The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

3-Step Formula to Skyrocket Your Shopify Conversion Rate (Episode 97)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 97

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🗣In this episode of the Dropship Unlocked Podcast, hosts Lewis Smith and James Eardley break down the essential 3-step PTO method to boost your Shopify conversion rate. 

Whether you’re struggling to convert visitors into customers or just want to optimise your store's performance, this actionable strategy is designed to help you maximise your results.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/Tzi5Ca9kEXs

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Topics Discussed:

★ Product Quality: The importance of high-quality products and reputable suppliers. How better products lead to fewer returns, more trust, and long-term customer loyalty.

★ Traffic Quality: Why targeted ads are essential for attracting high-quality traffic. The power of intent-driven visitors and how to focus on people who are actively searching for your products.

★ Offer Optimisation: How to craft a compelling offer that stands out from competitors. Tips for providing additional value (e.g., bundling products or offering free guides) to make your offer irresistible. The importance of reducing friction at checkout and building customer trust with reviews, badges, and clear policies.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

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Key Takeaways:

★ Refining Your Product: Focus on quality suppliers and high-ticket items to build trust, reduce returns, and ensure long-term success. Your product is the foundation of your e-commerce business.

★ Targeted Traffic: Not all traffic is equal. Focus on attracting visitors who are already searching for your products. Using the right ad platforms and narrowing your audience can lead to better conversion rates.

★ Crafting the Perfect Offer: Make your offer more compelling by adding value beyond just the product itself. Ensure that the buying process is as smooth as possible and use trust signals to reassure customers.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-97-3-steps-for-conversion-rate

