PODCAST: How You & Your Clients Can Make the Most of the Holiday Season

With the holiday shopping season around the corner, storeowners are starting to spin up a plethora of different marketing tactics to capture their share of the holiday shopping revenue. In this podcast, we discuss ways that Shopify Experts can offer more value and services to their existing and future clients by supporting these marketing efforts.

With the holiday shopping season around the corner, storeowners are starting to spin up a plethora of different marketing tactics to capture their share of the holiday shopping revenue.  

I recently sat down with Gavin Ballard, author of the upcoming course Mastering Shopify Themes, to talk about ways Shopify Experts can offer more value and services to their existing and future clients by supporting these marketing efforts.

In this episode you’ll learn:

1. How you can improve your client’s email marketing with things like targeted landing pages and how to set up your themes to optimize email collection.
2. Specific elements you can add to your themes and your client’s themes to encourage purchase
3. How to optimize your client’s site so that their store is lightning quick during the high traffic shopping season

To listen to other Shopify Masters episodes ideal for Shopify Partners, go to ShopifyMasters.org/Partners.

Advice you’ll get from this podcast:

Email Marketing

• Email marketing is a really powerful tool to drive sales, especially over the holiday season.
• Tips when capturing visitor email addresses:
  • Make sure you have a clear value proposition for the visitor in exchange for their email address that they can understand and appreciate, even if they’ve never heard of your brand before. Examples include 10% off store-wide, exclusive products, or early access to popular products.
  • Make sure to measure whether more intrusive methods of email collection (i.e., full screen popups) are having an overly negative effect on your purchase conversion rates for the rest of the store.
• Don’t try to do it all yourself with HTML emails. Use a tool that integrates with Shopify (like Klaviyo) and gives storeowners the ability to tweak content when needed. Try to create consistent branding between your store and the HTML emails you send out.
• Create pages on your store that are targeted for specific email campaigns. When people click on email links, make sure you’re sending them to a page they expect and understand. It should be consistent with the call to action in the email.
• When you have a simple product proposition, consider using a prepopulated cart link that sends people directly to the checkout.

You might also like: How to Help Your Clients Get Results with Email Marketing

Analytics

• Work out the questions you want the answers to before opening your analytics; otherwise it’s too easy to focus on irrelevant numbers. Good questions are specific and measurable: “Which pages cause visitors to leave my site?” or “Is my newsletter popup having a negative impact on sales?”
• Many smaller clients aren’t always aware of all the work required on the analytical and marketing sides of ecommerce. Be prepared to help them, especially in the lead up to busy periods.

Getting Your Store Ready for the Holidays

• The main objective is to make it clear to customers that you’re ready for the holidays:
  • Make guaranteed delivery dates and order cutoff dates prominent, and provide a separate, detailed page breaking down dates by product and delivery locale.
  • Delivery date countdowns can create a sense of urgency and drive purchases.
  • Make it clear to customers that you offer gift wrapping, and give them a real sense of what their gifts are going to look like. Make your customers look good!

You might also like: 6 Tricks to Increase Your Clients' Conversion Before Christmas

Performance

• Performance is really, really important for ecommerce stores, but not enough people make it a priority.
• Use third-party libraries sparingly, and when you do, make sure you understand the tradeoffs.
• Use development workflow tools like Grunt to automate development and make tasks like image optimization and the bundling of Javascript and stylesheets together easy.
• Use the freely available Shopify Theme Scaffold to get a good development workflow up and running quickly.

Gavin Ballard is a Shopify consultant with years of experience helping businesses achieve success online. He’s the author of the popular Bootstrap for Shopify framework, as well as an upcoming course on how to create Shopify themes that delight clients and convert customers, Mastering Shopify Themes.

You might also like: How to Optimize Themes for Performance