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How to Optimize Conversion Rate for Shopify Stores?

Written and researched by experts at AvadaLearn more about our methodology

By Sam Nguyen

CEO Avada Commerce

Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
avada email marketing

Conversion rates are the ultimate number that tells you about the health and performance of your eCommerce business. The process of making a potential customer click on the buy button and check out takes several steps – landing on the homepage, searching through the product list, accepting the pricing, adding the purchase button to the cart. At each stage, you can add things that nudge the customer ever closer to a purchase.

If you can keep track of these stats and think of how to optimize every step of the purchase process, from click-through to buy, you’ll know what to do to improve your conversion rates. This effort has its own name - conversion rate optimization.

Optimize conversion for your Shopify store.
Optimize conversion for your Shopify store.

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If you step into a brick & mortar shop, you’ll have a tailgating salesperson before they convince you to at least try it. But when it comes to eCommerce, the chaperone is missing, so it’s really important to look closely at your Shopify conversion rates. With website dynamics constantly changing, understanding the latest trends is important to stay on top of your game.

Here’s all you need to know to increase shop conversions in 2020. We explore how to improve your Shopify conversion rate using the following techniques:

  • Use first-time offers
  • Offer Free Shipping
  • Offer coupon codes
  • Use retargeting ads
  • Minimize cart abandonment

Related topics:

Now, let’s dive into the details!

1. Use First-time Offers

Use first-time offers to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.
Use first-time offers to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.

When your visitors are continually increasing, if your conversion rate is stagnating, that signals a significant problem. Your low conversion rate could be attributable to the fact that you don’t really know your target audience and don’t understand what they’re looking for. Whatever the cause is, you’ve got to find it and fix it. More often than not, the first-time offer is a good way to solve this issue.

To make your first offer successful, prepare your reward by conducting surveys to find out what your customers want. Using the experience of shopping trips and the primary deal timing to really make the deals stand out or coupons to attract consumers online. Here are a few ways you can see your first-time deals.

Try Pop-ups

One of the best ways to provide a first-time offer is by using pop-ups. This eCommerce feature plays a significant role in fulfilling the deal and increasing the overall conversion rate. Whenever a customer is about to make a purchase, you can use pop-up alerts to inform them of the sales that relate to their order, be they first-time offers or other promotional discounts.

Use Exit Intent

This is an effective function that makes it easier for shop owners to know when customers visit their website and communicate with them before they leave the website without purchasing anything.

Send offers via email

If you’ve acquired a good list of customers by blog opt-ins, you might want to consider submitting your list of promotional emails introducing the first time you have for them.

Apps for making first-time offers

Here are some Shopify apps you can use to promote your offers.

  • AVADA Discount Code Generator: In Shopify, you can only generate a discount with a single code. This default feature is troublesome when you want to have multiple codes for the same discount so that you can send those unique codes to different customers. Discount Code Generator by AVADA is developed to help you generate a pool of different codes for any existing discount rule.
AVADA Discount Code Generator
AVADA Discount Code Generator
  • Upsell Popup Sales Pop up: When visitors come to your store for the first time, you can provide them with a very special offer with a product upsell popup window. Another function is when they’re about to leave, an exit-intent popup window can quickly retain their attention. In both examples, This app enables you to offer a coupon, a special discount for a product, or free shipping.
  • Ultimate Special Offers: Ultimate Special Offers enables you to reward your customers with enticing promotions, such as receiving a gift with purchase (buy x, get y). Ultimate Special Offers also allows you to offer multiple discounts in your store, including volume discounts on bulk orders for customers looking to make larger purchases.

2. Offer Free Shipping

Use free shipping offers to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.
Use free shipping offers to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.

The market is becoming more and more competitive, and prices for products continue to rise. Large and small retailers often pass on shipping costs to customers or ask them to pick up products in stores. Such high shipping charges frequently discourage buyers from placing an order. That’s why you need to deliver free delivery.

Explore: Shopify Free Shipping Bar

How To Do It On Your Shopify Store

The idea of free shipping is clear, but to let your customers know that you are providing free shipping is another thing. Below are some suggestions that will help you improve your revenue as a shop owner.

Download Shopify Free Shipping Bar
Download Shopify Free Shipping Bar
  • Advertise On Social Media
  • Send Promotional emails
  • Use Pop-Ups

3. Use Social Proof:

Social proof is a psychological concept that people don’t like to take risks as the first person to do something, so they will follow the actions of others. Using social proof to build up credibility among target audiences is a common practice in the world of eCommerce where most transactions are conducted without in-person interaction.

Having social proof on your website will provide hesitant customers with the confidence to buy from you. One of the common ways to display social proof is by using pop-ups. These pop-ups shouldn’t show up in an in-your-face manner so that customers won’t get annoyed.

Understanding that, we have developed an app called Proofo - Social Proof that allows you to display notifications in the form of pop-ups on your website when visitors take actions (such as download an app or buy something).