This is something that can truly make or break an E commerce business, as we know. So no matter how many optimizations you make, if your customers fundamentally aren't the right people that are looking to buy that product, and all of those efforts are wasted. It's really simple when you think about it and it, but so many people get this bit wrong if you haven't got the right quality people on the site in the first place, then you're optimizing for the wrong reasons, for the wrong metrics. So I'm really excited to share how we've learned from our mistakes today, and how each of these steps can drastically improve the conversion rate of your store. If you're listening to us today, you welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our client success coach, James Early. Now, when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket dropshipping businesses. Keen to build your own six or even seven figure business, my book, the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy@htabook.com today, and let's get you started. Now, sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast today, we are going to be diving into one of the most crucial aspects of running a successful e commerce business, your conversion rate. If you've been struggling to turn your site visitors into paying customers, then this episode is for you. We'll be breaking down the three step PTO method, which are the three pillars that will determine your Shopify store success. So Lewis, I know this is a mess method that has transformed many of our students businesses. So are you ready to unpack that for our listeners today? Absolutely, yep. Let's do it. This is something that can truly make or break an E commerce business, as we know. So when you get the product traffic and offer right, everything else starts to fall into place. So it's a bit like if you're building a house, you want to make sure that the foundations are solid, so that everything else can stand up strong on top of it. So we, I know we both experienced early in our journeys, getting these three wrong early in the in the process. And so, you know, you get the low ticket products that we tried to sell, the wrong products, the wrong traffic sources. We're using the wrong ad network, and maybe just the wrong offer as well. So I'm really excited to share how we've learned from our mistakes today, and how each of these steps can drastically improve the conversion rate of your store if you're listening to us today, exactly, it's all been learned through hard mistakes and errors, and so we've come up with the perfect method to make sure your Shopify conversion rate can increase directly after listening to this episode. So the PTO method. May have never heard of it before, wouldn't blame you that you're going to understand by the end of this episode exactly what that is and the order that those letters are in. So products, then traffic, then offer, is very important because it's in order of importance, and you'll see that as we go through the episode. So firstly, Lewis, the first step of that method is product. So can you explain why product is the most critical factor in the PTO method? Yes, the this is the foundation that everything else stands on. So the quality of the products that you're selling is directly tied to the suppliers that you work with. And if you're using a model like our home turf advantage model of drop shipping, where we work with high ticket products, we sell higher priced, higher value items, often from UK based suppliers. If you're doing that and you're drop shipping with these reputable local domestic suppliers, your product quality is naturally going to be higher in most cases, and so this reduces things like returns and complaints, and it just increases your customers overall satisfaction with the process of purchasing from you. The other thing is trust and reliability, and that starts to build as well when you sell higher quality products from these reliable suppliers, customers have a good experience, therefore they trust your brand more. And so this trust then translates, for you as a business owner into higher conversion rates, because customers are more likely to purchase when they know they're getting something of value. They leave nicer reviews. You can showcase those reviews social proof, and so before you know it, your conversion rate starts to increase as well. I know that when I signed the first premium suppliers in the UK, so I'd originally signed some suppliers that I wouldn't class as premium suppliers. These were more probably easier access, lower barrier to entry, drop shipping, wholesale type retailers that I thought or suppliers that I thought would work for our business. But I realized that, firstly, there was not much demand for those products. Secondly, when we did sell. The products, the suppliers weren't great. They weren't very responsive. The margins weren't great. And if ever there was a problem, the suppliers were not really anywhere to be seen. They were reluctant to help. But as soon as I signed the first premium supplier, I just realized how much less stress was involved in this whole process, and it meant for me, the benefit for me as a business owner was that I could sleep easily knowing that my customers would be happy. You know that the sales of the products that were going out meant that I was building a business that would have a sustainable future. So these high quality product sales lead to repeat purchases, obviously, because if a customer is happy, then they're more likely to come back, even if they don't come back though they leave a nice, positive review, or they might tell a few friends or family members, so your word of mouth referrals start to increase. So it's not just about that initial sale, it's about building a brand that customers will come back to and return to time and time again. You know, you're building yourself a financial future, a stable, repeatable business. So we're in this for the long term, and the better that the products you sell, which is the first part of our PTO formula here, the longer that you stay in the game, because that's what it or, you know, everything else is contingent on this part. So it's the difference between planting a tree that bears fruit for years, versus one that withers after a single season. You know you want, the one that you can constantly harvest and reap the rewards off for years to come, exactly. So I think that the biggest takeaways I've had from my dropshipping business in terms of improving the conversion rate has been the products that I'm selling and the suppliers that I'm working with. There's kind of two stages to this. So firstly, Lewis, we've both had that experience of working with low ticket suppliers on Aliexpress selling poor quality, cheap products from the other side of the world. And I didn't realize how wrong I was until I then worked with UK high quality suppliers in terms of the difference in conversion rate between the two. It's absolutely massive, because you've actually got products that are in demand and are actually high quality that you can stand behind, and customers can see straight through a low ticket option. So that was the first big