Hi Reader,
One of the joys of my mailing list is that when I offer help to one shop owner, I can go ahead and offer help to 5000 more by sending an email. Here's an email I received recently:
"At this point, my sales are nowhere close to where I feel they should be, despite having a pretty robust assortment of inventory and two physical shop locations. I believe that ramping up my presence to find new customers, and fostering relationships with our existing customer base, would help tremendously.
Do you suggest that we start by looking at fine tuning Shopify & setting up marketing with Klaviyo? If so, I would love to schedule a time for a call to get the ball rolling."
Here's what I told her (and what I recommend to you, if you find yourself in a similar position).
Whatever you do next as far as the website will depend on how much traffic it's getting. For instance, if you're getting less than 1000 visitors per month, your immediate goal should be to build traffic. If you're getting over 2000 visitors per month, improvements to the site could pay off well.
Shopify site improvements
There's usually a lot of room for improvement on most ecommerce sites. Is your site making any of the big "mistakes" I list in this article on our blog? Our most affordable website service, Simple Shopify Design ($12,000 USD), would be a great way to get these issues (and more) cleared up. You'll end up with a well-designed website using Aeolidia’s UX best practices, developed over years of experience. You’ll bypass the common mistakes we see on websites over and over.
If you are getting a good amount of traffic, we can either work on a Shopify optimization project or a custom Shopify redesign. These projects allow us to cater how your site works to your specific customers, address roadblocks on the way to checkout, and employ custom features and functionality (the ones that we've seen increase sales over and over).
Improving your site can be a great step before growth, because then all the marketing and advertising projects you work on next will be supported by a high-performing site. Sending traffic to an optimized site is how you get the highest payoff.
SEO & email marketing
However, if your main problem is low traffic, you might be jumping the gun by optimizing. You don't have the data to tell you what's working and what's not yet. Only a small percentage of visitors will purchase from you, so you need enough visitors to make the investment in optimization pay off.
You might want to look into SEO, email marketing, and/or paid ads (though ads are more cost-effective for an optimized site -- it's best to get the website conversion rate up before paying for traffic).
I'm going to drop some info below about both SEO and email marketing. For paid ads, we have a partner agency I'd love to share more info about and possibly introduce you to (email me back!).
Both the mailing list and SEO are foundational projects. A bit like putting your money in a retirement account, the earlier you start, the more these projects pay off in later years.
An SEO project will prepare you to start building organic traffic, which is great, because it's free once you're set up! Aeolidia gets about half of our traffic from Google, without paying for ads there.
Our SEO service is $4500, and the consultation is a detailed, growth-focused assessment of your store. Your deliverable will be a clear, actionable, and personable report, highlighting:
- Technical SEO
- SEO priorities
- Competitor analysis
- Keyword recommendations
- SEO opportunities
The same thing goes for email - those automations, segments, and smart setup will make your list a money making machine as you grow it. Unlike SEO, which can take months to a year to start seeing results from (because you're waiting on Google to notice), our work starts paying for itself right away as your emails go out. Of course, with a smaller list, this will take longer to add up, but when you can budget for it, it's a great project. But don't hear it from me, hear it from Kyle, who we worked with on her Klaviyo setup.
Your email list is one of the most powerful marketing channels in your toolbox. Working with us to develop an effective email strategy will:
- Yield better customer lifetime values
- Lead to higher conversion rates
- Immediately open new lines of revenue
Our experts set up automated flows to target different stages of the customer journey. Segmentation will allow you more personalized conversations at scale. Getting a head start on SMS (text message marketing) lets you reach your most important subscribers.
The average return on investment for email is well above 60:1, and the average return on investment for Klaviyo SMS is 24x. It's particularly important to make sure your site is getting people on your list and keeping them interested around the holiday shopping season. 98% of your visitors won't buy the first time. Black Friday tends to be when ecommerce businesses get the most eyes on their site, and it's a shame to lose those people, when you could be marketing to them throughout the year.
Overall?
What you really want to do is do both of these things: improve the site and grow traffic - here's why. Budgets don't always allow for this, though, so base the decision on how much traffic you're getting now. Email me if you'd like me to think this through for your shop.
