#1 Marketing Hacks from Leading Shopify Experts

Want to know what leading Shopify experts are doing for their top merchants this coming holiday season? We've got the inside scoop.

We reached out to agencies and industry leaders to get marketing hacks from leading Shopify experts to help you optimize your marketing and boost conversions. These include top tips from the following:

Ready to upgrade your marketing to pro level? Let’s jump in.

1. Mine Existing Upsells for New Opportunities

According to Paul Rogers, managing director of Vervaunt, one of the most significant and consistent opportunities to drive more revenue to your store is mining your existing upsells for new opportunities.

By reviewing existing upsells and looking for additional opportunities to sell products together strategically, eCommerce retail brands are able to boost sales via bundling promotions and increase AOVs as part of the cart process or post-purchase procedures.

Here are just some examples of the success his eCommerce merchants are seeing from this approach.

Paul Rogers, Managing Director at Vervaunt

“We’ve seen several clients really benefit from promoting a bundled upsell or by positioning complementary items, often part of the cart process. Of course, this approach can vary, and the level of opportunity too, but overall, I’d say cleverly positioning buying items together is usually pretty effective!

For instance, we had some clients see new bundled products become their best net-performing items over the last two Q4 peaks. Additionally, one of our clients saw £100k ($155k) in incremental upsell sales over the cyber weekend alone with only one strategic upsell within their cart flow.”

So what does Paul recommend online retail marketers do to duplicate their clients’ success?

He suggests reviewing ALL your upsells on your store to ensure none have broken stock, are unavailable, or are out of line with recent trends. Additionally, for the coming peak shopping months, brands will want to ensure that their gifting bundles are highly visible, along with other performant bundles.

Here are some of his practical upsell and bundle tips:

1. Static bundles. Build static bundles or quantity upsells that stores promote with strategically placed CTAs across their sites.

2. Accessory upsells. Consider accessory upsells within the product, cart, and checkout flows to boost AOVs (without, of course, causing unnecessary distraction).

3. PDP bundling. Consider isolated “add to basket” upsells or PDP bundling. This is something Fairfax & Favor has achieved beautifully with their boot tassel upsells.

2. Never Underestimate the Power of Store Site Speed

As the Head of Strategy and co-founder of Quickfire Digital, Shopify expert Fred Cohen knows all about the need for speed and lists page load times as one of the most critical conversion factors. This is especially true during peak shopping times.

And the stats backing this up don’t lie!

According to Google, with every second of delay in mobile page load, online conversions can fall by up to 20%. Additionally, an analysis conducted this year by one marketing agency showed that a site that loads in one second has a conversion rate 2.5X higher than a site that loads in five seconds.

So, what can you do to speed up your store? Here’s what Fred suggests.

Fred Cohen, Head of Strategy and Co-Founder at Quickfire Digital

“Still, one of the leading causes of site drag is image size, so get them compressed. Additionally, there is a section on Google PageSpeed Insights (which is simple to run) that provides feedback regarding:

• Proper sizing
• Lazy loading
• Image encoding
• Recommended image format

You will also want to run an app audit. Most merchants have a host of SaaS services and Shopify apps, but they can weigh your site down. So, you will want to keep only what’s essential and ditch the rest.

Lastly, it is vital that you check your code and scripts. The likes of Google Analytics and jQuery scripts are external files and could cause a page to not appear until they’re fully loaded. Where you can, put Javascript files at the bottom of your page, and set Google Tag Manager tags to kick into action either at DOM ready or Window Loaded.”

New to Google Tag Manager? Here’s an overview of all the key features.

3. Invest in Advanced Product Sorting and Merchandising

One of the significant factors that impacts your conversion rates and your overall store performance is your product sorting and merchandising strategy.

This means ensuring that you are sorting your products in a way that pushes the most important product first. Not just your bestsellers, but products your shoppers would be interested in that offer the most profit potential.

This is something Daniel Gurevitch, eCommerce manager, Shopify expert, and CEO of Kimonix, knows all about. In fact, he built a whole SaaS product around it.

Daniel Gurevitch, Founder and CEO of Kimonix

“Around 75% of the clicks on a collection page are done on the first results page. That means that even if a collection/category has many products, the majority of the customers will only see around 30–40% of them.

