Shopify Editions: Winter ‘24 Customer Retention Wrap-Up
Throughout my career, I've worked with numerous eCommerce platforms, spanning from Magento to bespoke builds and encountered some that weren't quite up to par. However, for the past decade, Shopify has been a platform that the brands I’ve worked with consistently use, and I absolutely love it.
80% of the brands I now work with in a consultancy capacity are on the platform. Most of the smaller, growing brands I support are now thinking about moving away from WordPress or Squarespace to Shopify as their new eCommerce solution to grow their DTC business.
In the past few years, the team at Shopify have really levelled up to compete with the big players. If you’re reading this, you may be aware that twice yearly, they drop something called ‘Editions’, which shares the platform's latest updates, new functionality and releases.
At the end of January, Shopify released Winter ‘24 with 100+ updates, and it’s really exciting. Without diving into each and every one of them, I thought I’d highlight some of the releases that specifically benefit customer retention and online customer experiences. Let’s dive in.
Semantic Search
According to Nosto, 69% of online shoppers go straight to the search bar when visiting an eCommerce site, but 80% leave due to a poor experience. And according to Segmentify, on-site search users who successfully found what they were looking for led to nearly doubled conversion rates. They’re very compelling stats! Shopify’s Semantic Search is an AI-powered storefront feature that goes beyond keyword matching to better understand the intent behind a customer’s search. Customers can use more natural words and phrases and get richer, more relevant results. At the moment, this is only available to Shopify Plus merchants.
Shopify Subscriptions
Recurring revenue provides businesses with a reliable income stream that traditional one-time purchases cannot match. It also offers brands an opportunity to nurture long-term relationships with their customers, resulting in boosted loyalty and improved retention rates. Essentially, what every eCommerce brand dreams of! If you’ve got a business where a subscription model makes sense, Shopify Subscriptions is definitely something to consider against the other well-known apps such as ReCharge. Now in full release, brands can increase their customer lifetime value and generate predictable revenue by offering their products as subscriptions with this free subscriptions app. You can easily set up and manage subscriptions directly from the Shopify admin, and allow your customers to modify or skip subscription orders directly from their account.
Shopify Bundles
Product bundling is a retail strategy that offers a curated set of complementary products to attract customers. Bundles can serve as upsells or cross-sells that increase AOV and drive more revenue. Shopify have given their merchants more flexibility, so you can now bundle more products. Brands which leverage Shopify Scripts can now use Shopify's bundle app offering to increase their AOV.
New Discounts
The new discounts feature is more of a conversion driver to leverage, but if used strategically across specific customer cohorts, it is likely to be particularly impactful. These new discount types include free automatic shipping and a fixed amount off of Buy X, get Y promotions. Shoppers will also see exactly how much they’ve saved right in the cart view.
CLV Reporting
If you want to understand what your customers are doing over time, get familiar with the Cohort Analysis report. Brands can use historical and predictive spend metrics found in the report to gain Shopify-powered insights into the long-term value of their customers, and optimize customer retention over time. You can pivot the data based on retention rates or customer numbers on monthly or quarterly intervals AND add in first order inclusion and exclusions. Yay!
Looking to boost your customer retention strategy? Get in touch to find out how I can support your business to build out a plan for success.