step. And then the step that you've described as well is actually once you've got a high ticket drop, shipping store, the next big uptick I had in my graph of conversion rate was when I went on to sign better suppliers, add new products onto my store, and when I added the products and suppliers that really in demand that made the biggest difference to my overall conversion rate by selling the right products. So once you've got the right products, which will make the biggest difference to the conversion rate, you also need to make sure that the right people actually looking at those products are people that are actually interested in purchasing those products. So how would you ensure that the traffic that you get onto your store, which is part two of the PTO method, is correct so that you can increase that conversion rate even more? Yeah, I think the key to this part is targeted ads. The quality of your traffic is determined by how well you target your ads and who you target them to. If your ads are too broad, then you find that you're wasting money on clicks that don't convert. So narrowing down your audience ensures that you're only attracting those who are already ready to buy. And so we hear lots of people reaching out to us early in their journeys, maybe before they've started, you know, working with us or joined our program, and they'll say, I already have a drop shipping store. You know, I've already launched one, and I've I've spent about 1000 pounds on Facebook ads, or I've spent 1000 on Tiktok ads, or I've spent 1000 on Google ads, and I've had loads of clicks, loads of impressions, loads of traffic, but haven't made any sales. And that, to me, is probably the most indicative evidence that not all clicks are created equal, because with 1000 high quality targeted clicks from from customers that are genuinely interested and want what you have, if the offer stacks up and the price is good and your site works, then you should have made at least a few sales in those 1000 clicks. And so the question is, who was doing the clicking? Who's the person behind the maps? What? What are, you know, what were they looking for? Were they even looking for anything? Or were they just scrolling and they clicked you either by accident or because they were curious. Or were they not even humans clicking? Were they bots? Were they people that are out of the market, that you even serve in a different country, you know. So it all comes down to the targeting of this and making sure that the algorithm is in tune on the ad network with who you're actually going after, who are your target customers. And so focus on attracting visitors who are already searching for your products, and you'll make your life a hell of a lot easier when it comes to this, and also you'll acquire customers for a much lower cost. It reminds me of a really good example, a kind of a story analogy by the copywriter. I think it was Gary Halbert that first said this one. And he said he posed this question to an audience and said, If you were going to open. A hamburger stand, and you could only have one competitive advantage. What would it be? And people were like, it would be a good location, best location, or know that it would be the best quality beef, like that would be the thing. Or someone else was like, price, it would be price. It's all about, you know, being the lowest price. And people shouted out with these various answers, and he was just shaking his head at each one, and then he shares the answer, the only advantage you need is a starving crowd. And so it's kind of an extreme analogy, but one way we can do this in dropshipping is by leveraging Google Shopping ads, or even Google search text ads, because those ads capture people who already have a high buying intent and where they're already searching for the items that we sell. So they are our starving crowd. You know, we've taken our hamburger stand and we've put it right in front of a group of people that we know are really hungry, who've just come out of, like, a music event or a sports stadium or something after a sports event, and they're really hungry, and they're ready to go, and they're searching for food. So it's like, well, then put our market there. You know, it's a it's really simple when you think about it and it, but so many people get this bit wrong, and they they think that there are other factors that control this. And of course, those come into it. But, you know, it doesn't matter if your hamburgers are double the price of the other ones down the road, but that other van is nowhere to be seen. I guess another way to think about this is these visitors to your store who come through Google ads like this, who've shown an intent, commercial intent, to buy. They're like shoppers who are walking into a store with a shopping list. You know, you sometimes see people in the supermarket and they're like, staring at their list. They know what they're there for, and they know what they want. They're ready to purchase. So it's like, well, if we can just provide the items they're there for, then there's no like selling that needs to be done. There's not really much marketing that needs to be done. It's just a transaction of value. And so once you're up and running and continuing to monitor and optimize your campaigns, will allow you to really trim the fat and the wasted spend from those campaigns and improve that traffic quality over time. So you can use analytics to see where your best customers are coming from, which clicks to which products, which geographical locations, what times of day, things like that. And you can really then start to double down on those demographics, those segments, those channels. And that's how you can create an incredibly profitable marketing campaign. So hopefully that explains the difference between low quality traffic and extremely targeted, high quality, profitable traffic. It does because it shines an eye on something that's often dismissed. And when you think about having a low conversion rate, how often does your mind go to the website and the Shopify store that you've actually built, and the way that customers interact with your store when you're on the site. Yes, of course, that plays a part. But if you haven't got the right quality people on the site in the first place, then you're optimizing for the wrong reasons, for the wrong metrics. Because if you, if you, like Lewis said, if you've got people that are not even in the market in the first place on your website, then it's going to be very much more difficult to convert those no matter how fancy you work on your Shopify store, no matter how many optimizations you make, if your customers fundamentally aren't the right people that are looking to buy that product, and all of those efforts are wasted. So traffic is a huge part, and that all comes down to the marketing channels that you are employing to increase the Shopify conversion rate. So make sure it's search intent, as Lewis said there. Think Finally, we need to talk about the third part of the PTO method to increase your conversion rate, and that is the offer. So what is the offer, Lewis, and how can we make an offer truly irresistible? Yeah, so one part of making