How to Grow Shopify Store

You’ve launched your Shopify store, established a strong brand, introduced your products to world. Now, the question that keeps you up at night is, ‘How do I grow my Shopify store?’.

Everyone has a different answer for this question. A good store, great Meta campaigns, SEO audits, email marketing, push notifications, mentorship, affiliates, apps – the list goes on.

The truth? While all these can be helpful, our main focus is on moving your Shopify business from point A to point B, shipping more packages each day.

I analyzed more than 300 shopify stores from a variety of categories then prepared this guide.

In this guide you’ll find nucleus of growth, 6 core growth strategies for your store and tools for your growth process.

What Growth Means Like for Your Shopify Store?

Let’s start with what real growth looks like. Now, imagine this;

• Your campaigns are generating great results.
• Your customers becoming brand advocates.
• You have multiple traffic sources, each one doing well.
• Most of your customers buy from you again and again.

If you ship more packages than yesterday, it means your store is growing. It’s quite simple and clear. This is what I call growth. I explain this more inside “What is Real Growth for Shopify Stores?“, you can check it later.

In this guide, we’ll focus on achieving this growth.

Nucleus of Growth: Conversion

As you see “conversion” is the center of the growth. I know there are lot’s of different conversion definition.

In this guide, we look at conversion with growth perspective. For us conversion is a visitor saying “I want to buy this product, right now.”

There are two core part of the visitor.

1. Customers: Who are our customers? Who should be your target?
2. Offer (Value Proposition): Why do they buy our products? Why do they buy from our store?

In order to build the growth foundation for your Shopify store, you need to understand these two core part.

Ideal Customer Profile

Everyone can’t be your customers. Simple and plain. Stop focusing on everyone.

You need to find a niche that will need/want your products badly, be ready to buy right away, love your brand & products and afford easily.

This is the core idea of the growth process.

There are some niches who love and afford your product and brand much more than anyone else. That’s your ideal customer.

For growth and conversion perspective we use ideal customer profiles (ICP). It defines ideal customer based on demographic, psychographics, pain points, behavioral and environmental attributes for ideal buyer. You can find more information about ICP here.

Let’s say we have a Shopify stores that sells organic, high-end baby clothes. All products environment friendly, unique designed. There is no chemical in these products which makes them perfect for babies health. Then our ideal customer profiles can be something like eco-conscious parents who care about the health, safety, and style of their little ones and can afford it.

Based on your marketing and store current state, there can be a few different methods to create ICPs. I prepared “How to Create ICP” post, check it if you want to get more information.

So far we completed the first part of the conversion. We know our target audience.

Now we can move to our second part. What we offer for these target customers. 

Offer (Value Proposition)

I want to start with our example store. We’re selling organic, high-end baby clothes for eco-conscious parents who care about the health, safe, and style of their babies.

Let’s say I created my Shopify store, took photographs of products and only posted them on my store. Running campaigns to get traffic to my store. Will it be enough to convince eco-conscious parents? As you can guess, it won’t be.

We need to design our brand, strategy, products and services just for them to say “yes, I want to buy these products right now“.

In this step we have to know our audience very well so we can just address their concerns, preferences, needs and pains. We need to find answers to seven key questions about them.

1. Who are we empathizing with?
2. What do they need to do?
3. What do they see?
4. What do they say?
5. What do they do?
6. What do they hear?
7. What do they think and feel? (Pains and Gains)

This is called empathy map, check the detailed post to learn more about it. After getting the answer for these questions, we can create our value proposition.

A promise to our audience about how their pains will be relieved, how their lives will be better with our products, services and brand. Also known as value proposition. You can check value proposition guide here to learn more.

Your growth process all depends on quality of your value proposition. If your offer better than anyone else, your offer becomes unrefusable. This should be your target to persue.

Let’s continue with our clothing brands for new borns.

Our value proposition can be something like “We provide new moms with the peace of mind knowing they are dressing their babies in the safest, healthiest, and most stylish organic clothing available.“.

If we want it to be a killer value proposition, we can use something like “Experience the Ultimate Peace of Mind Knowing You’re Dressing Your Baby in the Safest, Healthiest, and Most Stylish Organic Clothing Available, Delivered with Lightning Delivery Speed and a Guaranteed 30-Day Full Refund“.

Start Growing Your Shopify Store

In this point we know our ideal customer profile, a customer segment that will love our products radically more than anyone else.

