Get Your Shopify Store Off To A Rocket Start
With the closure of ‘non-essential’ Amazon sales due to COVID-19, many distressed business owners are now being forced off Amazon, and are instead starting their own branded store on Shopify.
A common question is: What email marketing, apps and systems do I need to start on my Shopify store? And, how do I start getting traffic?
Collecting Customer Email Addresses on Shopify (moving from Amazon) - Recommended Email Marketing Systems
Two options I can suggest:
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BEST: Klaviyo. Best system by a mile in my opinion. Free for up to 250 subscribers. https://www.
klaviyo.com/ . Connect it with your Shopify store, create a basic popup and an onsite embedded form. Also embed form in any and all blog posts. - Just "ok" but cheaper: MailChimp. Free up to 2000 subscribers. https://mailchimp.com/pricing/
Which Apps should you install on your Shopify store if moving from Amazon?
I'd suggest to start with as few (paid) apps as possible in the beginning. What I mean is: Try to avoid falling into "Which apps should I install?", and instead, think: "What do I want to do?" and only install apps if needed. Apps are fantastic. I love the ecosystem. But A) the costs can add up and B) they can slow the site down if there are too many. So what we want is the minimum amount of apps that helps us get the most amount of traction. There are some good ones to start with though. Here are my recommendations for the basics:
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Reviews: I like JudgeMe. Free version is great. Paid version is more advanced, also very cheap at $15/month. https://apps.
shopify.com/judgeme - Emailing customer order updates: Not needed, Shopify has templates / notifications for all of these. You can upgrade them to be fancier later (e.g. with this app) but as a starting point, just customise the basic templates as outlined here.
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Upsells: Lots of options, this depends a bit on what you want to do (upsell on product pages? Cart? In a popup? etc.). Some options > https://apps.shopify.com/
search?q=upsell
How do I get customers to visit my new Shopify store after I've moved from Amazon?
- Any existing resources you have, e.g. do you have any email address of existing customers? Any info from Amazon that you can use? Any existing social media followers?
- Social media free: Create a social account for your business on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Start getting active there, and you can promote your stuff from time to time. For the home niche, in particular Pinterest seems not as 'crowded' as FB / IG, and from what I understand there's a large gardening / home renovation community on Pinterest so it might be a nice starting point too if you're in that industry.
- Social media paid: You can also do paid ads on IG / FB. But I'd be careful here, you'd need to make sure there's enough margin in your products.
- Google Ads: As you mentioned, this is an option too. Careful of margins though.
- Blog: To me this is one of the biggest opportunities for you to get free, SEO-driven content. I'd suggest to write some blog posts with a lot of your keywords in them, especially in the titles.
- Email: Start collecting email addresses (make it enticing, not 'just another newsletter', what can you offer people in return for their email address?), which you can then use to send customers back to the site to purchase.
- SEO: SEO optimising your site. As a starting point, all products, pages, collections and blog posts in your site should have real optimised SEO titles and SEO descriptions (There's a field for each of these in Shopify). Make sure it isn't just grabbing the default description. Basic guide here.