The 5 Things Apparel Shoppers Want

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Knowing what your customers want makes marketing easy (er)

I ran into an interesting study by Bain & Company that focuses on what customers perceive as the elements of value. The group identified 30 separate elements and grouped them in a pyramid based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. From the bottom up the groups are:

Functional:

Saves Time
Simplifies
Makes Money
Reduces Risk
Organizes
Integrates
Connects
Reduces Effort
Avoids Hassles
Reduces Cost
Quality
Variety
Sensory Appeal
Informs

Emotional

Reduces Anxiety
Rewards Me
Nostalgia
Design/Aesthetics
Badge Value
Wellness
Therapeutic Value
Fun/Entertainment
Attractiveness
Provides Access

Life Changing

Provides hope
Self-actualization
Motivation
Heirloom
Affiliation and Belonging

Social Impact

Self-transcendence

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Bain’s chart says that the five most important elements in the apparel industry are:

Quality
Variety
Avoids Hassles
Design/Aesthetics
Saves Time

When you read the list, you can see how important it is to really understand your target customer. Quality may not be as valued with younger shoppers looking for fast fashion. Variety may not be important to someone who likes wearing a personal uniform (Think Steve Jobs). Avoids Hassles is less true for real bargain hunters. Though site issues are universally despised. Design/Aesthetics won’t appeal to those who hate shopping and only buy clothes so they aren’t naked and cold. You see where I’m going here.

Understanding what motivates your customers is a cornerstone of marketing. Relying on big data for most customers will actually send you down a path that has broad appeal, but no specific appeal. In other words, it will work well for Walmart, but not for a boutique.

I think some of the most important elements for smaller businesses are in the Emotional and Life Changing groups. We don’t think about clothing as being heirloom but buying a jean jacket your daughter will want to wear in 20 years is an interesting angle.

Nostalgia has appeal to everyone, and if you are selling to a niche that has a time period, you can always hit that note and it will resonate. Steam Punk, Cottage Core, 50’s – 90’s and so on all have a nostalgia element to them.

Fun and entertaining is another element that will resonate with power shoppers. Make shopping more fun and engaging and shoppers will come back. (That’s what Stylaquin does!)

Women often joke about needing some retail therapy, but it’s real, and having a great shopping experience is something those who like to shop genuinely value. When the mood strikes, there is something oddly relaxing about looking at lots of beautiful things, even if you don’t buy them. There’s also a rush when you find items that spark joy, whether it’s the prefect gift, or the perfect pair of shoes.

Social impact is another area that has trementous power. Tom’s shoes, Ivory Ella, Bert’s Bees and many more have social impact at the core of their business model. Younger customers have shown tremendous brand loyalty to companies that give back to causes they care about.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Creating connection with your customers takes time. Use the elements as a guide to spark ideas for everything from sales to social media posts. Think about the ones you can align with easily and focus on them. Good luck!

3 Easy Ways Get More Sales This Season

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Here are 3 easy ways to get more sales between now and December 24th

The holidays are here and if you’ve gotten all your promotions ready ahead of time—congratulations! If you didn’t quite have time, or just want to boost the end of the month sales report, here are three easy ways to get more sales.

Bundling

Take a look at the things that you are probably going to have left over inventory on, and think about ways to bundle them, before you have to put them on sale in January. Can you sweeten the deal with another complementary product by bundling them together? Buy 3 and save also works. Think about how the products will be gifted. Can you promote them as stocking stuffers? Would they make great Secret Santa gifts? Every kid has several teachers, so if you have a great teacher gift, try offering a set of three. Bundling lower priced items and telling shoppers how to use them is a tried and true tactic.

Does Your Site Do This?

Leverage your best sellers

Send an email to your customer list with your best sellers front and center. Use headlines like “Here are XX of our customers’ favorite things!”, “Looking for gifts everyone loves? Here are our customers’ favorites!”, “Last minute gifts that are sure to make them smile—our customers’ favorites.” You get the idea. Right now everyone is in a mad scramble to find the right gifts for all their loved ones. Bestsellers have already gotten the seal of approval, so shoppers who are worried about not choosing the right items will breath a sigh of relief.

Be sure to showcase some best sellers on your home page. Best sellers are proven winners and the items that are most likely to appeal to new visitors. In Shopify, you can set up a carousel of best selling items that will adjust as your inventory levels change. This means it will automatically update with new products if you run out. (You have to set your products to not show if inventory is zero.) There is awesome power in showcasing bestsellers on your home page.

