How to Get Sales on Shopify: [11 Tactics + Examples]

Figuring out how to get sales on Shopify can be more complex than it seems.

After all, while Shopify gives you all the tools you need to launch an online store, it’s still up to you to convince your customers to actually purchase your products.

There are thousands of competing stores out there, all trying to capture the attention of the same customers.

This means if you want to boost your chances of success, you’ll need to get creative. Fortunately, Shopify makes it relatively easy to collect and convert new leads.

Today, we’re going to cover 8 of these top tips you can use to effectively increase sales on your Shopify store.

What you'll learn in this article:

How to Utilize Landing Pages and Pop-Ups to Capture Leads: Strategies for leveraging landing pages and pop-ups.
How to Develop Effective Email Marketing Campaigns: Techniques for creating impactful email marketing initiatives.
How to Leverage Social Media for Traffic and Sales: Tips on using social media to boost traffic and sales.
How to Improve SEO for Better Online Visibility: Guidance on enhancing search engine optimization.
How to Use Paid Advertising on Google and Facebook: Insights into effective use of paid ads.
How to Optimize Product Pages and Checkout for Better Conversion: Tactics for improving product pages and checkout processes.
How to Use Social Proof and User-Generated Content to Build Trust: Strategies for incorporating social proof and user content.
How to Offer Free Shipping as a Sales Incentive: Understanding the impact of free shipping as a sales strategy.

How to Get Sales on Shopify

1. Use Landing Pages and Pop-Ups to Capture Leads

A lot of the work you do to get sales on Shopify will revolve around attracting new traffic to your store.

However, before you start capturing the attention of prospects, you first need to figure out how you’re going to boost your chances of each new visitor converting into a customer.

While well-designed product pages, high-quality items, and the right pricing structure will all play a role in increasing revenue, there’s another way you can enhance your chances of success: landing forms and pop-ups.

Essentially, both of these solutions offer companies a way to capture information about their leads, so they can nurture prospects into paying customers.

With pop-ups, you aim to capture the attention of customers in the moment when they’re browsing on your store, offering them discounts, offers, and deals in exchange for an email address.

Here's a great example from Holden, they offer a 20% discount on the first order in exchange for a newsletter signup.

With landing pages, you pull customers to dedicated pages on your store, using ads and links.

These pages use engaging headlines, CTA buttons, powerful images, and social proof to convince customers to act.

There are tons of add-ons and tools available on the Shopify app store that are great for creating landing pages and popups, such as:

Instapage
Leadpages
Pagefly

2. Develop Email Marketing Campaigns

Email remains one of the most valuable ways to not only nurture leads, but increase your chances of sales. There are more than 4.3 million email users worldwide, so there’s a good chance many of the leads you connect with on your store will have an address to give you.

If you capture these emails using the pop-ups and landing pages mentioned above, the potential ROI is $45 for every $1 you spend on your campaigns.

Of course, there’s more to making email work for your ecommerce store than simply using Shopify Email, or integrating an email automation app from MailChimp or Optinmonster.

You’ll also need to create campaigns that work.

How do you do that?

The best email campaigns leverage:

Eye-catching subject lines
Engaging, benefits-focused content
Segmentation for personalization
Interesting images and visuals
Direct links to your Shopify store

Remember, you can use emails for a variety of different things too. Welcome emails can help create trust between your brand and target audience.

Post-purchase emails improve the customer experience, and cart abandonment emails strengthen your chances of re-capturing lost leads.

Experiment with a range of tactics for email frequency, content, and design to determine which campaigns are going to drive the biggest sales.

While landing pages, pop-ups, and email marketing campaigns all give you great ways to nurture your audience and retain engagement, you still need ways of bringing more traffic to your store.

Social media is one of the best tools for both connecting with new customers, and retaining existing clients.

With Shopify, there are built-in tools already available to help you connect your store to channels like Facebook and Instagram.

You can design comprehensive organic and paid promotions, intended to showcase your latest products, services, and deals.

However, you can also go beyond social media ads, and turn your social channels into additional sales channels for your Shopify store.

For instance, you can leverage shopping features on Instagram and Pinterest, which allow consumers to immediately purchase items from your Shopify store without having to leave the channel they’re already using.