Download Proofo - Social Proof
Download Proofo - Social Proof

The notifications are nice and small pop-ups showing up at the left corner of your website, which means you won’t have to worry that they will disturb your website visitors. We provide this app for free! You can download it in your store on the Shopify app market. Go and grab it now!

4. Offer Coupon Codes

Use coupon codes to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.
Use coupon codes to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.

Coupon codes are to offer website visitors discounts. Typically, if the coupon is good enough, the visitor will become a customer! Coupon codes are considered to be perfect tools for increasing conversion rates. You can provide customers with rewards in the form of promotion codes. Here’s how to do so:

Offer Personalized Coupons Target Customers

Of all your marketing tactics, you can use the segmentation of your audience. Most email services like Abandoned Cart Recovery have a segmentation feature. With that feature, you can segment your best customers and give them a great discount to get back to your store.

Create Urgency and Use Expiry Dates

Don’t be too easy with your promotional discounts by providing it to everyone. This will weaken the power of discounts right off the bat. Applying urgency or restriction to your coupon (for example, free shipping for orders of more than $100) will urge the customer to buy more to get the benefit. Another method you can use is using an accurate copy by using a countdown promo button. Using a copy like “This deal expires this weekend” or “Today only!” “It can be used to create urgency and demand. A countdown can also be generated with regard to the coupon code, in order to make the consumer aware that their time to take advantage of a great deal is very limited.

5. Use retargeting ads

Use retargeting to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.
Use retargeting to optimize conversion for your Shopify store.

You may be wondering what retargeting is. Retargeting is a way to advertise to people who have interacted with your brand and product before. There are a variety of approaches to re-targeting.

How to Use Retargeting

There are several ways to retarget an ad to your prospects. Ads can be re-targeted on-site, on social media, or also through less traditional means. Today, however, social media — specifically Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — are among the most common ways to redirect advertisements.

Google lets you do something known as dynamic remarketing. Such re-targeted advertisements are not only particularly successful for retargeting frequent visitors to your website, but in particular, they tailor one’s ads to the products that consumers have previously seen. It brings targeting to a new, more targeted level, making it possible that your site will be re-visited and your product will be viewed again.

Dynamic marketing is very effective especially when you have a wide variety of goods or services that you offer to consumers who have already shown interest in it. Retargeting with Google will help increase the flow of visitors to your website and to relevant products.

Another option for retargeting and remarketing on Google has to do with RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads). It involves redirecting ads to users who have already come to your website before but then using related search terms after leaving your website. Imagine, for example, that you are an online beauty company. A customer visits your website, but leaves without purchasing anything, then uses Google to start looking for the product they need. You can use the RLSA to target them.

To use Google Ads we recommend you install google tag manager for shopify store

If you are not familiar with Google retargeting ads, and Google Ads as a whole, you can learn about them in our comprehensive guide for advertising on Google.

Facebook Ads Retargeting

Facebook has a range of features that make retargeting effective. The Facebook Ad Manager is a valuable tool in this regard. Let’s say a visitor started checking out your website, but he didn’t make a purchase. As a store owner, you can give a 20 percent off-code for cart abandoners via Facebook.

Facebook can create the code you need for pixel retargeting that you can get through your Ads Manager below Audiences. Once you have this code created by Facebook, you can add it to your website!

We have a very informative and insightful guide for advertising on Facebook too! Check it out if you need to learn more about Facebook advertising.

6. Minimize cart abandonment

Reduce your cart abandonment.
Reduce your cart abandonment.

Cart abandonment, a self-explanatory term that refers to people who go to eCommerce websites that put items in their shopping cart but leave the platform without completing or finishing the purchase.

Around three-fourths of customers who visit an eCommerce store do not continue with the order. Such concentrations can also differ across devices and mediums. Cart abandonment is taking place through a wide variety of industries and no longer just retail. In reality, the largest cart abandonment on the Internet today is in the airline industry. Here’s how you can minimize the abandonment rate of your cart:

Simplify the Order Process

The more complex the buying process is, the more likely you are to lose your customers along the way. Using the very basic “Add to Cart” button to make sure they are available on your product page. Make sure your cart button is easy to reach and view and make it easy to check the quantity in your cart.

Send Cart Recovery Emails

Many online customers are familiar with the email cart recovery follow-ups. Cart recovery email sequence refers to a scheduled email or series of emails sent in ‘X’ number of hours to your prospects after their cart has been abandoned.

Such emails solve the problem that you might have shoppers who have ended up forgetting that they had products in their cart. These emails will be a quick and effective notification that reminds the customers to finish their purchase.

Keep Your Payment Process Simple and Error-Free

The too complicated checkout process is one big problem that often discourages buyers from finishing their checkout. People are suspicious when it comes to buying, and what makes them even more suspicious is a complex, unclear checkout process. Therefore, it is essential that your checkout process is simplified as much as possible, so your customers can finish it quickly.

Read more:

Final Words

In this post, I have addressed approaches that you can use to increase conversion rates for your Shopify shop. Now it’s time for you to put all of them into practice and see the conversion rate of your Shopify store skyrocket! Please feel free to leave comments below for further discussion. :-)


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.