7 Top Tips for Scaling your Shopify Plus brand

Since its creation, Shopify has always been an ecommerce platform dedicated to helping brands to scale. Success stories like Huel and Gymshark have paved the way for other brands seeking rapid growth in the ecommerce space. So if you’re an ambitious brand, where should you be investing to fuel the next stage of your growth?

We’ve invited Swanky, a Shopify Plus agency with over 10 years experience in building and growing Shopify stores, to share some of the ways in which you can take your Shopify business to the next level.

1.Optimise your onsite customer experience

The work of an ecommerce store design is never complete. There are always improvements that can be made to your current Shopify store toincrease its potentialto win new business and turn visitors into loyal customers.  

The design of your Shopify store should allow your customers to navigate seamlessly, understand your USPs, locate the most relevant products or information, and proceed through checkout with ease. You’ll want to eliminate potential barriers and take advantage of every opportunity to convert. 

Here are some simple first steps to improving your onsite customer experience:

A. Understand your customer pain points

Through customers exit intent surveys, heat-maps and granular analytics, search for current pain points on your site that may be causing customers to abandon their purchase. At which point in your funnel do customers tend to exit the site? Are there areas of the site where customers are clicking in error and becoming frustrated? Do certain customer segments respond differently to others, according to device, location, or gender, for example?

Once you have analysed this data, you can start to identify where your store could improve.

B. Test every improvement

Whenever you make changes to your website, it's vital that youtest them an A/B testing tool to analyze the impact they have on your conversion rate. Not every change will be an improvement, you should aim to learn continuously as you make changes to your site.   

For example, when Swanky tested adding product filters onto collection pages for one Shopify store, we found that users who engaged with product filters converted at a 262% higher rate. However, when testing the use of social proof on product pages for another client, results showed that social proof only increased transactions for new site users, but had no effect at all on purchases by regular customers. Swanky therefore advised only rolling this change out to new site visitors, to avoid overloading regular customers with unnecessary information.

Armed with test results, you can make informed decisions on how you design your store to optimise conversion.

C. Personalise the customer journey

Personalisation is a powerful way to make your customers feel valued by your brand. It can also increase conversions by allowing you to deliver more relevant offers, products and information to your customers. One survey found that 49% of shoppers made impulse buys after receiving a personalised recommendation. 

Tools such as Nosto or Dynamic Yield allow you to personalize various aspects of the customer journey, from product recommendations to imagery or pop-ups, based on customer data such as location and previous interactions with your brand. With Shopify Functions, you can also customize offers and shipping costs for each customer at checkout to ensure a localized experience.

2. Build a loyal customer base

Returning customers spend 3x more than one-time shoppers on average, despite the fact that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than to keep an existing one. What’s more, loyal customers can become highly effective advocates of your brand.

If you aren’t currently investing in customer retention, you should be!

Here are some of the ways you could be improving your customer retention:

A. Implement a loyalty program

A loyalty program serves two important purposes. Firstly, they make customers feel like VIPs, deepening their relationship with your brand, as they receive exclusive benefits, such as personalised discounts, memberships or access to exclusive content.   

Secondly, loyalty programs allow you to influence customer behaviour by offering tiered rewards in return for positive customer behaviours like making purchases or hitting revenue targets. Your rewards can also target social behaviours such as referring a friend or liking your brand on social media. In this way, you incentivise your customers to sell your products for you.

B. Subscriptions

Subscriptions have become a go-to for brands to guarantee regular revenue and secure a loyal customer-base.  

Subscription models come in all shapes and sizes, from a replenishment model for verticals such as food and drink or grooming products, to a curated model that allows customers to discover new styles or experiences.

However you structure it, a subscription model offers your customers a seamless way to regularly receive the products they love. Be sure to highlight the USPs of your subscription offering, making it easy to sign up, flexible and cost-effective, to encourage customers to choose subscription over a single purchase.

C. Community

Businesses who succeed in building a community around their brand will gain a loyal customer base that they can rely on to buy their product and promote their brand.  

Focus on growing your email list and social media following, and use these platforms to curate an elite experience for your members, one that unites them around common interests or values. You can offer exclusive content, involve your members in discussions around future product development, and provide a welcoming space where they can interact with others in your community.