Instagram is particularly easy to use for this purpose. All you need to do is add Facebook Shops to your sales channels on the Facebook backend, then connect your Shopify site.

Once you have your Social media channels set up, you can experiment with everything from Facebook ads to influencer marketing to strengthen your presence online.

4. Improve Search Engine Optimization

Alongside social media advertising, content marketing is one of the best ways to boost the presence of any online website or store.

Boosting your position on the Google search engine result pages means customers can more easily find your products when searching for specific solutions.

Remember, 68% of online experiences start with a search engine!

According to Semrush, Away, leverages an incredible amount of organic traffic back to their site:

Shopify has some excellent apps already built-in for SEO purposes.

You can create blog posts, and optimize all of the pages on your store with custom meta fields (titles, meta descriptions, URLs) etc. Plus, Shopify helps you with automatically creating sitemaps, 301 redirects, and canonical URLs.

Carefully going through all of the components of your Shopify store, and adding keywords, links, and the right meta fields will immediately improve the presence of your online store.

Plus, regularly writing content to share on your blogs will highlight you as a thought leader in your space, and improve your chances of connecting with your audience.

If you’re struggling with any aspect of SEO on your Shopify website, remember there are plenty of great apps on the Shopify marketplace to help you.

You can leverage tools like:

SEO Image Optimizer
SEO Plus
Smart SEO

5. Leverage Paid Advertising

While social media and content marketing can both help you to capture organic traffic for free, sometimes it pays to spend a little extra on your advertising campaigns.

Paid ads on channels like Google and Facebook can improve your chances of connecting with the right audience, by allowing you to target people in a specific area, with certain interests.

With Google Shopping Ads, for instance, you can bid for the search keywords you want to appear for (and that includes your brand name), and focus on positioning your campaigns in front of customers with a high level of purchasing intent.

Since you only pay for the clicks you get, the results can be phenomenal.

Here is how Rains features they top products via Google Ads:

If you’ve already linked your Shopify store to social media channels like Instagram and Facebook, you can leverage the paid ads on these platforms too.

These platforms benefit from huge amounts of information you can use to target the perfect customer for your products.

Like with most forms of advertising, the trick to success with paid campaigns is optimization.

Pay attention to the analytics you generate from Facebook and Google to find out which campaigns, offers, and links are driving the most revenue from your store.

6. Optimize Your Product Pages and Checkout

An important part of boosting your chances of sales on any ecommerce store, is making sure your product pages have the power to convert.

The more engaging these pages are, the more likely it is customers will actually add products to their cart, and continue with a purchase.

Depending on the theme you choose for your Shopify store, you should be able to access a variety of ways to improve your sales.

For instance, most Shopify themes will allow you to showcase products with high-definition photos, but some will also allow you to showcase video, create lookbooks, and even use countdown timers to access the “fear of missing out”.

Advertisment ⓘ

Here is how TKEES use videos to showcase their top products on their homepage:

Accompany your amazing visuals with engaging product descriptions, with detailed insights into the benefits your products can offer.

Once customers add products to their shopping cart, make it as easy as possible for them to checkout, with features like:

Guest checkout (For people who don’t want to sign up to an account)
Straightforward checkout form fields (don’t ask for too much information)
Multiple payment options such as credit cards, PayPal, and Klarna

One way to significantly boost the performance of your product pages, checkout, and the rest of your store for that matter, is to leverage social proof.

While customers are becoming increasingly more trusting of online retailers, they still need evidence you’re running a credible store.

One good way to use social proof is to add trust badges to your store. Make sure you have an SSL certificate active too, so you can demonstrate the security of your website. Another option is to directly showcase the positive sentiments of your previous customers.

Show off your positive reviews on product pages, or create carousels highlighting the reviews you’ve received from customers in the past.

Remember, 53% of shoppers say reviews and ratings are one of the most important tools they use throughout the shopping experience.

You can even consider adding a social media feed to your store where you showcase customers using your products.

While collecting reviews and UGC can be a little tricky at first, there are plenty of great apps available on Shopify to help.

Shopify has its own “Product Reviews” app, or you could consider third-party solutions like Yotpo instead.

