The summer is the season of holiday photos, beach towels, and BBQ plans. It can also be a time for you to rejuvenate your Shopify store’s marketing and catch your customers’ eyes with some brand new visuals, fun sale promotions and other handy strategies.
We’ve grouped all of our top tips into one article so that you can use it as a one-stop marketing guide for these summer months. Read on to find out how you can maximise your sales this season.
Visuals
First and foremost, update your imagery. The human brain processes visual information around 60,000 times faster than just text, and when it comes to your website, you won’t do yourself any favours to only showcase your new seasonal products or discount promotions via the copy.
In general, we recommend updating your landing page with photos or graphics of your summer product line—think swimsuits, sunglasses, water sports equipment and the like. You can see that done here with Gordons Chemist, where the carousel banner has been updated to advertise travel products and summer holiday essentials. There is additional imagery further down showcasing “summer scents”—again, directing customers to seasonal products, and aiding product discovery.
Fashion brand Walk in Wardrobe is another great example of this. They have updated their newly launched shopping app to include a beach-set video, showcasing summer dresses.
You can also update imagery across your website, but in general, try to keep this to a minimum. Changing your website’s design can be time consuming, and to do this every season even moreso, so use sparing yet effective imagery changes to achieve your sales goals.
It should also go without saying, but please be sure to only use high quality imagery. Fuzzy or pixelated shots don’t communicate a quality brand.
Create collections
With Shopify, you can group products into collections. Customers can then see all of the products in a collection on one page, making for exceptionally easy product discovery and cross-selling tactics.
Collections can be automated or manually curated. For automated collections, you can choose up to 60 selection conditions and can be useful if your collection regularly changes or expands. Manually created collections, however, are stationary and you will need to individually add and remove products as your collection changes.
You can showcase these collections all the more by adding imagery to your landing page, adding the URL to your menu bar, or advertising the specific URL via social media platforms or Google.
You can see an example of this with our client Outside In. They have their spring/summer 2023 range added to a collection here, and this is really helpful for shoppers visiting their website, looking for current products and seasonal looks. It’s also helpful for the brand’s marketing team, because then this collection can be promoted via socials and email instead of the entire website.
Promotions
Sales, discounts, and other promotions can be highly effective when used correctly. They can also benefit your business not only by way of direct sales, but by shifting stubborn last-season products or helping curious shoppers find their next must-have.
With Shopify, to offer discounts, you can create discount codes, set up automatic discounts, or set sale prices for individual products.
You can see here that sportswear and athleisure brand LuluLemon has promoted a sale via their landing page, with links through to individual collections:
They have deducted the sales discount from the original price, so that customers can see the new price as they shop. In order to do this in your store, simply make sure to include a sale price and the original price (called the compare-at price) in your product details.
To do this for multiple products at once, use Shopify’s bulk editor.
Alternatively, you can create a discount code to send to your customers via email.
When you create a new discount code, it appears on the Discounts page in your Shopify admin. To distribute this discount code, you can send the code to your customers by email, or display it on your online store. Your customers need to enter the code during checkout to receive the discount.
You can see an example of this kind of email here, from the brand facetheory:
When sending these codes to customers, we recommend using Klaviyo integration.
Klaviyo allows you to create coupon codes to be sent out to subscribers, customers with abandoned carts, and other audiences, similarly to Shopify. More importantly, however, is that Klaviyo creates dynamic codes, meaning that each discount code is uniquely generated for each customer, and can only be used once. This avoids unpleasant issues like a more general code being uploaded to a coupon website, or the code being used across multiple orders.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Over the summer, you might lose a few customers to busy social calendars, holidays, or any number of other distractions. In these instances, they may also leave behind a shopping cart with added products, and as a business, it’s important for you to remind them of those products. They may no longer need or want the product—which is fine—but it’s in your business’ best interests to drop them a reminder, and possibly an added incentive.
This is all the more important for products which may only be interesting for one short season, like sun cream, sun hats, and water sports equipment.
Emailing a customer about their forgotten items can be set up through Shopify.
- From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
- In the Abandoned checkouts section, check Automatically send abandoned checkout emails.
- Under Send to, choose who you want to send a checkout recovery email to:
- Anyone who abandons a checkout
- Email subscribers who abandon a checkout
- Under Send after, select the number of hours that Shopify should wait before sending the abandoned checkout email.
- Click Save
Here’s an example of such an email from boot brand Merry People:
It doesn’t offer any additional incentives to complete the checkout, but is a simple reminder that the product is there, and may sell out if the customer does not complete the purchase.
See also this email from fashion brand Cider, where the brand sends not only a reminder, but a small discount to sweeten the deal and close the sale.
You can also offer things like free delivery, an extra small gift, or a “refer a friend” discount as abandoned cart incentives.
Delivery Add-Ons
Delivery can make a big difference for your customers. In fact, over 72% of customers won’t recommend a brand if their delivery services are poor—and that isn’t just about next-day or free delivery options (though those are crucial places to start).
When it comes to marketing your store, make sure that you have various options for delivery available to your customers, such as delivery on specific days, delivery notes for recipients, and the ability to mark something as a gift, so that delivery does not include evidence of the full cost or billing details.
At Glaze Digital, we recommend the Shopify app Giftship. With Giftship, Shopify store owners have access to the following features:
- Gifting Options – Gift Messages / Delivery Date Picker on Product or Cart pages.
- Enhanced Checkout – Ship to multiple addresses from a single checkout.
- Smart Upsells – One-click, Popup, Dropdown, Thumbnail Image.
- Gift Bundling – Bundle Upsells, Premium Box Builder Tool w/ Multiple Layouts.
- Back-end Engine – Smart Auto-tagging, Order Printer, Customise All Tools.
To see this working with a real brand, see George Prestons—a florist based in Belfast. This brand gives customers the option to purchase bouquets and gifts for particular days and to add their own individual messages. For a gift-focused business such as this, it’s even more important to make the most of a buyer’s experience with your brand all the way to the recipient’s door.
Conclusion
Your marketing doesn’t need to take all the chill out of your summer, but rather what we hope you can take away from these examples are a few useful tips on how to better your digital reach, and achieve the sales that your quality products and quality branding deserve.
If you want to get in touch with us to discuss further marketing ideas, or to build a Shopify store for you, please reach out via our website.
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