• Conversion rates
• The total variants in stock
• Margins (the real ones, after discount codes)
• The amount of time a product has been in your store
• Inventory totals and value
• Pageviews

And more.

You should understand which parameters are the most important for you in order to achieve your business goals and factor them into your product sorting and category optimization strategies.

Why? Because well-strategized product sorting will help you optimize conversion rates, boost sales, and, while doing so, also optimize your inventory.

Ultimately, for long-term growth, you shouldn’t settle on just selling more products. Instead, you want to always be thinking about your bottom line and aim for longer-term increases in profitability.”

Daniel says that another important aspect of the performance of your product collections is maintaining a good customer experience and making sure that collection pages with varied products are well organized by the type of products.

And, of course, you will want to automate everything. It’s almost impossible to invest in advanced product sorting and online merchandising strategies. This is where Kimonix comes in.

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4. Devote Big Effort to Marketing Landing Page Optimization

Maurice Rahmey, the co-founder and co-CEO of Disruptive Digital, understands just how powerful the right ads are at the right time for ensuring that you’re bringing ready traffic to your retail store.

However, while yes, emails and ads drive site traffic, strong landing pages are ultimately required to convert those visitors into customers. And how do you ensure that they do so? By investing effort and budget into fully optimizing all your landing pages.

According to Maurice, this comes down to three key elements:

1. Continuity
2. Content
3. CTAs (call-to-actions)

Let’s review his expert strategy for each!

Maurice Rahmey, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Disruptive Digital

“By following these three essential landing page optimization best practices below, you should know exactly what tweaks you need to make to build high-converting mobile landing pages for your ads. Let’s break them down:

1. Continuity. Ask yourself how you can improve the flow between ads and landing pages so that the experience feels consistent. This can be done with consistent imagery, pricing, design elements, and messaging. Also, make sure to send visitors straight to the product they’re interested in, allowing them to purchase what brought them there in the first place.
2. Content. Is all your content optimized for mobile screens, and is it eye-catching? Make sure to use an attention-grabbing headline, ensure your value proposition is obvious, and use large images to convey the main messages.
3. CTAs. Do your CTA buttons inspire someone to progress to the next step? Make sure you have your call-to-action button above the fold and that it stands out from the rest of your page so potential shoppers know where to click. You will also want to consider what happens if someone ends up somewhere in the middle of your page — your button must also be visible at that moment for them to take action.”

Don’t forget to add as much personalization to your landing pages as well. You can do this by:

• Matching your product discovery pages to your channels
• Boosting relevancy with customization and personalization
• Enhancing profits by factoring in important retail metrics
• Strengthening conversion potential with UX hacks
• Using analytics to optimize and tweak for sustained growth

You can read more about how to do just this in our How to Use Personalized Product Discovery Landing Pages to Drive ROAS post.

5. Opt for an Actionable Data-Driven Optimization Approach Instead

What is Joris Bryon’s, CEO of Dexter Agency, number one conversion tip to online retailers? Ditch over-generalized tips. Choose an actionable data-driven optimization approach instead.

He knows trending tips and hacks are “sexy,” and yes, they may even get you a quick win, but Joris says, in his experience, it is not a sustainable strategy for conversion optimization.

So, what does this eCommerce marketing expert suggest to online retailers to do instead? Let’s take a look.

Joris Bryon, Founder and CEO of Dexter Agency

“Sure, it’s not ‘sexy,’ because you have to do some thorough conversion research before you can start running A/B tests, and it adds time to your research. But you’ll get so much better results from it that, in fact, you’ll make up for that ‘lost’ time you spent on the research immediately in the first month of testing.

Let’s say you only A/B test a couple of random ideas. It’s likely that only one out of every seven tests you do will produce a significant result. The problem is, while that result is significant, it’s not necessarily a significant winner. In fact, it could also be a significant loser. In other words, only one moves the needle, and that needle could be pointing in the wrong direction.

This means you are spending a lot of time and effort in creating these seven A/B tests, of which six out of those seven won’t make any difference whatsoever (A and B perform the same.)

However, if you instead follow a data-driven approach to optimization and A/B testing — and take your time to do some thorough conversion research to come up with your A/B test hypotheses — you can expect one significant winner out of every three tests you run. Not just a significant result, but a significant winner.”

And what does he mean by taking a “data-driven approach,” in terms of A/B testing? This means collecting actionable data.