3. Streamline your business processes

Tempting as it is to start reaching millions of new customers across the globe straight away, you may find it more profitable (and less risky) to first fine-tune the experience of your current customer base.   

Analyse your current delivery - from shipping and returns to customer service - to understand exactly what works, learn from your mistakes and lay solid foundations for a multi-channel, international brand.

Are you efficient? Do you have a fast time-to-ship record? Do you have a reliable network of suppliers and distribution partners?

By answering these questions, you can check where improvements could be made to your current business structure, before expanding and taking old habits to a larger audience that could impact your ability to meet demand.

4. Adopt an omnichannel approach

Whilst your Shopify store may be your flagship sales channel, you cannot hope to always attract new customers directly to your store. Widen your audience by multiplying points of contact, be it marketplaces, social platforms, mobile applications, “brick and mortar” shops, third-party distributors, etc.  

Developing an omnichannel approach means delivering a seamless experience for your customers across all touchpoints with your brand. This is where PIM comes into play, automatically unifying your product information across all your channels, to reduce room for error. A PIM solution helps you to ensure that your product names, descriptions and images are consistent across the web, and that your keywords are optimised consistently.  

5. Expand internationally to reach new audiences

With an online store, you have the world at your fingertips. International expansion can require a significant financial investment, so you’ll want to be confident of success before launching in a new region.

Your current website analytics give you a good idea of where your products are already gaining traction abroad. With Shopify Markets,  you have the possibility of testing new international markets before deciding where to concentrate your resources in the long term.  

Shopify Markets allows you to create tailored, localised online shopping experiences for each region, including offering local payment options, translating content and varying your shipping terms according to where the buyer is based.  

If you're considering expanding internationally, check out Swanky's complete guide to  internationalisation on Shopify. 

6. Use automation to increase efficiency

As your organisation grows, having automated workflows and systems in place will help to streamline your commerce processes and maintain the same levels of service across different regions, giving you confidence that important tasks won’t go overlooked.

Some of the most useful workflows include:

• Automation of inventory management.
• Standardization of your product catalogues and merchandising.
• Tagging or segmentation of customers according to buying behaviour.
• Tracking and rewarding customers based on lifetime spend.
• Fraud detection through automated flagging or cancelling of high-risk orders.

For Shopify Plus merchants, the Shopify Flow app provides easy-to-edit workflow templates that are built right into your ecommerce platform, meaning you don’t need to rely on third -party apps for your ecommerce automation. Flow can help you automate tasks from a whole range of business areas, including buyer experience, order management and promotions. As a result, you and your team are free to focus on your brand, not your tech stack.

7. Streamline all your product information with a PIM

As your business expands, the addition of new sales channels, regions, suppliers and SKUs adds increasing levels of complexity to your business. With multiple team members working in different areas of the business, it’s vital to have a single source of truth when it comes to your product data, to avoid errors, missing information or duplication.

A PIM (Product Information Management) solution becomes a vital piece of the puzzle for managing your ecommerce business. The PIM is a platform on which you can store, enrich and distribute all information about your products, from technical data to sales and marketing content, SEO meta data, and, with an integrated DAM (Data Asset Management), your visual assets as well. You can bulk edit your product information, segment it for different sales channels, have various members of your team enrich the data, and set the data to go live automatically once a product is complete.

Not only does a PIM significantly reduce workload for your team, it also offers your customers a seamless experience with your products, across all your touchpoints, so they are able to make informed buyer decisions. 

Your partners for scaling your Shopify Plus business

As a Shopify Plus expert, Swanky works with international Shopify brands to help them grow their online revenue. Swanky’s ecommerce experts can advise on digital strategy, marketing and ecommerce growth, particularly as you look to launch into international markets.  

Quable’s PIM solution is designed to give ecommerce businesses an efficient and seamless way to store all of their product data. As certified Quable onboarding partners, Swanky can help you implement the PIM into your business and connect it seamlessly to your Shopify stores.  

Get in touch with the team at Quable or Swanky to discuss how a PIM solution can help you streamline your Shopify business as it grows.