Also we created our value proposition, a killer one. Our ideal customers can’t refuse.

Now it’s time to grow your shopify store using six proven strategies.

1. Convert More Visitors From Your Traffic

This is the most crucial step in achieving your Shopify store growth. The most fun about this you don’t need hundreds of thousands traffic or expensive agencies to increase your conversions.

Here is the three keys strategy you can follow to achieve higher conversions.

1. Strengthen your value proposition: If you don’t have a killer conversion rate, start working on strengthen your proposition.
2. Be sure your visitors get it: Highly possible that most of your visitors  won’t identify your value proposition. Ideally your visitors should get the sense of value proposition in the first 6 seconds and will be able to get most of it in the first 30 seconds.
3. Fix UX Issues: Checkout your visitors session recordings and heatmaps. There can be huge issues that block your customers. Be sure your store working perfectly on mobile devices and people find it easy to access, find what they’re looking for and reach to you easily whenever they want.

Here are some actionable ideas that can work for you:

• Create tailored content to address any barriers that prevent people from purchasing your products.
• Encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews to showcase how your products have positively impacted their lives.
• Utilize high-quality product visuals to capture attention and convey product features effectively.
• Craft detailed and informative product descriptions that provide comprehensive information to potential buyers.
• Offer a variety of payment options to cater to diverse customer preferences.
• Provide fast and reliable shipping to ensure timely product delivery.
• Implement a flexible and straightforward return policy to instill confidence in your customers.
• Make your shipping and return policies easily accessible and understandable.
• Implement campaigns to create a sense of urgency and encourage timely purchases.
• Offer prompt and responsive live customer support to address customer inquiries efficiently.

Some strategies that are unlikely to yield significant results include:

• Changing button colors
• Changing button texts
• Putting random numbers on your product page like 34523423 people looking at this product

2. Reach Your Ideal Customer More and Better

• More than 50% of customers engage 3 to 5 different channels during each purchase journey.
• Customers who use multiple channels shop 1.7x more than single channel shoppers and spend more.

These are stats from the McKinsey research.

Lesson is simple and clear.

Do not try to focus on everyone. Just focus on reaching your ideal customer profiles.

When you just focus on the right audience for yourself, you will be able to reach them more, make them click more and get most interested customers on your store.

Also using different channels plays a huge role, too. You already know your customers profile. Ask yourself where they spend most of their time? Try to utilize each channel. Get their attention with empath map and your value proposition.

3. Get New Customers From Your Customers

Based on McKinsey’s another report word of mouth 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decision. Also based on The Heinz/Influitive report 59% of companies with referral programs have higher lifetime value.

Customer referral can be a great channel to growth your Shopify store. Friends and family reviews are always more trustworthy and people generally tend to share similar preferences with their friends.

Building a referral program is a must-have for stores looking for growth.

Checkout article “Discover The Hidden Growth Channel: Referrals,” to learn how should you do it. Utilize the power of your existing customer base to attract new customers.

4. Make Them Easy to Buy From You, Again

“Acquiring new customers five to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.” based on Harvard Business Review’s report. Can you believe it?

It doesn’t matter how many customer you have, retention should be your number one priority. It’s that simple.

I know there are lot’s of experts recommend to send more and more and more emails each day. But that’s not the point. Also you shouldn’t do that.

Turn back to your ideal customer profile, empath map and value proposition. Those are keys for each marketing activity.

You should be keep in touch with your customers, for creating more value. And it doesn’t have to be only discounts.

For our hypothetical example of high-end organic baby clothes brand, you can start a YouTube channel about informative content for new borns, share the latest researches, expert opinion. Then you can encourage your customers to subscribe your channel and let them know about the new videos.

When you publish a new video, you also remind them you’re the address for them to checkout for new products for their babies.

5. Marketing to Prospects Not Ready to Buy Yet

This strategy can significantly impact your growth trajectory.

A portion of your website traffic may not be immediately ready to purchase from you. This can stem from various reasons.

Just because someone doesn’t buy your product right away doesn’t mean they’re uninterested or dissatisfied.

Based on your brand promise and the problems you solve for your customers, you can anticipate why they choose to purchase from you. Consider the positive impact you make on their lives.

For instance, if you’re selling high-end, organic baby clothes, you can predict that your target audience is parents who prioritize their children’s health.

