I think they were going to send some emails or whatever else, which is probably what most people do is like, hey, I'm an announcement on Facebook and email. But what you're going to realize is that you're going to send people there and then you either are going to get good data or bad data or like let's just say you send one hundred people there, like you said, one hundred people. Well, you may not you may not have seen enough people to actually even get a purchase. So it's just really, really hard to to scale the business or you start to question like, is my product good or is anything good? You just don't have enough data. So the traffic source is absolutely like, yeah, if we were to order these in, like importance, you should focus on let's get as many people there as possible and then let the Shopify Analytics tell you what you need to change.
Christian [00:16:10] Yeah. And some of our analytics will even tell you more specifics on demographics, traffic sources and different things like that, where after that you can actually determine, OK, where can actually where do I want to spend my money on? Where is it more likely that people are going to convert from? So, yeah, those are a very, very important strategies and I was going to say. It's like, yeah, I think I've mentioned this before, but, you know, nowadays is more important to build a community and then sell that product versus you create this product or create this website and then have to worry about finding traffic, finding traffic. Right. So if you're. Starting are about to start your own Shopify store, maybe focus more on building that community, create a Facebook group, start talking about different things, maybe and I'm not gonna read it on Pinterest and create a following, create a really strong following and after you, you don't have to necessarily still sell them anything. But when you're ready to, those people are more likely going to be that traffic source for you starting out.
Aaron [00:17:24] I do I think it's a good example of like, OK, so you build a community, but to I would say like a Facebook group or whatever else is a great spot. But the only thing that we technically own online is our email address. And even then, I would say that like we own it, but we still got to pay for, like, sending the emails or like paid a monthly subscription, but. To this day, the the most I think what most people thought was going to be like outdated, archaic, like dinosaur of like marketing is email, but it's still the most powerful. And it's going to give you four times more return than anything else, like Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or whatever else. Like email is absolutely like one of our clients. We didn't do email for for a while because they were doing it themselves. And we're like, OK, we'll just do it yourself, like send emails whenever we never set up an automation sequence for them. And then we finally started and I mean, this is this has gone on for years. I don't want to like, think about all the money that was missed out. But to give an example, like they just only send it out, hey, we're having a fall event. We're having a Super Bowl party. Come see us. It was only for the people who came to the brick and mortar store, not the ones who were online. They never just they never really got emails. So we set up an email sequence like, hey, new customers. People had shopped in a while, people who did shop but didn't have it shopped, you know, and a couple of weeks, whatever. But anyway, they for every dollar they spent before that, they were making like five or six dollars. And this last week, just like real kind of in time, it was for every dollar they spent, they made ten dollars. So they literally with two emails through the week, which I would like for them to send more but two emails throughout the week because they've grown their email list and everything like that. I mean, they made like six thousand dollars just from sending the emails, which before, like I said, they just never did it. So it's a matter of writing an email, sending it, and it was making them a decent amount of money in it. Like I said, it has the highest Arawa. It's the only thing that we own. And like the I guess the caveat is if you don't do it, you're just missing out on all of the other revenue that you could make.
Christian [00:19:33] But what did you mean by. So are you combining? Ads with because you're you're saying for every dollar spent, because I mean, with email, you don't necessarily spend money. You're talking about you have these audiences already or people who haven't purchased in so long and so well, that's through to email.
Aaron [00:19:52] So like through their website. So like on Shopify. But yes, I'm just saying, when the client's working with us, before they sent emails, it was like for every dollar they made, they made six dollars in return. We added in emails which connected to their Shopify store and it's like, Oh, Joe hadn't purchased in a while, send him this email sequence that we created. So yeah, we were combining it just with everything that we're doing with them, which is right now is just paid traffic and with email. Yeah, that's a good clarification, but just adding the email cost him no more. I think they are paying, you know, they have a decent sized email, so it's probably a couple of hundred dollars per month, but two hundred dollars to I mean on an average month when. Quite a bit of money, it pays for itself plenty over, but that's only something like I said, a couple of emails per week. But it's to your point, is like building a community will build a community and then collect email addresses and build up anticipation and find different ways to interact with them because it's going to be your highest profile. Like I said, you spend two hundred, whereas in online advertising you may have to spend two thousand. No, you still need that to get new traffic, but to spend two hundred dollars on email marketing and then get thousands of dollars and return, it's just, it's a no brainer. So I would, I would tell everybody to sell more on top of it. You need to be building your email list. And Christian meant building a community and build your email list and sending emails. Our next one here.
