Little Stream Software

Tiny Tip: Promote gift cards to last-minute customers

2024-12-20T07:00:00Z

With the year wrapping up soon, now is a good time to promote gift cards.

In order to get the best result you'll want to put them in multiple places:

main promotion on homepage
your announcement bar e.g. at top of every page
prominently in your major collections

You'll also want to promote them so customers know you offer them:

an email campaign
handful of social media posts
any PPC ads

You might also want another deal especially for your repeat customers. Something like:

Buy one $50 gift card to give, get a $10 for yourself

These will get your repeat customers to buy this year and make them likely to buy again next year when they redeem their card.

Gift cards don't take a lot of setup in Shopify and since fufillment/shipping is easy, they can be a good year-end boost.

Directive: Sell and promote gift cards for last-minute orders.

Eric Davis

Analyze your customer's behaviors before they defect

Your customers aren't yours forever. Some might have defected today, never to be seen again.
You need to analyze your customer behavior so you can reach them before they defect.

Learn more

Look beyond the 25th for your selling season

2024-12-19T07:00:00Z

This winter I'm going to start some tomatoes and peppers indoors while it's too cold outside for them.

It'll be an experiment as last year it worked so-so (tomatoes were great, peppers and cucumbers didn't make it). If it works I could get a few weeks ahead of the season come spring.

Similarly, you can try to extend your selling season.

We've all seen stores doing that by offering Black Friday deals early. Some as early as October now.

You can also extend the season at the end. Keep selling and making offers through the end of the month and into January. Kwanzaa continues until January 1st. Businesses making end of the year purchases to adjust taxes. And holiday shoppers self-gifting and buying "I-forgot" gifts still.

Unlike starting seeds, you don't need new equipment to extend your selling season. You just need to plan a few more campaigns for the year and get them ready.

You don't have to be in the dark when it comes to your customers. Using their existing behavior, Repeat Customer Insights shows you patterns and optimization potential for Shopify stores, leading to more and better repeat customers.

Directive: Customers still buy after Christmas so don't close up shop yet.

Eric Davis

Discover which products are bought again and again

Using the Product Reorders report you can discover which products customers are buying again and again.

Learn more

Stick to your sale deadlines

2024-12-18T07:00:00Z

Don't set a deadline for a deal or offer and then plan to extend it at the last minute.

Some marketers have latched onto this idea as a way to turn up the urgency pressure on customers. Force customers to buy before a deadline, then give others more time, all as a way to squeeze out more sales. It's not much more than a lie and a bait-and-switch.

It might work once, but once customers catch on they won't be fooled again. News and especially negative opinion travels faster than ever. This is how you train customers to never buy unless there's a massive discount.

Better to come up with a new offer than to risk customers thinking they were manipulated.

Directive: Keep your deadlines, don't fake them.

Eric Davis

Discover where your best customers come from

Going beyond simple attribution, Repeat Customer Insights lets you analyze and segment your customers by who first sent that customer your way.
This will let you find the best sources of long-term customers, not just anyone who orders.

Learn more

Speed up your free shipping offers the closer to the deadlines

2024-12-17T07:00:00Z

One online store I buy from is offering free overnight shipping for the last couple of days of their holiday season.

This works well for them because:

their products are small and light so they can be packed easily
there's very few products or variations so they can be picked quickly
they charge a premium price and rarely discount, leaving room for profit

You might need to adjust the offer to fit your store's products (free 2-day instead, only on specific smaller products, etc). As long as you keep the core idea I could see it working well as a season extender:

"running out of shopping time so get faster shipping for free"

By analyzing your customers, orders, and products, Repeat Customer Insights can help find which marketing tactics attract the best customers.

Directive: Consider offering faster free shipping as shipping deadlines approach.

Eric Davis

Segment your customers automatically with RFM

Segmenting your customers has always been touted as a powerful marketing tool but many stores avoid it because it can be time-consuming.
Repeat Customer Insights will automatically segment your entire customer base for you based on the valuable data Shopify has already collected for you. Ranging from 5 to 30 to over 125+ different segments using RFM and other models, you can pick how much power you want to harness.

Learn more

Send shipping deadline reminders this week

2024-12-16T07:00:00Z

With holiday shipping deadlines approaching, this week is the time to be sending out "last-minute" order messages to customers.

It's also a prime time to contact any VIP or repeat customers who haven't ordered this season yet. For them you can position it as a year-end loyalty deal as some of them might buy for themselves.

Still a solid week remaining to end the year on a high note.

Directive: Remind customers of your holiday shipping deadlines

Eric Davis

Is one flavor better at keeping customers?

Compare how your variants perform to find the ones that keep customers buying over and over again.

Learn more

Reward your most loyal customers at the end of the year

2024-12-13T07:00:00Z

A way to prolong your selling season is to make a special offer to your best customers before the end of the year.

You'll want to target the best customers (what I call the VIPs and Loyals in Repeat Customer Insights).