In this case, you could offer an enticing incentive, such as a free ebook titled “6 Things You Need to Check Before Buying Clothes For Your New Born,” to collect their email addresses.

This example illustrates the importance of identifying something that resonates deeply with your niche audience and is difficult for them to resist.

Reserve discounts for those who are on the verge of purchasing from you.

By implementing these strategies, you can effectively bridge the gap between Point A and Point B, propelling your Shopify store towards sustainable growth.

6. Expanding to New Market Segments and Markets

If you’ve successfully implemented the first three steps, you can finally embark on expanding into new market segments or markets.

This is the final step of the growth strategy because it requires significant effort across various aspects of your business, not just marketing or your online store but also operations and branding.

Continuing with our previous example, let’s say you’re selling high-end, organic baby clothes. You’ve achieved great success in your current market segment, boasting an impressive conversion rate, effectively acquiring new customers through referrals, and nurturing long-term relationships with future customers.

At this stage, you can consider expanding your market segments and markets by exploring options such as:

• Selling clothes for kids with the same high-end, organic philosophy.
• Offering more affordable products for those who are price-sensitive.
• Expanding your product line to include organic and high-end toys.
• Expanding your business into new countries.

As mentioned earlier, this step represents the most advanced stage of growth. Personally, I recommend focusing on the first three steps initially, as they generally yield a higher ROI compared to this final step.

Tools For Shopify Stores Growth

This is what makes Shopify great for e-commerce businesses. There are lot’s of tools to help you excel on your brand growth marketing.

There are more than 8,000 apps on the Shopify app store. How to choose which one to use it?

After working hundreds of Shopify stores growth marketing and trying lot’s of different Shopify growth apps, I created a simple checklist.

1. If you’re looking for building a brand, you should, the tool you use shouldn’t add their own links. Most of the time tools insert their own links like “Powered by …” and it’s not cool to have.
2. The tool you use shouldn’t slow down your page speed. A fast Shopify store is must have for higher conversion. It’s crucial for your search engine optimization and other digital marketing activities too. Check the effects of tool on your store page speed.
3. The tool shouldn’t interfere your Shopify themes code. It may works when you just start but in one day it will broke your store. Worst part is you can’t realize it for a while.
4. Avoid app conflicts. If you use different apps for different purposes, especially for the new visitors, those apps puts different messages can cause a mess on your store.
5. High quality experience is the key for higher conversions. Do not be like the annoying sales people. Be sure you offer the best experience on your store.
6. Is it customizable for your store? Each Shopify brand has their own needs. You should be able to customize it for your needs and strategy.
7. Is it easy to use? As you can see there are lot’s of work to do for your growth. The app you use shouldn’t take much of your time. It should be easily usable.

Just keep these things on your mind before making decision.

Summary

There are lot’s of advices and recommendations for Shopify store’s growth. Most of time they bypass the strategy, business and marketing and just recommend simple tactics.

As we discussed real growth means more customers, more revenue and more profit.

It’s almost impossible to reach these without having clear understanding of ideal customer profile, value proposition and growth strategy.

Before working on your Shopify store’s growth, you need to find out your ideal customer profile and build a killer value proposition.

When you have a clear idea of ideal customer profile and value proposition then you can start working on your Shopify store’s growth.

There are six core strategy to consider.

1. Increase conversion rates
2. Build a marketing engine that focus on your ideal customer profile
3. Build a referral program and get more customers from your customers
4. Focus on high quality content and play the long game for better retention
5. Build a marketing plan for prospects that not ready to buy
6. If you’re done with each of those steps then focus on expanding your Shopify business for higher growth.

If you’re interested in pursuing this approach for your growth process, I’m offering a growth program through Growth Suite.

I built Growth Suite from the ground up, meaning I personally wrote every line of code within Growth Suite.

Why did I take this approach?

Because I understand that developing an ultimate growth app is not the same as creating an app with seemingly cool features.

Growth Suite is a growth tool that empowers me to manage all aspects of your business growth.

The best part is that you can simply entrust the management of your growth to me, the creator of Growth Suite.

You won’t need to worry about any technical details; I’ll handle Growth Suite for you.

Sounds interesting? Just reach out, get a free conversion checkup report, and we can start working right away!

Also don’t forget to check out Conversion Rate Optimization Guide For Shopify and Marketing Guide For Shopify too.