With any Shopify Plus project and new ecommerce build, it can be difficult to create a post-launch plan. All of your time, energy and focus is often taken up by the initial project and it is easy and understandable to ‘worry about the next stage’ after.
However, all ecommerce managers know that the time will come when you need to carve a strategy for your Shopify Plus store post-lunch and identify how to take your online store to the next level.
How can you take your Shopify Plus store to the next level?
#1 – Work with an agency or consultant to create a growth plan
The first point of call is to work with an agency or consultant to create a growth plan. You will benefit significantly from a third party who can offer insightful knowledge about the industry (and your business if they worked with you to build your store), but they will have the distance needed to be critical and constructive.
A proactive agency can work with you on an ecommerce growth roadmap, and will likely offer you a dedicated Account Manager and schedule regular Quarterly Strategic Reviews.
During these sessions, they will continue to work with you to plan your growth strategy, review benchmark statistics, offer site analysis and recommendations and also create a KPI dashboard to report on your growth.
This can be incredibly useful for understanding how you can take your Shopify Plus store to the next level.
#2 – Do you have an ecommerce retainer?
Whilst working with an agency or consultant, you will want to consider how you may use an ecommerce retainer. An ecommerce retainer will give you the flexibility and dedicated time from an agency to work on your site with continuous optimisations and updates.
Without a dedicated retainer, you may struggle to prioritise necessary work and development costs will be higher.
This also helps you with unplanned work (bug fixes etc.) as you will have an established retainer with the time needed to fix issues on your site, so that you are distracted from your high growth strategy.
#3 – Work to improve your site speed and site security
The first actionable optimisation for your online store is to improve your site speed and site security. These are two hugely important factors for improving your conversion rate and reducing bounce rate.
You can easily take your Shopify Plus to the next level by optimising images and implementing more streamlined technologies and code to improve speed.
This is also true for security – by investing in EV SSL and upgrading partner technologies to improve security, you will be increasing conversion rates and adding trust and stability to your online store.
#4 – Implement a loyalty and rewards program
If you provide a good experience for your customers, it can be easy to retain them and position yourself as a trustworthy retailer.
However, you can encourage this further by building a loyalty and referral scheme that rewards your customers by making repeat purchases. This can be with points (that can be redeemed for discounts or free products), or with tiered rewards (that provide benefits such as free delivery after a certain value of spend has been reached).
You can partner with a loyalty scheme provider such as LoyaltyLion or Yotpo to make this seamless for your customers.
#5 – Create personalised experiences for your customers
Another fantastic way of taking your Shopify Plus to the next level is by adding an element of personalisation.
If a customer has a trend of buying a specific category of product or brand, then you can customise their next visit by promoting this product type again and speed up the process. The quicker they can find the product they’re looking for, the more likely they are to make the purchase.
You may also want to personalise on a more top-of-the-funnel basis by providing a slightly different experience for new and returning customers. If a customer is visiting your site for the first time, you should be promoting more messages about your brand and your story. If a customer is returning, you may want to promote more reinforced messages such as free delivery or even give them a discount.
There are a number of personalisation platforms out there including Nosto, Segmentify, Bunting and Pure Clarity.
#6 – Add new payment methods and integrations
Another easier way to take your Shopify Plus store to the next level and improving your online store is by adding new payment methods and integrations.
You can explore additional easy payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, but also extra payment methods such as Amazon Pay and PayPal. These can improve conversion rates significantly by giving customers choice and convenience.
Depending on your sector and your customer base, Klarna can also significantly improve conversion rates by helping customers pay later or pay with installments.
If you need support with payments, Adyen can often help.
#7 – Add click and collect functionality
Another added functionality you can add to your Shopify Plus store to take it to the next level is click and collect functionality.
Click and collect can be a challenging service for many retailers. Many retailers do not have physical stores and some retailers will sell heavy or bulky items that can’t realistically be collected from non-store locations.
However, there are some interesting trends where retailers have attempted to combat this with innovative solutions such as HubBox.
#8 – Create an email marketing and automation strategy
Many retailers will have an email marketing strategy and there will likely be a place for email within your marketing strategy if you haven’t implemented this already.
If you are seeing growth, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen a significant increase in new customers. But what does your welcome experience look like for these new customers?
A quick win is to set up a welcome email series for customers who make a purchase and sign up to your newsletter. There are dozens of welcome email examples, but the idea is to send an initial email on sign-up, followed by another a few hours or days later if they haven’t purchased (or if they abandoned their cart), and then another in a few days perhaps with a discount (if they haven’t still purchased), etc.
However, you can set more complex automations up for lapsed customers, loyal customers, one-off purchase customers etc.
Once these are set up, they will be automated to fire every time a customer signs up to your newsletter.
#9 – Invest in paid search and/or paid social
If you are seeing an increase in sales and interest, then there is natural demand for your product and brand. If this is the case, you may want to ramp up your paid search efforts to maximise the amount of traffic and sales you generate.
You will likely want to work with a PPC agency who can manage your paid search or paid social strategy but this can certainly be a strategy to boost growth for your business.
Many retailers have a negative impression of paid search and may believe that it doesn’t work for their business or their product but more often than not, their previous campaigns have been mismanaged and budget has not been well spent. This is definitely worth picking up again to explore the opportunities with a new agency.
Paid search can be a dynamic way of increasing traffic and driving sales in times of high growth.
Work with partners to get the most out of your online store
Ecommerce growth does not stop with an ecommerce site build. You need to make iterative changes and improvements to get the most out of your Shopify Plus store and take it to the next level.
Working with partners and agencies is the best way to do so for diverse ideas and a wide range of talent.
We offer ecommerce consultancy and ongoing Shopify Plus support, so if you’re searching for a new agency and are interested in how we could work together then get in touch.