15 Tips to Accelerate Sales on Your Shopify DTC Brand Store

The US ecommerce market is expected to generate a revenue of 1.3 trillion dollars by 2025. As a DTC brand, how do you get a slice of that? The law of singularity in marketing states that a single, impactful strike is better than several. We will give you 15 ways to throw the ball so you knock all the pins down. These 15 tips will help you increase sales on Shopify.

Reasons for not getting sales on Shopify store

It is not easy getting customers to buy your products. It will sometimes take several a-ha moments followed by a wow to convert them. Before we look at the tips to improve sales, let's look at some of the barriers that make light of your efforts in sales.

• Poor store navigation
  • An incorrect menu structure or lack of advanced search features to search for a product.

• Niche and target audience - Sometimes the product is in a niche category which restricts the target audience to a very small number.

• The store is not responsive - The store website does not render well on mobile.

• The product page isn't great - The product page has fewer descriptions and wrong or inadequate specifications. 

• Flaws in the checkout process - Payment methods are set up incorrectly causing delays or stopping the checkout process.

• Imperfect store design
  • Flaws in the UI/UX design that hamper the overall customer experience.

• Wrong messaging - Incorrect messaging that builds unreasonable customer expectations or leaves them dissatisfied.

If you've checked your Shopify store for these common problems and still aren't making as many sales as you'd like, it's time to step up your game!

15 Tips to Increase Sales on Shopify

1. Personalize shopping experience

Since DTC businesses gather insights across the customer journey, they can gain a real advantage by mapping different stages in the funnel to real numbers.

DTC brands can also identify the “great moments”, the touchpoints where the customer responded, and the “not so great moments” when the customer churned. A customer data platform such as Moda will help you gain insights and more.

They seem to have realized the website is a great touchpoint. Here’s the section where you can shop for styling gel.

On the brand’s custom styling gel page, when you click on “GET YOUR STYLING GEL”, you are greeted with a page that sets forth questions to identify hair type, goals, and environment. Prose then uses these answers to create a bottle of custom styling gel personalized just for you! 

Brands can drive out an exceptionally high level of personalization by collecting this kind of data. They can make content and communications relevant with pinpoint precision to drive sales.

2. Optimize product pages

To step up your sales game, it is important to optimize your product pages, but utilizing the right copy and the right content format can work wonders for your business:

• Rumpl utilizes lifestyle pictures and videos to show product usage. 

• The product description on every page of their website is thorough and the copy is compelling enough and keeps up with the matching visuals. 

• Detailed product specs and a narrative sets the mood. Remember, great stories fuel great commerce.

• Great recommendations also let the customer know what can complement his/her purchase perfectly on every product page.

3. Leverage SEO

In a world of cereals saturated with carbohydrates and sugars, essentially desserts masquerading as breakfast health foods, how do you stand out as a brand? How do you drive sales when there are so many players? Especially as one that makes a healthy promise and strives to preserve it? 

• Three Wishes Cereal does this by highlighting all of their USPs in a brilliant first half of the meta-description, which is visible to any surfer on Google who just types in “the three wishes cereal”.

• Needless to say, they are also number one in the Google search ranking with just the brand name input in Google, no mean feat for an up and coming DTC brand. That unique name “Three Wishes Cereal” helps.

For a cereal that is purely plant protein-based and free of allergens, we can’t think of a better way to rank so high or a better meta-description to drive SEO. Can you?

4. Collect visitor opt-ins to nurture future sales

When you request information, there better be a substantial benefit for the customer. One approach would be to offer 10% off on their next purchase when they enter their email address and opt for your newsletter.

The other would be to make a promise of being good to the environment and live up to that by using environment friendly ingredients in all your products, just like Intelligence of nature. 

Is offering a discount or making a healthy and sustainable promise the only way to capture customer information? Absolutely not, DTC brands can always do it better when they want to! 

Imagine something that also captures customer intent, like the one in the image below. That gets an applause from us!

5. Engage with your subscribers

Don’t lose a person who once raised their hand and said “I’m interested in your brand”. Those are your subscribers. There are three things you must do.