Use collections to create price ranges

If you are on Shopify, one of the easiest things to do is to create collections based on price ranges. This time of year shoppers are very price conscious, but not because they don’t want to spend too much. They want to spend the right amount. If they are buying a small gift for a colleague or friend, they have a price in mind. If they are buying for a significant other, they have a very different price in mind. In both cases they have a price in mind and they are looking for a gift in a specific price range. Think about who your target customer is buying for and make create collections with the price points that will help them find the right gift quickly. If you are selling high end merchandise, don’t be afraid to use “over” as well as “under”. This strategy doesn’t work as well after the holidays, but while shoppers have a list that they are checking twice, it rocks!

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

This time of year it’s easy to get overwhelmed while trying to get everything done. If you have time to just do one thing on this list, I would recommend creating collections with price ranges. You can set it up in half an hour, and then add it to all your emails and social posts. It’s also something that can be set up and reused every year. Good luck!

Get more WOW from the products you have now

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to Promote the right products on your Shopify store's home page

Imagine your home page as the digital red carpet to your store, where you have the power to make a dazzling impression on potential customers. When you strategically select and showcase your products here, you’re not just displaying beautiful items, you’re creating an experience that resonates with your audience. By understanding your customers’ tastes, staying on top of the latest trends, and curating a captivating home page, you can turn visitors into loyal shoppers. So, get ready to boost those conversion rates and sales like a boss! Your home page is your secret weapon in the competitive world of online retail, and it’s time to shine!

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is the compass that guides your success in the world of online fashion retail. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about creating a shopping experience tailored to their desires and needs. Knowing your target audience intimately allows you to speak directly to their hearts and capture their attention on your home page. To achieve this, start by identifying who your target customer is. How old are they? What do they care about? What’s trending in their world? Put yourself in their shoes.

Does Your Site Do This?

Start with Bestsellers

The best place to go for inspiration on what to put on the home page is your best sellers. Bestsellers should have a prominent place on every home page. Why? Because they’re proven winners. Bestsellers are also a roadmap to seasonality. You probably won’t have the same bestsellers in August that you do in November.

Let Shopify do the heavy lifting

Go to your Shopify sales report, make sure it includes the date the product was sold, the number of products sold as units, the product name and SKU, the price and the profit. Download the report and open it in excel or whatever spreadsheet software you use. Open the file and subtotal the report by product. Some spreadsheets call this categories rather than subtitles. You are trying to find the products with the highest units of sales. If you have Stylaquin installed you can use the Insights Panel to see your best sellers. We have a video titled Bestsellers you can check out to learn more. Just change the date range to see a specific time.

Use color

This will make spotting the winners easier to see later. Color the cells with the top ten or so products with a bright green color. Then color the next ten or so products with bright blue, and color the following ten or so with bright gold. This will give you an easy way to spot where the best sellers are showing up in each season.

Sort your table by date

This way you can see where the best sellers are working their magic. Are they all Q4 gifts? Are they summer self purchase? What can you learn from them? Are there any the show up consistently throughout the year? We call those perennial best sellers and they typically are problem solvers.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

But wait! What about new products?

There has long been a debate about which is more powerful—new products or best sellers. If you want to dive in even deeper here’s a post on the subject. But the short answer is that most of the customers coming to your site will be new. That’s just how the online world works. So showcasing new products on your home page in place of bestsellers is risky. What if the new products are a bust? There are stores that can make showcasing only new products work, and clothing and accessories are frequently about tends. How do you pick? Not to worry, you can test it!

A/B testing is easy in Shopify

Head over to the App Store and you’ll find lots of apps that offer A/B testing. A/B testing lets you create two versions of a page which are randomly shown to visitors. It allows you to see which version gets you more clicks. You can A/B test headlines, product assortments, images and offers. Be sure to keep your A/B tests clean by not changing too many things at once. It’s also a good idea to keep a diary of what you’ve tested so you can keep track of learnings.

Keep learning, growing and being creative! ““

8 Great Tips to Kickstart Your Holiday Marketing! + FREE gift

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Get Your Holiday Sales off to a Sane Start

Okay, so it’s October, and Halloween is almost upon us, which means Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and then OMG the holidays and the busiest time of the year are almost here. If you’re a Shopify store owner selling, well almost anything, getting ahead of the holiday tsunami will help your bottom line and your peace of mind. Here’s a quick list of things to get nailed down now and a free gift from me to make it easier.

Sales strategy

Unless you only sell Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving decorations, you don’t need to be having a sale. I know, I know, all the big stores are having sales and you will be killed if you don’t. Take a deep breath and consider if you can really compete on price, online, against the big box stores… If you can—then sale away! If you’re a niche boutique then think about the overall landscape before you offer up margin. Here are some things to try before resorting to sales. My general position on sales is they are the best way to get rid of unsold merchandise after the holiday, but should only be use sparingly, if at all, before the holiday.