8. Offer Free Shipping

Giving your customers a great deal can also improve your chances of sales – but this doesn’t always have to mean lowering the prices of your products to a huge extent. While the pricing strategy you choose should be competitive (based on the value of your items), you can also strengthen your sales strategy by offering free shipping.

Studies show around 80% of online shoppers expect free shipping on ecommerce websites, particularly when the value of their order exceeds a certain amount.

You can work with Shopify shipping partners to reduce the cost of getting items to your customers, or consider using dropshipping apps to work with fulfillment providers who can handle the logistics process for you.

Since most shipping options won’t be free for you, think about how you can absorb the cost of shipping into your product prices.

You might also consider offering “conditional” free shipping. This basically means you give your customers free shipping when they purchase a certain amount on your store.

Here's an example from Selfmade:

This could be a great way to boost your average order value, and convince your customers to add more items to their cart.

9. Use Upselling and Cross-Selling Tactics

When you’re trying to run a successful ecommerce store, you shouldn’t just be focusing on generating sales, but convincing customers to make the biggest purchases possible.

But what does this mean?

In other words, you need to find ways to increase your average order value (AOV).

Cross-selling and up-selling are two of the best ways to boost your sales. Cross-selling involves persuading products to add complementary products to their carts.

Here’s an example — Rains, a popular Shopify store offers gifts on orders of $130 or more.

You can use recommendation carousels and “people also bought” sections on your site for this purpose. You could also consider offering customers discounted prices on bundles of items.

Upselling involves convincing customers to upgrade their purchase, choosing a better version of the item you already have.

For instance, you might use comparison pages to showcase how one version of a product compares to another.

Apple are masters at creating comparison pages:

Once again, one of the easiest ways to leverage upselling and cross-selling tactics on your Shopify store is with add-ons.

Here are some Shopify Upselling apps that can all help you boost your average order value:

Dialogue
Swagify
Cross Sell

To boost your chances of success, try to ensure the suggestions you give customers are personalized.

How do you do that?

Many of the top tools available on the market today allow you to customize your product recommendations based on a customer’s previous browsing or purchasing behaviors.

10. Consider Using a Chatbot for Customer Service

One of the best things any company can do to increase Shopify sales, is focus on delivering a phenomenal customer experience.

While a great marketing strategy will bring customers to your store, your customer service strategy will boost your chances of creating loyal customers.

A good way to boost your customer service strategy, without having to hire extra members of staff, is to implement a chatbot into your Shopify website.

Chatbots can reach out customers when they’re at risk of leaving an abandoned cart behind, or clicking away from your website. They can be designed to automatically send notifications to customers at certain times with special offers too.

Proactive bots allow store owners to instantly connect with potential customers when they’re shopping, offering discount codes, incentives, and more, to ensure you get that first sale.

They can also answer common questions for first-time buyers, so they feel more confident buying new products.

These chat bot tools integrate seamlessly into your ecommerce platform, and can sometimes connect with ecommerce marketing tools like email and SMS solutions too.

11. Make the Most of Existing Customers

Finally, one of the most important things to remember about building an online business is that your existing customers are often the most valuable assets you have.

Not only will they generally spend up to 67% more on your website, but they can help you grow your email list and capture new leads too.

With referral campaigns and loyalty program apps, you can turn your customers into advocates for your brand, rewarding them every time they drive a new customer to your website.

This makes it easier to boost brand awareness, increase your sales, and enhance the credibility of your brand.

There are tons of Shopify apps that can help you to create a loyalty program from scratch. Explore options like:

ReferralCandy
Stamped.io
UpPromote

Remember, the key to increasing your conversion rate here is actually rewarding your customers for contributing to your ad campaign. Give your customers points, discounts, or offers every time they bring someone to your site.

Getting More Sales on Shopify – Conclusion

Learning how to get sales on Shopify can seem tricky at first and with competion increasing over the years .

However, there are tons of tools and strategies entrepreneurs can use to boost their chances of success.

Not only does Shopify have a ton of great functionality built in to enhance marketing and sales, but you can access a range of apps and add-ons to strengthen your revenue too.

Remember, whenever you implement a new strategy into your Shopify sales efforts, it’s important to monitor the results.

Keep a close eye on how ads on social media platforms, customer reviews, and Google ads generate revenue for your store.

The more data you collect, the more you can update your website, and increase your sales in the long-term.