How Shopify Store Owners Can Leverage Compound Growth Strategies
I thought it would be worth explaining the aggregation of marginal gains in websites and how it can benefit anyone with an online store. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to fix a website, but I think most people understand compound interest and how, over time, the interest rate going back in and compounding on itself can have a very beneficial effect on your investments and savings.
Well, there’s no difference when we talk about websites.
The aggregation of marginal gains is best explained, I think, by imagining your website and all the tiny changes you can make that improve aspects with positive outcomes on your income. The income from your website is affected principally by one of three things: the number of people that visit your website, the conversion rate, and the average order value from those visitors. Usually, the cheapest element you can fix yourself is the conversion rate.
All of these three factors are interrelated. If two of them stay the same when one goes up, you make more money. If two of them go up and one stays the same, you make even more money. But if you can affect all three of them in a positive way? Your website is going to significantly increase revenue.
Boosting Shopify Conversion Rates With Minimal Time Investment
I think what people get lost in is that they feel they need to go for a “silver bullet” approach. Realistically, there isn’t a miracle cure for websites, but consider this: if a website was making 1 million pounds a year with a conversion rate of 2%, and we change that conversion rate to 2.5% with the same number of visitors and all other factors being equal, you’ll make an extra quarter of a million in sales annually.
It doesn’t take much to alter the conversion rate by 0.5%. Different niches have different conversion rates, and the impact of changes might vary. But can you nudge your conversion rate by 0.5%? For those who’ve gone through the optimisation exercise, you know it’s achievable. If you’ve never gone through this process, looking for anything and everything on your website that could be improved, you’ll probably find it hard to appreciate how relatively easy it can be.
Why Your Shopify Store Needs Regular Maintenance Just Like Physical Shops
Most people’s websites are either left alone once they’ve been built and handed over by the agency, or they’ve slowly morphed from something very good to something not quite so good anymore.
The easier analogy to make is with a physical shop front. Imagine a nice store that you’ve let go to rack and ruin – you’ve got a different sign out front, one colour paint on the door and another on the windows. You’ve got an old window display with products that are a bit faded and haven’t been your main sellers for a long period of time. You didn’t bother changing the fur coats and winter hats when it’s 35°C outside, or you’re trying to sell barbecues in January.
You must change your site as frequently as you would change the front-of-house appeal of a high street store. If you owned a physical shop, you’d probably walk around every morning before customers arrived, making sure it’s all hoovered, the displays are correct, everything looks as tantalising as possible, the toilets are clean, and everything about your business has been brushed up ready for trade.
I’ve been in this game a long time, and there’s just no way that people think the same about their websites – other than those who are really winning the e-commerce game.
10 High-Impact Shopify Optimisations That Drive Immediate Sales
So what tiny changes can we make to your website? Can we commit to making 50, 100, or even just 10 small improvements that will make a difference? The compounding of all those beneficial changes will add up to more than the sum of those individual changes. If you can make the relevant changes in a timely fashion to your website, you’ll start to see quite a rapid gain in sales.
You may be thinking, “Well, what do you mean by tiny changes?” I would suggest things like:
- Changing your homepage banner to feature a relevant product with a compelling call to action, telling visitors what you want them to do next. Don’t be passive!
- If you’ve got something with good margin, put it on your homepage. If you haven’t, try changing things to feature products with bigger margins, higher sales tickets, or better conversion rates so you’re making the most of the real estate on your homepage.
How Alt Tags Boost Shopify Product Visibility in Google Image Search
Have you gone through every image on your website and given it an alt tag? Alt tags are alternative text used for people with screen readers, but they also help increase visitor numbers because Google will display images based on the relevancy of searches. If you’ve got a photograph of a gold necklace with a football-oriented design, but your alt text doesn’t say that, nobody’s going to find it when searching on Google. In terms of images, around 20% of products are now found through Google Images, depending on various factors.
