There’s good news and bad news.
First, you’ve made it through almost all the holiday chaos. (And this was some kind of chaos!) That’s the good news. Congratulations are certainly in order.
Some Bad News :(
The bad news is, right about now your Shopify store revenues may be dipping. While some online stores can plan on a bit of a bump from year-end and into-January sales, very, very few folks will be killing it like Christmas.
Yes, that’s normal and to be expected. Ugh!
Lots of Good News :)
How about flipping things around? Finish strong! Give the New Year a powerful start! Break some records!
We’ve come up with five tactics that you can implement NOW and without heavy lifting. Heavens to Betsy! We don’t want to suggest another deep dive, Asana-driven, hurricane-force undertaking right now.
No apps, no coding, just get ‘er done!
Five, Count ‘Em, Five Disruptive Tactics to Implement Today.
1) Increase prices. (Yikes!)
Now we’ve got your attention. Talk about disruptive! This could cause a riot at the next meeting. It’s been an incredibly tough year and margins are no-doubt tight. You don’t have to do it across the board. Look at high-demand items for clues to which products to target.
Not a bad idea to alert your customers via email and site banners to the upcoming price change to drive purchases ahead of increased prices.
A twist: look at low-demand items and see if they should stay or go--after you increase prices (and, ahem, the margin!).
2) Email non-openers. (Horrors.)
We’re not suggesting you do this all the time. You’re playing in the deep end of the pool with sender reputation, so maybe this is a one-time thing. But if you have a big promotional email going out and usually see open rates above 20%, consider hitting your non-openers again. About 48 hours after the original send is good timing.
Change the subject line, too. Something as simple as “ICYMI” in front of the original subject line works or “Before It Goes Away.” Most email platforms make this easy to do. A 10% increase in openers is not unheard of. Got a big list? This could have real impact. If you’re not completely risk-averse, heck, re-email your entire list.
3) Free shipping. (What the heck?)
Do a little break-even analysis (sorry, heavy lifting?) to see what kind of increase in AOV you’d need to see to make this profitable. In some ways, this will be a gut call. Limit the time frame and make sure you promote it on your site and other communication channels, you could see a bottom-line gain.
Plus, you’ll learn something about your customers and their sensitivity to total price.
4) Enhance thank you/order-confirm pages. (Wait!)
Caution: This is for Shopify Plus stores only. This should be easy if you don’t overthink it. Find a product or two that are high-demand, not too pricey, and add a short sales message, image, and clickable link to take customers to the product page. Keep the design clean so it doesn’t overwhelm your intended message.
If you already have installed an app that does this or suggests additional items on checkout, then you’re in great shape. Just do it. For the rest of us, this could be a sales booster.
5) Breakout plus-size SKUs. (Huh?)
For apparel marketers we’ve been seeing a trend that might be worth your consideration. Rather than including your 1X, 2X, 3X, and other plus sizes in a typical drop-down, create a new SKU to highlight that your shop is size inclusive.
Create a new product and make sure the product description highlights sizes. When time allows, get some new images of plus-size models. According to Racked.com about 68% of American women wear a size 14 or above. And the teen and men’s markets are booming. Give these sizes their due--and more screen real estate!
Bonus Tip:
Keep an eye out for this trend with your competitors. Go further when you can and consider adding plus sizes as a separate tab in your site navigation. It’s not just the Lane Bryants of the world who are adding “shop-by-size” collections. Doing any of these things will also help in site search.
Psst. Take a closer look at your competitors without having “admin” access to their stores. If they are on Shopify, most stores do not hide these autogenerated pages (we hide them when appropriate for our clients).
- Go to the online store for your competitor on Shopify.
- In the address bar, add /collections to the url.
Example: https://myshop.com/ becomes https://myshop.com/collections
Going here will show you ALL the collections a company has, even ones not linked. - The second place to look is /collections/all. This address gives you a full list of EVERY product on that Shopify Store.
If you want help hiding these autogenerated pages, stay tuned for our next blog post in the New Year!
Now, go do some disrupting!