Shopify: Start, Optimize & Scale Smart

Shopify holds a whopping 23% market share of eCommerce platforms in the US. 1.75 million merchants are making money selling on the Shopify platform today.

Whether you’re just starting, looking to optimize your store, or want to hear more about scaling – it’s essential to refresh your knowledge in the ever-changing world of Shopify.

In this event, we’ll go through the three stages of Shopify with plenty of perspectives involved, with:

– A full-stack agency CEO,

– eComm Consultant working with world-known brands,

– Founder of Duradry, who scaled his business from 0 to $10M ARR,

– CEO is currently establishing a #1 video solution for eCommerce.

Aistis Matulaitis – Co-Founder & CEO at Kandy

Aistis is the Co-Founder & CEO at Kandy Agency, with his passion being business relationships and his mission helping e-commerce business owners scale their brands to 7 & 8 figures. Kandy is one of the few full-stack performance-focused agencies that combines sweet in-house creatives with proven profitable strategies into a repeatable e-commerce accelerator to achieve long-term, sustainable eCommerce growth.

Ben Zettler – Digital Marketing & Ecommerce Consultant at Ben Zettler Digital

Ben Zettler is an “e-commerce quarterback,” a consultant with tactical and strategic experience across all digital areas to help a company grow and thrive. 250+ businesses have been supported by Ben Zettler’s services, from world-class athletes to luxury goods, fashion retailers, beauty products, lifestyle apparel, and food/consumables. Ben has worked with brands from Netflix and Unilever to Bleacher Report and NBA stars.

Jack Benzaquen – Founder at Duradry & Angel Investor

Jack founded Duradry, which is the #1 solution for excessive sweating, back in 2014. Up to this day, he bootstrapped Duradry.com from 0 to $10M ARR.

Claudiu Cioba – CEO at VideoWise

Claudiu is a product designer with more than a decade of experience and had the opportunity to impact millions of users through the products that he designed. He founded VideoWise in 2021, and they have been establishing themselves as the #1 video solution for eCommerce.

The Importance Of Owned Marketing: Email+SMS

The importance of own marketing: 

As we already know, the new iPhone update iOS 14.5 released in May changed online advertising forever. Yet, it’s important to remember that it hasn’t killed performance. (Jack will discuss this topic further in his presentation). However, changes have reemphasized the importance of reaching customers directly and tailoring content to their interests.

Email marketing is not dead. It’s all about segmentation and relevance and what message we are putting in front of users. SMS Marketing is also becoming a core marketing channel, and it has high engagement rates if appropriately handled.

Klaviyo as a recommended tool:

Ben has tested many platforms, and Klaviyo is his most recommended tool by far. For the various reasons: 

• Has excellent out-of-the-box integration with Shopify. 
• In terms of pulling data for the segmentation of users: purchase data, what products someone bought, average order value, pages visited, product browsed.
• Many integrations with other tools: Gorgias, Facebook ads.
• In-built SMS: In Klaviyo, you have SMS + email in one platform – because of the cost and streamlining of communications and user data.

User acquisition: 

The thing you can do on your site to get people to leave you their information is as simple as a pop-up saying that the new users get a discount on the first order. They need to leave you their email, Instagram account, phone number, or whatever that has a sense for your business.

Key automated flows to implement

Every time you are making user acquisition, you will need automated flows. Make sure you send them that discount, and then you can implement these key automated flows: 

• Welcome

– Serve your discount incentive within this flow 

– Split delivery of messages to users that have not purchased before 

– Send at least 2 additional follow-up messages over 7 days to users that have not purchased 

• Abandoned Cart 

– Test time delay after abandon 

– Serve at least 3 messages over a 3-4 day period 

• Post-Purchase 

– Offer a limited-time offer for a fixed amount off a future purchase 

– Serve offer to users that made their first 1 or 2 days after they ordered 

• Browse Abandonment

Segmentation Recommendation

The segment of the emails you are going to send in your campaigns.

• Only send campaign emails to users who have subscribed recently or have engaged recently.
• There is no hard-set rule on exact targeting parameters, but find a balance between actions users have taken + engagement.
• Open rates should be above 20-25% at a minimum.
• Click rated should be between 2,5-5%.

iOS 14.5 Killing Your Business? Learn What Top Brands Are Doing

Apple released a privacy update on iOS 14.5. This created a few significant issues. First, all the channels (like Facebook, Pinterest, Snapshot, and TikTok) lost attribution data. That means we don’t know when an ad impression or an ad click becomes a conversion. The second problem is the algorithms don’t know who to target to increase the conversion because of this loss of attribution. 

What to do?