• On making a second contact, send them a welcome mail with optimized subject lines and valuable content written in a warm and friendly tone. 

• Birthdays and anniversaries are big days for everyone. Don’t miss out on a birthday, because you just might make an offer your customers cannot refuse!

• Remember they became subscribers because not only do they love your brand but they also love to read! When you know a customer well and have understood the purchase intent and behavior, you can even push delightful lists that the customer may be interested in. 

Take a look at this welcome mail from Yeti, which introduces a bit of humor for a regular customer, that at first almost seems like an abandonment cart email when they say “We haven’t seen you in a minute”. “The best buds for an adventure” line further accentuates the warmth and the friendship the customer has with the brand also, as with a friend.

And then of course come the big days! A customer is sure to open the mailbox on this big day, but what if your responsibility is to get her in good attire for the special day? As is the case with Stitch Fix. The outcome of such a mail is that the customer, even if only a prospect, would make an effort to visit your website and spend some time there to find a fix, the reason being you wished the customer on their birthday! 

6. Build an online presence

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If you want to boost your ROI by positive word of mouth, your online presence plays a critical role. Not just this, it also increases the visibility and accessibility of your brand. 

Avant Arte is a company that serves as an online marketplace for NFT and contemporary art collectors. They are very active, with nearly 2.4M followers on Instagram and 6971 posts to date.

They engage with customers and also instill trust that every work of art they sell is genuine by tagging the beneficiaries, the great artists of today. They have also not only tagged but added a picture of a very popular artist among them, Camilla Engstrom. 

Of course, they have not linked directly to their website from the Instagram page, which is also a smart move to not appear salesy. There are three reasons for this:

• The post is a simple post of engagement and selling is a hidden motive here.

• Remember they are marketing to collectors, people who put in sheer effort to procure works of art. 

• They are also talking about a great artist such as Camilla Engstrom. Thus a simple search on their website brings this work of art among others.

7. Run paid social media ad campaigns 

Most of us have used those bags that don’t hold up in the rain. Yeti realized this is a major point of concern especially in America, the land of the great outdoors, where people enjoy riverside fires, picnics, and camping! 

Let us see what this ad gets right!

• It highlights the USP in its creative and in the description, mentioning that the Panga range of bags is 100% waterproof. 

• It often gets hot in the great outdoors, especially in a desert such as Arizona. What if you could wheel around a cooler? This is exactly what their ad on facebook addresses.

• The Facebook ad addresses another pain point of their customers, which is that the wheels often get stuck in the mud, so they redesigned them for ease of travel in the wild. 

8. Build a community

A DTC brand is all about personal interactions and bringing in a feeling of community. Building a great community online is critical to achieving great sales for a DTC brand.

Love Wellness is a brand of products to help maintain women’s hygiene. They offer a 30% off subscription to their Bloating Kit, highlighting problems women face during their periods.

But no half steps there! They go ahead and dedicate a whole forum where women can freely discuss topics on wellness.

Another way of building a community is by word of mouth and positive social shares. Request the customer if they would like to join a referral program and receive a 10% discount, as in the mailer from ION, a gut health product that is anti-gluten. And absolutely great for you if you do indeed fancy those gluten-rich cereals, as some of us do!

And now for a dash of humor. Not really much of a value post for a member, but is there another brand as entertaining as Dollar Shaving Club is in their ads? In the below packaging, they maintain their sarcasm and wit by giving the customer a good laugh. Up for laughs anyone?

9. Start working with micro-influencers

It is a human tendency to first listen to family and friends and then everyone else. Imagine the case of someone who has painstakingly increased their reputation step-by-step and built a subscriber base by talking directly to their fans. 

Influencers and micro-influencers are very important to drive sales. Two great factors put them in a great place.

• They are cost-effective as opposed to some other forms of marketing. 
• They also have authority on the matter and a powerful voice that makes people want to listen.

A case in point of a brand employing this tactic is Birchbox. In their Wellness Wednesday series, they talk to several micro-influencers in the health and beauty space. 

Featured in the episode below is OpalbyOpal on Instagram, an NYC beauty content creator and an actual user of their products. Her happiness and enthusiasm are enough to drive great sales, don’t you think?