Christian [00:21:19] It's also something that we've added. It's like. Yeah, I think some of these go in in some type of order where you don't necessarily have to do them all at once. Yeah, it could be overwhelming. Yeah. So I think, like, they build onto each other and I think that's a. The strategy that we have done with our clients, to some extent, one to not overwhelm them. Yeah, but. And I think I mean, I think it works good that way, where you're sort of focusing on that one thing, maybe traffic right now and not worrying about anything else because everything else will come from that pillar. Mm hmm. And I think that the next one is adding the abandoned car type pop ups to to stores. And I think the most part, we do this for all of our clients, or at least we recommend you include this somewhere, because it's a very important reminder, especially when you're shopping and some people even expect it where you're in the car, you're looking for some sort of discount code or I've done it multiple times where, um, I'm in that checkout and I'm like maybe about to exit or I just leave it open for a while and maybe they'll send me an email with some sort of discount code. And that's how some people shop, that people actually do that on purpose in order to get some sort of discount.
Aaron [00:22:48] I try to do that the thing for a wedding and I left it in my car like plenty of days in advance, like three days, like, let me test this. And they were just like, yeah, you'll get a deal for your next order. And I was like, Really? I still had to purchase it, but I was like, that's a bad Bhandarkar. I mean, they still got me, but I'm not going to buy from them again now, but just cause I didn't need the shirt. But yeah, yeah. That's a good way to kind of get some money back for sure.
Christian [00:23:15] Right. Yeah. So yeah I think doing it. Yeah. Doing traffic sors doing abandoned car pop ups obviously having sort of email strategy, um having social approve websites to be like these all sort of build up into each other and we're not saying to Yeah. Do them all at once. It's again what's most important work on that. Move to the next thing, work on that. And then at some point you're going to be doing sort of everything you can. So if right now you're Linzess episode, you're like, well, I'm doing all this stuff then as maybe time to optimize all these things, right? If you think about, you know, your email, like with email alone, there's a hundred different things that you can do there. Yeah. With headlines, with the actual copy, with whatever you can actually put on the email, the frequency. There's a lot of different things that you can do with each of these things in order to optimize and make them better. Um, as times goes because it has to be constant adoration with all these things, and in order to sell more and with ads, it's always like always be testing, right? Always be testing new things. The market obviously changes the way people buy in, probably, I don't know, 10, 20 years. We're going to have frerking goggles or contact lenses and we're going to walk down the street and see our ads and offers, you know, right in our freaking faces. So it's a matter of always being seen on top of things and always testing all these things.
Aaron [00:24:50] Yeah, absolutely. And really, I think that from all of this is if you're doing all of these things or if you're doing even one of these two or three things, well, you are going to sell more from your store. I think that's the whole point from all of this, is that, as you mentioned, you don't have to do all of it. But these are the key things to making sure that you sell more. Now, this goes without saying that you should probably have a really good product and a proven product that people want first. But the website traffic will be able to help you do that. But this should help you sell more on your Shopify store. You do those things correctly, I think even at a 50 percent of them. OK, you're still going to end up selling more products and then you can continue to build from that. Exactly.
Aaron [00:25:35] All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the marketing natives. Hope you thought that this was an amazing episode on how to sell more on your Shopify store. If you're interested in learning more about how to sell more on your Shopify store and you want somebody else to take it away from you, there's going to be a link in this description either on YouTube or the podcast. Click that and schedule a free strategy session. If you've been listening for a while, please make sure to go over and leave us an honest rating and review around Apple podcast. It helps us reach more people online. And if you are a first time listener, whether you're on YouTube, podcast, whatever podcast platform you're on or Facebook, please make sure that you like the page. Subscribe or. Yeah, or subscribe. Whether it's on the podcast or YouTube. We put out content every single week and the market news comes out every single Monday. So I hope you guys got a lot out of this. If you did, please screenshot it and tag us over on Instagram and we'll send you something definitely worth value to. Alright see you guys.
Narrator [00:26:35] The marketing native's podcast is a production of BitBranding.