• Test more creatives – Test at least 5-10 new pieces every 3 weeks. Don’t be shy to shoot stuff at home. People don’t care if it doesn’t always look professional. 
• Use Google – Google wasn’t affected by new privacy rules like Facebook. Why is that? Because when you search for something, you still show interest in buying that thing. 
• TikTok – CPM’s (cost per mille) are less pricy than Facebook. Creative must be Tik Tok native.
• Youtube – people are searching on Google but also on Youtube. Do Product reviews and insert keywords. You can also use coupons/affiliates.
• You have to test stuff on your site. It’s not enough to test a new creative or copy on the ads. You need to test stuff on your site because a lousy conversion rate makes you waste money. The bare minimum you should do is learn how to use Google Optimize. And then build the landing pages that you’re going to test. You can use Builder or Unbounce. Both are very easy to use. You should be gathering emails, and you should have active flows. 
• You can also use AI models to solve attribution. For example, these two apps: DataHelm and Rockerbox – are a bit more expensive, but they will help you know which channel is performing better. 

How To Go 0 – $1.3M MRR In 9 Months?

It sounds like a scam, but it’s a real story of Aistis and his team. They started from scratch and brought 1.3M$ Monthly Recurring Revenue to their client. He will now reveal to us 4 important things that got them there:

• Good product and margin – A good margin lets you spend money on ads. If you have margins that are too low, you won’t be able to pay Facebook to acquire more customers. 

It’s also essential to have a repeatable purchase aspect. If you don’t, you’ll lose the momentum of testing and optimizing. A good product has aspects of problem-solving or a high emotional buy factor. It should be visually attractive or easy and quick to explain. It should also be sellable on social media.

• Funnel – Even with the physical products, the funnel is becoming more important these days. 

The formula that they came up with was:

– Educate.

– Show a few more times through marketing.

– Have the right proper offer and put that in front of customers’ eyes at the right time.

– Once you have the funnel, make sure you A/B test, get results and optimize. 

• Creative  – You need to test, test, and test. Once you learn from testing, you’ll need to optimize. You also have to understand your customer avatar, language, the overall market you are in, and your competitors to see if they are using a similar language. Before creating that content, look through the ad libraries of similar competitors. 
• Media buying – The main traffic source of Aistis and his team was Facebook. They have tested both SBO and ABO campaigns (80%). The advice is to simplify the Ad account and keep the low amount of Ad campaigns. You don’t need ten different ads at the same time. 

To summarize: Test, test, and then optimize and learn on the way.

How Shoppable Videos Can Unlock Additional Revenue?

Why use video in your store?

From Google’s research, more than 50% of shoppers leave the product page to perform research elsewhere; basically, they go on Youtube or Google. Once they leave your product page, they get distracted or are exposed to competitor products or bad reviews. As a result, the conversion rate drops significantly. So you don’t want to make people leave your page, and you want to make them stay on your website.

Benefits of using video on your Shopify store: 

Increase social proof – There is no better proof than hearing directly from other people what a product feels like or how it performs. 

Boost SEO – Increase your time spent on site by having shoppers watch videos directly on your Shopify store. 

Product Presentation – Most of the time, photos and text descriptions don’t do products and just leave shoppers with more questions. 

Increase Engagement – Videos simply keep shoppers on your site 5x longer than regular content and influence them to purchase more. 

Convert more – Shoppers that watch videos on the Shopify store have a conversion rate of up to 20%.

Better Shopping Experience – Overall, video creates a next-level shopping experience that brings products to life.

Advice: Extend the lifetime of your TikTok, Instagram, Youtube videos: 

Usually, the lifetime of a video goes through production (collect UGC, hire influencers, in-house), distribution (post on social media, run ads), and traction (drive traffic, convert). The usage of that video content pretty much stops there. So you just stop using that video. But you can use this video once again. How? You can add it to your website and make it content shippable.

How to properly use video for e-commerce? 

• Don’t open videos in a small pop-up window. 

Do open videos in a full-screen mode for a more immersive experience. 

• Avoid using landscape videos when most of your audience is coming from mobile. 

Try to use portrait-style videos that fill up the entire screen. 

• Don’t open videos in a new tab on a different website.

Do open videos on the same page to keep shoppers engaged. 

• Don’t use default video thumbnails if they are not good. 

Instead, do create custom thumbnails that clearly show the product.
Do try to add text over the thumbnail to describe the video.

Why use shoppable videos?

Video shoppers are 10x more likely to buy.

Best places to use video on your Shopify store: 

1. Under the add to cart button.
2. Above your text reviews area.
3. On the home page and category pages. 
4. On blog posts.

All the speakers have given great insights into e-commerce marketing in this video. Follow this advice, and your e-store will become successful without a doubt!