a great offer, and this is this isn't the biggest factor, but it's something that everyone will think about. So it may as well be one that we mentioned first, and is competitive pricing. You know, your price needs to be fairly competitive. You don't necessarily need to be the cheapest. Contrary to popular belief, it's not about being the absolute rock bottom, cheapest bargain store. You know, there's a place for that in the market, where they take the slimmest percentage margin of any other retailer, and they try and soak up all of those bargain hunter customers that are just searching for the best price deal. But actually, that typically becomes a race to the bottom, and it's not a race that I'd want to win. So I find that it's about offering the best value for money, and there's a big difference between value for money and just being the cheapest. Customers should feel like they're getting a real deal that's just too good to pass up on. So for example, rather than me just offering the premium, luxury double gas burner barbecue that we often go to as an example, instead if I'm offering the barbecue and it comes with a free set of premium barbecue tongs, and then the silicon barbecue glove, and then the recipe book that comes with it, and maybe a downloadable ebook with recipes or a video guide on how to get the most out of your barbecue, that kind of bundle, that kind of value, especially if it's visually highlighted. And shown on the product page with those items kind of shown in various product photos. What you're doing by doing that is adapting your offer to what the market wants. You're not just trying to you're not just looking at the competitor retailers to you and basing what you offer based just on what they're offering. You're actually listening to the customers and thinking, Well, what else would they want? Because they're the ones you need to impress. You're not trying to impress the other retailers by being the cheapest. You're trying to create the value for the customers that will ultimately be the ones that buy from you. So rather than just being a carbon copy of all the other retailers and hoping you get your share of the traffic, you get to control how big a slice of the market share pie that you get is by making your offer more compelling than the next retailer. So that's how you can stand out. That's a really big advantage. There are some other factors as well, I think, the ease of purchase and the actual buying process. So you want to make sure that that buying process is as smooth and straightforward as possible. Remove all of the clutter from your store, specifically your product page, because that's the money page. That's where we'll be sending most of the traffic from Google Ads straight to the product page. So people take so long fine tuning their home page and making sure their banner looks right and getting the colors right, and it's actually 99% of your traffic's going to your product pages anyway. So reduce the friction on that product page. Make it super smooth, simple, easy to buy, and offer multiple payment options as well. Offer a really fast checkout if you can have Apple and Android Pay which Shopify makes it really simple to do. It's just a checkbox exercise. You know, maybe you want to offer finance options if you're selling higher price items, so customers can split the payments up, you know, these buy now, pay later, type providers and really clear call to actions as well throughout. So sometimes we just have to tell customers what we want them to do, you know? And it's like making sure that there's no queue at the checkout, at the counter in the shop. Just make sure that there's no point in the sale where a customer would have to think twice about completing their purchase. And there are some other more subtle psychological things that we can do as well to again, just tick the trust boxes and make sure that all of the right trust signals are in place. So things like customer reviews, social proof, if you don't have any product reviews, then put store reviews on every product page, hard code that into your site and trust badges you know you see, like the Visa, MasterCard, Amex, like these, just these little payment signals and secure checkout this stuff like you'd think that it's just noise, but really, This stuff can really help ensure that a customer sees it and thinks is the difference between them thinking in the back of their mind their little voice saying, Could this store be a scam, or do they look legitimate? Also things like clear return policies, making sure that they know exactly what would happen if something went wrong. How would they contact you? How long do they need to wait for their item to be delivered. And ultimately, if a customer has those questions answered ahead of time and they feel secure, they're so much more likely to convert Exactly. And framing the offer that you you provide to customers as an actual offer really helped me in improving the the quality of the offer that I was providing to customers beforehand. I thought I thought I was just needing to sell products and not really see it as an offer or an option for customers. Compared to other retailers, when you view your product and your website as an offer that you're presenting to your customers, it makes you think differently about how can you increase the value of the offer that you're providing as much as possible, and making sure that that price to value ratio is massively skewed in favor of there being loads of value compared to the price. And there's lots of different ways that you've mentioned there Lewis to enhance that value and to get all of the relevant trust signals in place, because they customers need to see certain things before they're ready to buy. So double down on the amount of reviews you show. Double down on the amount of trust signals, trust badges you show double down on the social proof, whether that's highlighting user generated content that you've generated with your previous customers, it all helps to show customers the right things that they need to see in order to be ready to purchase. And then making that as smooth as possible is the way to really make a difference to your conversion rate. So this product traffic offer PTO method that I've used to enhance my conversion rate will be really actionable for people to take away. The first thing is the products, focusing what we're selling, then making sure you've got the right traffic, and then making sure that offer that is presented to that traffic is really compelling, and it'll make a big difference to the bigger picture of increasing the profit that you generate for your drop shipping business. So I think for people that are looking to get started quickly, Lewis and we want to leave them with some actionable advice that they can dive right into straight away. Where would you suggest that they go? Well, first thing is probably to check out a previous episode of the dropship. I'm not. Podcast that we did. It was episode 15, and it was called How to double your Shopify conversion rate. So episode 15 of this podcast is definitely one to line up to listen to after this one is packed with additional insights, strategies and