🤷‍♀️ Swifties

Hello! Kyle here with another issue of Morning Commerce.

Lots of conversion-boosting and email marketing content this week:

• Did Swifties crash Shopify?

• Plain text emails for BF/CM?

• Just send me Black Friday emails

• Turning adversity into opportunity

• How to opt out of “shopping insights”

• Generating product descriptions from images with AI

• 6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page

• Boosting search conversions: 5 behavioural strategies to test

— Kyle Tully

CONVERSION

6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page

Did you know you can add content to your order confirmation page on Shopify? For example…

• A cross-sell for a best-selling product.

• A video from the founder thanking them for their purchase, welcoming them, and letting them know what to expect from your brand.

• A post-purchase survey getting insights into their purchase decision.

• A newsletter signup, unique discount code, or referral promo.

Just about anything you can think of!

Yup, even if you’re on a non-Plus plan this feature is available in your account.

You’ll need to know a little HTML or Javascript as there is no visual editor, but any decent developer can help you with this. You’ll find it under Settings → Checkout → Order status page.

Need ideas? Check out this article for 6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page.

How to opt out of “shopping insights”

Google is adding “shopping insights” to some Shopping display panels in Chrome which will show, amongst other things, historical price info from the past 90 days.

Possibly helpful for consumers… but a potential conversion killer for brands if historical sale prices are being compared to current full retail pricing.

“Ah it was $23 cheaper a week ago, maybe I’ll wait til it goes on sale again.“

You can opt-out of this with your merchant center ID here.

Boosting search conversions: 5 behavioural strategies to test

Getting more traffic is great, but it’s expensive and requires ongoing time and effort. Optimising existing traffic is cheap and once you find some patterns that work, the results often stick for months or years at a time.

Suffice it to say I’m a big fan of CRO — having seen it’s impact on both our own stores and those of my clients.

So it was nice to see Search Engine Land step out of its usual SEM-focused content with a solid article on boosting conversions with behavioural strategies, including some ideas you might not be familiar with:

1. Social proof and herding

2. Cognitive load

3. Scarcity and FOMO

4. Loss aversion

5. Anchoring

Definitely worth a read to gear you up with test ideas for your next CRO campaign.

Turning adversity into opportunity

“Reason why“ marketing is a simple but super effective marketing strategy. The idea is simple, people are more likely to take action when given a reason why.

Even if the reason is fairly flimsy, just giving a reason increases “yeses”.

Smart marketers are always looking for reasons to exploit in their marketing and this example from Mini Katana is a great off-the-cuff example of how to turn adversity into opportunity.

EMAIL MARKETING

Just send me Black Friday emails!

I love this idea from Moiz of giving people an option on your “unsubscribe” page to just receive Black Friday emails. While some people don’t want to hear from you every day, week, or month… they do like big specials and FOMO might be enough to keep them around for BF/CM.

In Klaviyo you can implement this by customising your preferences page and giving people a checkbox to select “only send me Black Friday specials“. You’ll then want to exclude this segment from all other campaigns.

Definitely something worth testing and if it saves just a small percentage from never hearing from you again it could be worth thousands of dollars each year.

Plain text emails for BF/CM?

It’s no secret that plain text emails — or very minimal HTML emails that mostly look like plain text — are superior for email deliverability, and when done right, absolutely killer for conversions.

(Yes, even highly image-focused industries like fashion can crush it with these types of emails. Our “a letter from the girl boss“ personal style emails always did great mixed in with all the image-heavy newsletters we sent.)

The key is doing them right as you can’t lean on product imagery and lifestyle shots to get your message across.

A few nice tips from Jimmy here:

• Add a little light branding imagery to keep it on-brand less spammy looking.

• Focus on strong copywriting and focused CTA.

• Segment out new subscribers.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Generating product descriptions from images with AI

If you want to see what the very near future holds for Shopify, check out this little demo of an app that uses the brand-new GPT4 Turbo to generate product descriptions based on product images.

You let it know how long you want the description to be, choose which image to base the description on, and the AI does the rest 🤯

Did Swifties crash Shopify?

You may have noticed some Shopify storefronts were down for up to an hour on Nov 14. Rumour abounds that it was the hoard of Taylor Swift fans — affectionally known as “Swifties” — clamouring to her new store that caused the outage.

But in a postmortem of the event, Shopify says the issue was due to “a code update that renamed a table in our database“.

I’m not sure which explanation I like worse.

In an effort to avoid similar issues during critical times, Shopify said “we made the decision to lock code deployments starting earlier today and keep it locked extending through Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).“

They’re currently going through a root cause analysis to understand what led to the issue and to implement measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Six new Shopify updates

• Shopify Tax is now available on Point of Sale Orders, supports orders sold into the U.S. from abroad, and supports tax-inclusive pricing in the United States.

• Filtering by Markets in Analytics - you can now filter your Shopify reports located in the Analytics page by Markets.

• Support for visual filters - you can now add colour and images to the filter options shown on the collection and search result page in the Search & Discovery app.

• Cancel orders and void transactions on POS - you can now cancel orders up to 15 minutes after the order is completed via POS.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

It might not be doing much for conversions — the fact you need a line of text explaining how to use the UI and a notice on mobile to use the desktop site attest to that — but I do love the creativity of the hero section on Taylor’s store. Browsing the rooms of the house to explore different collections reminds me of some of the interfaces we designed back in the early 2000’s and I’m sure it’s a fun experience for the Swifties who figured out how to use it.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.