You'll want to give them a short-time coupon or free gift on their next order.

You can call it a VIP perk or a reward for their loyalty over the year.

You could also send something to your potentially loyal customers. These customers are the ones who are showing some loyal behavior but aren't quite there yet. Either they don't have enough order history or aren't ordering as often as the VIPs.

Convince them to become loyal and you might be able to influence their purchases next year.

Directive: Send a reward to your most loyal customers this year.

Eric Davis

Did all of those holiday shoppers ever come back?

Compare how your last winter customers performed over the year with the Winter Holiday report in Repeat Customer Insights.

Learn more

Recommend filler products to boost Average Order Values

2024-12-12T07:00:00Z

An easy tactic to increase your Average Order Value is to create a collection of low-cost products.

These will be products that are $2, $5, or maybe up to $10. You can manually curate them to include easy-to-ship and high-profit products or you can use Shopify's smart collections to include everything below a set price.

Then on your cart page you call-out to them. Especially if the customer is below your free shipping threshold.

Ideally you'd add some code to say something like "You're $3.24 away from free shipping" and link to your collection. (Your theme might have that built in already. It's an easy feature for them to include)

Done right this can boost your AOV a bit without a lot of work on your side.

If you want to monitor your AOV, it's calculated as part of Repeat Customer Insights. You get your overall store-wide AOV, at different time periods, for different customer cohorts, and even based on where you acquired the customer from. It's one of the core metrics included in the analysis.

Directive: Make it easy for customers to buy a little more.

Eric Davis

Go beyond Average Order Value

Go beyond just Average Order Value and learn how your customers perform in various metrics.

Learn more

Promote your best products during the holiday season

2024-12-11T07:00:00Z

During the holiday season (and any busy period), it's important to promote your best products. Promote a weak product and you risk losing the sale.

Problem is, your best products aren't always your best-sellers. You have to dig deeper to find them. "Best" should be which products create the best long-term customers.

That's why the Nth Product Analysis was created in Repeat Customer Insights. It'll show you the true long-term results for each product by tracking the lifetime customer behavior.

Using it you can decide what to promote to new customers (e.g. homepage hero, ads), customers considering their 2nd order, and repeat customers. I recommend using the Total LTV to determine the best products but Average LTV or Repeat Purchase Rate can also work well.

You can also use the Product Reorders to find the products and variants customers reorder the most. These products are the ones you want to get customers to try out.

Directive: Promote your best-selling, best-customer-creating, and best-reordering products during the busy seasons. Don't waste time on so-so products.

Eric Davis

Get started getting more from your repeat customers

If you haven't signed up for Repeat Customer Insights, it's an easy process. Just give it your Shopify store url and it'll walk you through the setup, import, and analysis process automatically. No code needed.

Learn more

Tiny Tip: check for checkout frustrations

2024-12-10T07:00:00Z

The past few weeks I've experienced a ton of different ordering and checkout processes. Many of them were frustrating and full of errors.

In today's Tiny Tip, you should check your own checkout.

This should only take you five minutes. If it takes longer, that's a sign of urgent problems you should look at in your Shopify store.

On a phone, open your store's homepage
Use your navigation menus and find one product
Add it to your cart
Without using the main navigation, find a second product (e.g. using related products, an upsell link, browse the collections, etc)
Preview the cart and adjust the quantity of a product to 2
Checkout using a credit card

Getting stuck, taking longer than five minutes, or being frustrated at any step of this is a sign your store is causing too much friction for customers.

This process is a pretty plain order workflow and your store should be able to easily handle it. Later on you'll want to test more complex workflows (and test them regularly) but for now, catch those easily lost sales.

Directive: Test your checkout regularly to make sure it's not losing you orders.

Eric Davis

Do your holiday customers over or under-perform?

Big sales numbers look great in November and December but they can hide your true performance. Get the facts on how your winter holidays stack up with Repeat Customer Insights.

Learn more

Tiny Tip: create three titles for each content

2024-12-09T07:00:00Z

Today's Tiny Tip is to create three titles or subject lines for your content.

Normally there's a lot of stress about picking the best title for something. If you set a goal of creating three titles instead, you give yourself freedom to create one that sucks. Even with a bad one, you can easily compare the three and pick the best one from them.

It's much easier than trying to pick the best one from the entire universe of potential titles.

Create three titles, give them some time to sit, and then pick the best one when you publish.

(And if you have the tools for it, you can even pick the two best and run an A/B test to see which one gets the most clicks or orders)

Find which products create the most valuable customers with the First Product Analysis in Repeat Customer Insights. It goes beyond your best sellers by looking at long-term purchasing and retention behavior of your customers.

Directive: Brainstorm three titles every time you write an article or marketing email.

Eric Davis

Compare how your sales perform

Comparing sales channel performance is vital to understanding where to invest your resources. Repeat Customer Insights will analyze the channels that send you customers so you can directly compare.

Learn more