10. Use upselling and cross-selling tactics

Both upsell and cross-sell are vital tactics for increasing sales on your Shopify store. 

But before you do either, you must figure out:

• Where you should position the offer in the sales cycle. Whether you should do it pre-purchase, advertising a combo, during the purchase, or post-purchase.

• Which do you think the customer will be most comfortable with, an upsell or a cross-sell? Make that decision first.

• What should you upsell or cross-sell to a specific customer? 

For instance, NaturAll Club believes it will help the customer if they pair it with their curl custards, their special hair spray to induce curls. Naturall Club have positioned this cross-sell tactic pre-purchase. We think it is a great tactic! What do you think?

11. Send text messages

Even a “How are you doing?” text message definitely works for several brands, as the customer is always looking to be pampered.

• Make an offer the customer is surely going to remember you for, especially one that brings a group together, like free coffee, so they might even talk about you.

• If you are not ready to offer a discount, the other option would be to try and make the customer feel special. Who wouldn’t love early access to a Christmas sale? Even Santa would love it.

• How about a concierge service link shared on an SMS? Customers would welcome it with arms wide open, if the quality of support offered is exemplary and if they are long-time fans of the product.

Do whatever works for you, but do it like Blume. Send a code they can scan at Starbucks for a cup of good hot coffee or better yet, make them feel wanted by offering early access to a Black Friday sale, a special day for e-commerce brands and shoppers alike. 

12. Integrate Shopify with Amazon

The buying journey of the customer is non-linear and omnichannel. Integrating Shopify with Amazon helps you simplify the selling process by using Amazon also as a channel. 

You can link products both ways from Amazon to Shopify and Shopify to Amazon as well. You could also use Shopify reports to reconcile the sales made through Amazon and take advantage of the affiliate marketing programs there too. 

Read this reference for the prerequisites for Shopify Amazon integration and how to do it. 

13. Use the power of UGCs

When we are looking for a great restaurant, we always ask our friends for recommendations, especially those with our tastes, don’t we? Why should a brand do anything differently? 

Because you are eventually selling to customers, user-generated content too could give you a swift boost, especially if you are in the food and beverages space. PetPlate, which is known for helping dish out tasty treats for our four-legged friends, believes in its user-generated content. 

They frequently feature reviews from their happy customers on Instagram. And they just about always have only the nicest things to say. What else could brands ask for?  

14. Organize giveaways and contests

Giving the customer freebies doesn’t always help drive sales in the future, especially if it is always done. But it works if it is done to mark one of these:

• An occasion marking a major triumph

• A day that celebrates emotions that hold meaning for certain groups

• A religious or congregational day

• A few moments of laugh out goodness

PetPlate won over their audience over an emotional moment, a day of triumph; this is when the brand truly stands out and revenues go up. The black-owned DTC brand stresses on the fact and salutes other brands like them, inviting users to participate in a contest with $1000 winnings.

Sometimes, it is not about just a giveaway or an emotional moment but a few moments of laugh out loud goodness. The Dollar Shave Club, for example, asked their fans what their balls meant to them and offered a $25,000 grand prize to the two people with the greatest responses. 

And if you think about it, the question they ask in the beginning is quite pertinent, and who wouldn’t want to be featured!

15. Offer free shipping & returns

Sometimes a customer is just not completely wowed by your product, and not necessarily disowning your brand either. 

Offering free shipping can be a great strategy. In this exceptional email from Casper, they have highlighted exactly why the customer should trust them. 

The 1,000,000 customers before them did so with fantastic results. Free shipping and risk-free trials (commendable for a mattress brand) are other offers that make them stand out from the rest.

Wrap up

As an ecommerce brand owner, we hope the 15 tips we elaborated on here help you increase sales on Shopify. While a little effort and the correct ecommerce automation tools may be what is needed immediately, a great customer data platform can help boost the efficiencies of marketing automation, enable hyper-personalization, and retain customers by analyzing their experience levels.

And what’s more, some CDPs like Moda are no-code platforms and are set up with ease and without developer assistance. Talk to a consultant at Lifesight today to know more about how Moda can break escape velocity and take your business to new heights!

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