How to Setup Your Shopify Store for Success

As a Shopify marketer or store owner, there are certain practices and habits you can invest in that can set your store up for long-term success. Let's go through 4 tactics you can use to ensure Shopify store success.

Test for mobile-friendliness

Most shoppers are now mobile-first. The massive penetration of mobile devices in countries like the United States is proof enough that it is the future of online retailing. Making your store mobile-friendly becomes a significant aspect of setting up your store for success.

Consider these figures:

1. 77% of all Americans own at least 1 mobile device; smartphones, tablets, you name it. Around 80% of them buy online using their mobile devices.
2. Globally, there are more than 3.8 billion smartphones in use.
3. It is estimated that by 2022, around 54% of everything customers buy online will be booked via a mobile device.

These numbers really put into perspective the growth and penetration of mobile.

To cash in on the coming ‘M-Commerce’ boom, you must ensure your Shopify store is mobile-friendly and page-loading speed is high.

Benefits of a Mobile-friendly shopping experience

You already went through the numbers given above. They present the picture very clearly and highlight why you must have a mobile-friendly website.

Other benefits include:

• Faster check-out time with encrypted payment systems.
• Push notifications help you track orders-on-the-go.
• You will be able to reach out to more people than ever before.

Implementation

Unlike the other key elements, you do not have to go through any steps here. Shopify’s themes, whether free or premium ones, offer complete mobile-friendly shopping experiences.

All you should ensure your from end is testing your store on mobile view for user experience. The website should look easy to navigate and should be user-friendly.

Learn more about the new Shopify Page Builder by Mailmunch.

2. Invest in email marketing

Email marketing for eCommerce and Shopify is the idea of sending emails to the shoppers aiming to engage them and ultimately generate sales for your online store.

It can be as simple as sending an email to people who previously purchased your products. Or sophisticated, like having numerous campaigns that work together synergistically to multiply sales exponentially. Finally, whether it’s promotions, offers, free shipping coupons, or lead nurturing emails — email marketing is about building relationships.

Now, as someone who runs a Shopify store, you’ve probably seen the studies that show email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel available and are probably keen to start using it to drive sales and revenue for your store. Choosing one of the best online store builders, can scale your eCommerce store and boost your sales in no time.

But how exactly do you get started? What are the steps you need to take to get up and running with email and ensure your campaigns are a success?

To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of things you need to do when you’re getting started with email marketing:

• It can be tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool and start sending emails. Anyhow, before doing that, set up your goals and define what you want to achieve with email, for that will dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success.
• Grow your email list. Now that you know what to expect from your campaigns, it’s time to grow your email list so you can start sending it. Create an email list from scratch or import a list of known contacts.
• Choose the type of campaigns you want to send to your subscribers. There are different kinds of email campaigns you can send to subscribers, and the type you choose should depend on the goals you established.
• Create your first email campaign. Assuming that you’ve built a subscribers list and pick the type of campaign you’re going to send, it’s time to start building your email. Here’s something to help you create exciting content for your email campaigns.
• Time your email campaigns to perfection. When and how often you send emails can have a significant impact on email engagement and conversions. Send too many and subscribers will get annoyed easily, causing them to disengage and unsubscribe. Send too few and you lose the attention of your audience.
• Track the performance of the campaign. Spend some time analyzing how people interacted with your email campaign. This way you can understand what works best for your brand and what doesn’t.

While we won’t cover best email marketing practices in detail in this post, you can read more about them in our guide to email marketing strategies.

Now, let’s look at some email examples of brands engaging with their customers to build loyalty. These are a good source for inspiration when you venture out into email marketing for Shopify.

Sending out emails on customers’ birthdays is one of the easiest ways to increase loyalty. With Simons, they congratulated their customers with 2x points for the largest purchase they make during the birthday month.

Hampers With Bite shares exclusive coupon codes with their VIP members on Mother’s Day. They also have several product recommendations to further encourage recipients to visit the website and use the VIP coupon code to make a purchase.

3. Promote Your Store via social media

Social media can be the bridge that allows your Shopify store to reach different targets and communicate with them. They are the most precious tools available to brands, for those who know how to listen and use them with awareness.

Build a one-to-one dialogue and nurture your leads by finding them where they spend the most time!

Advantages for your Store

Social media marketing enables you to increase your website traffic and improve its quality as well. Simply by sharing blog posts and relevant pages on your social channels, you’re able to market directly to the target audience.

Increased traffic also helps improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization), enabling you to climb higher in search results.

Connect with consumers creating engagement

Interaction on social media channels helps you have real conversations with interested prospects. In this way, they aren’t just passive listeners. They’re actively listening to you through platforms they use every day. This means that social media is the best way to consistently stay in touch with your prospects. You‘ll also be able to turn them into advocates of your brand. They’ll increase your reach, refer you to people they know, and improve brand awareness.

Attract users’ curiosity through qualitative content

The success of your social media posts is determined by a mix of factors: timing, value, copy, and even the tone of voice. How do you get these right? By keeping your prospect top of mind. With this understanding, you can polish every post because it is not the number of posts that gains visibility on social media, but their quality.

Reach out to your target audience

Advertising tools enable you to zero in on your target audience by using various filters like location, age group, interests, and devices. You can then use your ad spend to show your social media posts to the selected groups, even if they aren’t following your social media channels. This helps you build a quality audience.

Improvement of your Shopify store’s brand image

Social media enables you to shed light on your brand values along with your care for your customer base. By responding to social media queries and comments swiftly, you’ll be able to quickly gain a good reputation for yourself. Even the feedback that consumers leave on your posts helps build social proof so you can get more customers.

4. Add all your policies to the footer

One last aspect of running a store new Shopify owners often forget is adding policies. A lot of times customers want to look at return policies and scenarios for refunding. Adding this information makes a customer trust your store more and adds legitimacy to your store.

With Shopify, you don’t need to create policies from scratch. You can use Shopify’s defaults templates and modify them according to your needs.

Do be mindful though, you’ll need to follow whatever policies you set, so be extra attentive while setting them up. For example, if refunds are a part of your policy, you’ll need to follow through when a customer asks for it.

You can find your policies in the Shopify app under Settings>Legal.

Conclusion

It's best to adopt good practices as early on as possible, this holds true for any venture as much as running a Shopify store. The sooner you implement steps that can guide your long-term growth, the sooner you’ll start reaping in benefits.