the complement the discussion that we've had today. So I think you'll find that really helpful. And then if you're looking to build a rock solid foundation. My book, the home turf advantage, is a great next step. It's available at HTA book.com and it's a really good next step to fully grasp principles of a profitable drop shipping business and to get you up and running exactly good plug there, because it is crucial to have the right foundations to all of this, all this discussion about increasing your conversion rate. It all comes down to what is the business model that you're building on top of in the first place? And that's obviously what you've laid out. That episode that you mentioned there, Episode 15 Lewis, is one of our most popular all about increasing the conversion rate of your store. We've also had a couple, two or three interviews, actually, with experts on conversion rate. There's also on the YouTube channel and in the back catalog of our podcast. So check them out if you haven't already. So I guess a nice summary. Then Lewis, for people that need to that the TLDR takeaway from today's episode of, how can they improve their conversion rate? How would you summarize that? Yeah, I think just remember that conversion rate optimization isn't a one time task. This is kind of a practice to get into. It's an ongoing process. So keep refining your products, your traffic and the offer that you make, and you'll start to see your conversion rates increase over time, again and again, and that starts to compound, and it can do wonders for your profitability as well. So just make sure you stay committed to that process and success will follow down the line. You just have to be patient. Sometimes it's a bit of delayed gratification that you need to exercise with stuff like this. Now, if you're serious about turning more visitors into buyers on your store, make sure to implement the PTO method that we've discussed today. And don't forget, you can check out our resources@htabook.com enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might just feature it on an upcoming episode. Also for detailed show notes and resources, head to dropshipunlock.com. Forward slash podcasts. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast app of choice, it helps us more than you could imagine, and who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've had in from a listener of the podcast. So thank you very much to John, who has asked us a question, and he did that by leaving a comment beneath a recent YouTube video version of an episode. So if you have a question and you'd like to ask that to either Lewis or myself, simply comment beneath a YouTube video with a question, and you might just get it answered, not just in the comment section, but also on a podcast episode soon. So this week, as I mentioned, the question has come in from John. So John has asked, Hey guys, I'm having a bit of trouble with getting product reviews on my store. Do you have any ideas on how to upload reviews onto my site? Yeah, thank you for your question, John. I'm sure you're not the only person with that one. So it's a great question, because getting product reviews is crucial for boosting your store's conversion rate, which is obviously the topic of our discussion today. So reviews build trust. They build credibility, and those are both key factors in a customer's decision to purchase from your store. So firstly, before you've started making sales, because obviously it goes without saying, once you start making sales, if you're using an app like we recommend, judge.me, as a Shopify app, you can automate the request for reviews to go out to customers after they've made a purchase, so a week, two weeks after they've got the product, make sure you leave enough time for them to actually receive the product and check whether they you know like it, and you can then ask them for a review, which you can then feature on the product page. But before you're at that stage, what we tend to do is, when we sign a new supplier, we just ask them if they can provide existing product reviews that they as the manufacturer, as the supplier of the product. Have many suppliers will be more than happy to share these reviews, because obviously it helps you, as one of their retailers, increase sales. Which of then benefits both parties, that makes them more sales as well. So if they're happy for you to feature the kind of centralized product reviews that they as the supplier have on your site, you can just upload these supplier provided reviews onto your Shopify store using the judge.me app. So you do that on the back end of the app. It's a really simple and easy tool to use to manage and display reviews on your product pages. You can customize the colors and the stars and what it looks like and where on the page it goes, and then when you start generating sales, obviously you have the automated review request emails that goes through on the judge.me app as well. So you can. And usdb building up sales as well. And as we mentioned today, another technique is, if you don't yet have sales coming through, but you want to just feature some reviews on your product page, you can edit the product page template on Shopify to insert store level reviews, so reviews for your own store as a retailer, so it might be like a review that says had a great experience, the customer service was five star. That's fine to feature that as a review on a product page will still increase customer trust, even though the review isn't about the product specifically, and so that way it doesn't look like a ghost town and that there are no reviews for the products, you can just have the review panel hidden until there are an active number of reviews on there, and in the meantime, you just show store level reviews, and you can do that on every product page on your site. So I hope that helps. John, yeah, no. Great answer. Lewis, and a great question. Very topical for today's conversation, because reviews make such a huge difference to conversion rate. Okay, it's now time to highlight a recent review that we've had in for the podcast as well. And I love doing this big thank you to Paul Haynes, seven, five, double two for sharing your thoughts in a YouTube comment after watching the episode with customer experience expert Paul Boag. That was episode 72 so Paul said, great interview. Loads of tips and tricks learned here. Thank you so much for your review. Paul, really glad to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast. Now, if this episode resonated with you, perhaps consider sharing it with someone who might benefit from it. Your recommendations help us grow our community and continue delivering valuable content. So a quick share can make a big difference to someone you know. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you'll walk you away with insights and inspiration to kickstart your ecommerce journey. Grab a copy of my book, the home of turf advantage@htabook.com it's a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your ecommerce venture, don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. And if you like what you heard, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You