Shopify offers a dynamic and ever-evolving e-commerce platform, which is perfectly suited for companies seeking growth and those already thriving. Shopify evolves rapidly, continuously offering new opportunities to develop e-commerce sales. However, competition is fierce, so increasing e-commerce sales demands sustained effort. A meticulously planned data-driven growth strategy, enabling continuous business expansion, is highly beneficial in this regard.
Growth in Shopify stores can be achieved in three different ways. By acquiring new customers, increasing the size of the average order, or generating more revenue per customer.
Seems simple? To truly achieve growth, you need to look deeper and clearly understand what you want to sell and to whom.
Buyer behaviour patterns reveal buying motivations
Planning e-commerce growth marketing begins with understanding how products or services and the online store itself relate to various buying behaviour models.
There are several models available, but I'll use Shopify's own model of six buyer types as an example:
Innovator (The Innovator): This buyer type is driven by the need to be among the first to adopt the newest products or technologies.
Perfectionist (The Perfectionist): This buyer type is motivated by high quality and is willing to pay to get the best product or service.
Value Shopper (The Value Shopper): The Value Shopper is always looking for the best deal and value for money, so they are willing to spend time comparing prices as well as products and services to find the best price.
Impulsive Buyer (The Impulsive Buyer): This buyer type is prone to spontaneous decisions, their behaviour often driven by emotions and they spend little time comparing products or prices.
Bargain Hunter (The Bargain Hunter): Motivated by discounts and promotions, bargain hunters do everything to find the very best deal.
Loyalist (The Loyalist): These customers are highly committed to a particular brand and remain loyal even if a competitor offers a cheaper price or better deal.
If this particular model does not suit your online shop's needs, you can utilise another buying behaviour model that better fits your product or service. The aim of modelling buying behaviour is to gain an understanding of how customers approach purchasing decisions and how they behave during the purchasing process.
When you understand your own buyer types, you can track and measure their behaviour and conduct A/B testing essential for growth marketing. Shopify offers a comprehensive guide to A/B testing.
Buyer types are fascinating, and you might immediately recognise which category you belong to. However, solely based on these categories, it is still quite challenging, if not impossible, to conduct more precise segmentation of different online shop visitors. Therefore, you need to delve deeper.
Buyer personas represent the target audience of the online store
A more sophisticated approach to e-commerce growth is through defining its buyer personas. There are various models for this task, and Shopify offers its own.
The core idea is that a buyer persona is a detailed description of a person representing the target audience of an online store. This persona is fictional but based on in-depth research of the existing or desired audience. The better you know who you're selling to in your online store, the more impactful and effective growth marketing you can achieve.
The internet is already quite a "noisy" place, and in marketing, it's no longer about who shouts the loudest – although sometimes that's beneficial. Nowadays, it's more about reaching the right people, at the right time, in the right place, and with the right message. It's about a very classic marketing principle. Howard Luck Gossage summed it up quite aptly back in the 60s.
"Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; and sometimes it's an ad."
This classic quote from the Mad Men era is still true, even after decades and changes in media. A common pitfall in e-commerce marketing is trying to be everywhere, spreading resources across all channels.
When information about buyer personas includes where they spend their time, it's easier to determine which channels to focus on and - most importantly - which to ignore.
Once you know who and where you're communicating with, creativity is needed in marketing and communications. Fortunately, defining buyer personas also provides valuable insights for developing creative solutions that can impact the desired target group.
But what is the best way to find the right marketing and communication angle? One that allows you to influence different buyer personas effectively or integrate the brand, products, services, and online store into their consumption habits.
Analytics helps understand customer behaviour
E-commerce analytics is the process of collecting data from as many aspects affecting the online store as possible. This data is then used, for instance, to understand trends and consumer behaviour. By utilising and understanding data, it's possible to make informed decisions in e-commerce that can increase sales.
E-commerce analytics should be viewed holistically and include metrics from all different stages of the customer's journey: awareness, consideration, activation, retention, purchase, and post-purchase (advocacy).