According to Joris, actionable data is not about collecting more data but gathering more of the right insights.

 And how do you know the difference? He recommends always asking yourself the following:

• “What can I do with this data to… (optimize the site, improve the UX, improve my marketing, etc.)?”

If you can’t answer that question, don’t use this data!

For instance, if you know the average time on site has increased, how can you use this data? The truth is, in most cases, you just can’t, because it could mean a lot of things, which are frequently irrelevant.

If you want to learn more about how you can get those actionable insights and follow a data-driven optimization approach, you can get a free PDF version of Joris’s book, Kill Your Conversion Killers, here.

Pro Tip: This applies to all A/B testing, including your on-store product collections. Here's an example of the types of tests you can run with the Kimonix Shopify app.

6. Optimize Your Online Store Performance with Smart Filters

According to Dana Halperin, Lead eCommerce Specialist at BOA Ideas, merchants don’t always pay enough attention to eCommerce product filters. And that’s a mistake!

Why? Filters can have a major impact on your customers’ shopping experience and your website performance.

This is why Dana says that to ensure you are able to provide an overall positive shopping experience for the users browsing your shop, you must implement a filtering system that improves product discoverability, serve shoppers’ needs, and, as a result, draw more sales.

And how to ensure your filtering system does just that? Dana says there are many things to consider when designing your filters, but these three are a good place to start:

1. Specs
2. Operation
3. Design

Let’s review the expert strategy she gives for each.

Dana Halperin, Lead eCommerce Specialist at BOA Ideas

“To optimize your online store performance, you will want to ensure that every element of your smart filtering is optimized in a way that always puts your customer front and center. In other words, you want to ensure that you are taking a ‘think like a customer’ approach in every element. While there are many very important elements to consider, here are a few I recommend to start with:

1. Customer-forward specs. Always remember to think about your products and filtering system from your customers’ viewpoint. How do your shoppers define your products? Review search queries so you can pinpoint what shoppers need and how to help them find it. You can use standard fields like size or color, and you can even add meta fields for an additional filter layer. For example, if you’re selling shoes, standard fields would be the type of shoe – athletic, fashion, sandals, etc – and the additional filter could be the type of technology used in the shoe, something that cuts across categories.
2. Operation. Your filters should only display items that your customers can actually buy. If your filters display items that are out of stock, customers may feel frustrated and jump ship.
3. Visual design. The side banner checkbox filter used to be the default, but today there’s a clear trend toward navigation menus with visual elements. Shopify 2.0 offers an out-of-the-box option to add visual banners on category pages and a grid of banners on lobby pages that offers visual filtering of the subcategories. This way, if a user clicks on ‘dresses,’ they’re sent to a lobby page that shows types of dresses in visuals.”

7. Boost Email Marketing with Inventory Optimization Automation

We know that inventory optimization dramatically affects profitability, not only affecting costs on the backend but dramatically affecting the front-end merchandising and conversion rates thereof.

However, despite how important it is to manage both marketing and inventory optimization — and ensuring they work seamlessly together — it becomes almost impossible to do without the right automation strategies and tools.

Bob Rockland, CCO and co-founder of Code, knows all about the importance of inventory optimization and automation. Here are the strategies and tools he recommends for online retail stores in order for them to be able to boost email marketing with inventory optimization automation.

Bob Rockland, CCO & Co-Founder of Code

“For our clients with over 300 SKUs, we opt for Kimonix, enabling them to sort their Shopify collections on auto-pilot. We are then able to use these automated collections in our Klaviyo email marketing as a way to spice up their abandoned cart emails and back-in-stock flows.

How? Right after someone subscribes to a back-in-stock flow, our merchants send them a confirmation mail to thank them and show them their top personalized product collection while they are waiting.

Why is this so effective? People who subscribe to a back-in-stock have money to spend and are willing to buy something.”

Bob suggests using the same approach with Meta marketing. He outlines that they have had a lot of success using Kimonix to maintain their client's product catalogs via Channable or other feed managing tools.

This makes it possible for them to update retargeting campaigns on auto-pilot and ensure they are fresh every day and have less ad fatigue with their audience.

Wrap Up

There you have it, top marketing and conversion tips from leading eCommerce and Shopify experts. Let’s recap:

Still have eCommerce marketing questions? Get in touch with our team here!