In my book notes for Isn't it Obvious I have this noted:
Sales increase when each person who enters buys more or when more people enter the shop.
Though obvious (like the book title), this describes the only way for retail to increase sales.
Swap "enters" with "visits" and it applies equally to Shopify and every other ecommerce store.
- If more people enter/visit (traffic) then your order volume will increase. Which increases sales.
- If each person buys more in an order then your revenue per order will increase. Which also increases sales.
Everything else falls into one of these two when you're focused on increasing sales.
Example: Your entire repeat customer funnel and loyalty program is based around getting previous customers to come back ("enter") and buy again.
This tip doesn't cover profit, which can be a huge factor (e.g. cost to acquire a new customer vs cost to reactivate a repeat customer). But it sums up the primary goal of the majority of ecommerce marketing. You could require any tactic to answer:
how will this get people to buy more or for more people to visit?
If you can think of another way to increase sales that can't be reduced to these two, please let me know. I've been thinking about this for awhile now and everything ends up being reduced to one or the other.
Eric Davis
P.S. If you haven't read Isn't it Obvious, it's a very good novelization of retail. It's by the author of The Goal. It also goes deep into stock-outs and how harmful they, are which something Linking Llama helps soften.
Market to your customer's timing
Figure out how long customers wait in-between purchases and you have a key component for your marketing timing. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.