There are three fundamental components in the development of e-commerce analytics: channels, customer experience, and products. Collecting and analysing these three components and customer journey analytics data are critical skills needed for successful e-commerce development.
Channels are external sources that drive traffic to the site. Channels may include social media, search engines, or emails. Each channel has its own complexities and metrics.
Customer experience is the user's entire experience in the online store. The goal of monitoring customer experience is the continuous improvement of website performance and user experience.
Product can be a service, subscription, reservation, or tangible product that the user can acquire from the site. Tracking products helps enhance the functioning of the online store. In practice, this might mean optimising product pages or easing purchasing by, for example, developing product descriptions.
Customer journey includes the following stages: awareness, consideration, activation, retention, purchase, and post-purchase (advocacy).
Shopify offers a quite comprehensive bundle of analytics and reporting opportunities for free. Thus, the issue isn't what can be done with Shopify analytics, whether data can be enriched with an extension, or how to combine data from different channels. Instead, oftentimes the breadth of Shopify's offerings and the resulting abundance cause headaches for online retailers.
Selecting suitable extensions and exploring all Shopify's possibilities takes time away from actual e-commerce development. On the other hand, almost everything is possible, and the necessary analytics components already exist, making analytics construction and the design and realisation of truly beneficial reporting the challenge. In this task, Crasman's data analysts can be of great assistance.
Insight is a means to monitor marketing effectiveness
You achieve insight through a process where information, evidence and observations from various sources are collected, contexts are considered, and contradictions examined. Insight research gives an online retailer the opportunity to form evidence-based insights into the effectiveness of digital marketing.
The insight should always be based on researched information and data rather than merely intuition or the so-called retailer's own "gut feel" (not to undermine them at all).
Sources of Insight include:
Customer databases. These can reveal, among other things, purchasing history and the value of those transactions and provide information about customer service and customers' most common challenges related to the online shop.
Internal data. Different departments or functions in the e-commerce can supply important jigsaw pieces, such as employee experiences, operational constraints, financial impacts, or even complaints made.
Market data. All online stores benefit from an external perspective, such as on market volume and value, their own market share, as well as broader future trends (for instance, consumer, economic, societal, or technological trends).
Consumer research. This forms the backbone of Insight work for many online shops. Research can be conducted, for example, as quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, or semiotic studies. Regardless, every online shop must talk to their customers to understand why they do what they do and under what conditions they might behave differently.
Foresight (also known as Strategic Foresight). This refers to developing new and profound future insights based on global trends and events. This work also takes into account various forces driving these trends and events. Through such futures research, online stores have the opportunity to create a credible picture and scenarios of how different future perspectives might affect their business.
Once buyer personas for the online shop have been created, their buying behaviour has been clarified, and a clear view of how to communicate with different buyer personas has been established, marketing can be set as the driving force for online store growth.
Growth marketing accelerates your e-commerce growth
Growth marketing is a collaborative model whose basic function is to identify e-commerce sales and marketing-related problems and barriers that hinder business growth. After this, growth marketing analyses the cause of the problems and plans and implements actions to solve them.
At Crasman, the e-commerce growth marketing team is a data-driven multidisciplinary team committed to advancing your online business growth. We view marketing holistically throughout the entire customer journey. A holistic approach to marketing distinguishes growth marketing from so-called traditional marketing.
Successful, planned, and impactful growth marketing needs a growth strategy based on the e-commerce objectives. Strategic growth planning is done based on business objectives, insight, customer journey, and buyer personas.
A growth strategy consolidates information on how to acquire and retain customers. It binds the e-commerce product or service offering and competitive advantages together.
Additionally, the growth strategy defines the online store's target groups, customer experience, and digital channels through which customers are reached. In designing the growth strategy, resources and digital contact points and their development needs are considered along with insight.
Shopify offers numerous applications for growth marketing, both within the store and in various external channels. With the help of Crasman's growth marketing experts, you can quickly find the most suitable Shopify extensions for your online shop's needs.
Does your Shopify online store need a sales boost?
Contact us, and we will help you accelerate your online business growth and development!
Crasman Ltd
3 May 2023