Proven Shopify Product Title Strategies for Google Shopping Success
Have you made your product title tags as descriptive as they need to be? The reason you need descriptive product titles is twofold. One, it’s the most potent aspect of search engine optimisation on a product page. If you just put “dog bed,” there’s not much to work with. But if you put “Wicker Dog Bed with Leather Trim and Tartan Cushion,” you’ve created a much more descriptive search term. People could potentially find that product through various searches like “wicker dog bed” or “dog bed with tartan cushion” or “leather trim dog bed.”
The same product can be found through many different search terms, as opposed to simply being called “dog bed,” which is too simplistic. The other benefit is that descriptive titles trigger your Google Shopping ads effectively. Google Shopping is vital – if you’re not using it and you’re trying to sell online, there are very few cases where this couldn’t be working for you. You really should be using Google Shopping because it represents 40% of e-commerce revenue in the UK – that’s a massive chunk of business you could be missing out on.
Google Shopping primarily works based on the product name and description and being able to reflect that in a search. For those who don’t know, these are the product images with prices that appear at the top of retail searches. When clicked, they take users straight to the product page. Because it only links to the product page, the title is what Google uses to match with people’s searches, so a descriptive product title works wonders for your Google ads as well.
Testing Shopify Button Colours That Convert Browsers Into Customers
Try testing the colours of buttons on your website. There’s a fairly natural order to things – the traffic light system where red means stop and green means go. If you want somebody to take action on your website, try making the button green rather than red, and people will intuitively understand. If you want them to buy or add to cart or perform an action, colour can make a difference. It does have to fit with your brand, but it’s worth experimenting with.
Another framework I’d like to put into your mind: even during lockdown, we had clients selling alcohol with free home delivery who still only managed around a 10% conversion rate – meaning a 90% failure rate in their e-commerce transactions. People don’t need much of an excuse not to buy from your website, so don’t give them any more reasons.
A high-converting website these days might convert at around 4-5%, which means 95-96% of people who were looking for your product and found it still didn’t complete a purchase on that visit. Let’s not add to that abandonment rate.
Eliminating Friction Points in Your Shopify Customer Journey
We’ve got to really think about what information is on the page. The mantra we use is “don’t make me think.” If there isn’t enough information to buy a product, particularly as the price goes up, people’s willingness to gamble that they’re getting the right product decreases. That’s the crux of whether or not you’re going to get that sale.
If you give customers all the information they need – very detailed delivery costs, explicit information about when products will arrive, complete details about what the product is, great photography showing all elements, clear instructions so they can decide whether it’s right for them – you’ve got a much better chance of converting that purchase.
Implementing A Shopify Marginal Gains Audit For Immediate Results
Without listing everything you can do to your website to improve conversion, I suggest you browse your site as a customer would. Have a good look at every single element, whether it’s the titles of sections in the navigation, the hierarchy of sections (particularly how they appear on mobile devices), changing button colours while recording the before and after results, tweaking prices, or reviewing your product title tags throughout the website.
What can you do to make a series of tiny changes that might have a beneficial effect? When added together, these small improvements can create a much larger impact. To give you an idea of the potential: a 1% improvement across 100 factors actually results in a 2,700% improvement on your bottom line.
What Shopify Store Owners Can Learn From Olympic Gold Medal Winners
Give this approach some serious consideration. Think about all the things you can do to improve your website through marginal gains, and then consider this case study: The British cycling team adopted this approach when they were languishing down the order of merit in world cycling. A man called Dave Brailsford came in and introduced the theory of aggregation of marginal gains.
He transformed them into the number one cycling team in the world with record numbers of gold medals. He went as far as optimising the massage oil the cyclists used that might have given a tiny fraction better performance, the pillows they slept on during training (because better sleep means harder training), and the materials used in every aspect of their clothing. No detail was left unexamined, and it worked.
Most people understand how this approach can work in sport, but there’s a huge knowledge gap about how it applies to website optimisation. Please bear in mind that you should start as early as possible making changes to your website – all those tiny improvements are going to give you better results.
Should you need guidance or a bit of confidence, and if you’d like to talk about how we implement this process for our clients – how we shape it and how we execute it – please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me on 07951 579789.