Compete as a small business

Small Business Saturday is November 25th this year. Reach out to your customer base and remind them how great they will feel supporting a small or local business. Have a special event either in your store or online. It can be interviews with experts, meet the team, or help with the problem you solve for your customers. It can be as simple as how to find the prefect gift, or outfit, or how to spice up the holiday. Everyone is looking for tips and ways to make their loved ones feel appreciated. They want to connect, and engage, and feel the magic of the season.

Pricing

Shoppers are especially price conscious around the holidays, but not always on the low end. Everyone has a list of people they buy for and the gift they give needs to fit the level of appreciation/love they feel for the recipient. Let’s say you need to get a gift for your child’s teacher, it will probably fall in the under $20 range. Your spouse would probably feel unappreciated with a $20 gift. A big client might warrant a gift costing over $200, but a small one might only need a token. This is why making categories based on price works so well during the holidays. Gifts under $30 is a great price point, so is gifts under $50. Gifts over $100 can also work.

Does Your Site Do This?

Get attention without discounting

Hammacher Schlemmer always has one item that is insanely expensive. Think $250,000 for a personal submarine. They don’t expect to sell many (or any), but it gets attention. Think about how your store can get attention without discounting. Do you have a unique item with a story? Can you create an offer that’s unique? Can you start a challenge? Can you do something that makes your store stand out? (Hint: Stylaquin is absolutely bomb for that.)

Make a collection for sale items rather than the whole store

If you feel you simply MUST have a sale, rather than have a sale on everything, why not make a collection of sale items and call it Santa’s Bargain Bin. That way shoppers who are out looking for discounts get what they want without devaluing the rest of your merchandise.

Stocking stuffers and table gifts

If you have items that are under $20, or a high end customer base that lets you go higher, think about creating collections of stocking stuffers and table gifts. Teaching your audience how to make the holidays special is about surprising and delighting them with things they haven’t thought of. Tell stories about the most special gift you have received, or the most surprising gift you’ve received. How can the merchandise you sell surprise and delight your customers and new visitors? Selling bath products? How about a dirty Santa bath set. I have no idea what it would be, but I would look at it if you had one. Kids’ gift collections and pet gift collections are great for blog posts and social media.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

Collections are an underused tool

Every Shopify store has collections, and there is a myth that the collections need to be in the top nav. You can make collections for anything and just use them for emails. Color collections, hidden collections, magic collections, surprise collections can all exist on your store and be part of an email campaign without being in your nav. You could make a Shopify collection of products that have the most meaning to you personally and share that with your customers. Johanna Gaines would totally do that, you can too.

Put a bow on it!

I’m including a download for my simple Holiday Bow image as my holiday gift to you.
bow_red.png
Add it to any product image and voila—It’s a gift! Slap in on your home page from November 1st to December 31st. The classic holiday bow hasn’t changed in a very, very long time. Sometimes the easiest things are the things that just work.

How Time on Site impacts SEO

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Enticing customers to stay longer can have a big impact on your SEO rank

Why is time on site important? It’s the often overlooked metric that measures how engaged and interested visitors are with your website. The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more likely they are to interact with the content, explore different products, and ultimately make a purchase.

Let’s break that down into 4 components.

Increased engagement: The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more engaged they’re likely to be with your content. We spend time with stores we like, so increasing time on site also leads to increased brand awareness, product interest, and ultimately, sales.
Improved user experience: If visitors are spending a lot of time on a website, it’s a good indication that they’re finding the site easy to navigate and the content valuable. This kind of positive user experience increases customer loyalty.
Better search engine rankings: Time on site is one of the metrics that search engines use to determine the quality and relevance of a website. If visitors are spending a lot of time on a site, search engines see this as a sign that the site is providing high-quality content and improve its ranking accordingly.
Higher conversion rates: When visitors spend more time on a website, they learn more about the brand and products, which leads to trust, which, as I mentioned in the Post on SEO Metrics, leads to higher conversion rates. In addition, longer time on site is often an indicator that a customer is closer to making a purchase.

Does Your Site Do This?

Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer?

Here are some thing to consider:

Improve the user experience: A good user experience is crucial for keeping visitors on a site for longer periods of time. This includes factors such as site speed, easy navigation, and clear product descriptions.
Offer engaging content: Providing high-quality, relevant content can help to keep visitors engaged and interested. This can include product videos, blog posts, customer reviews.
Eye Candy: Making sure your site visually appeals to your target customer is crucial for extending time on site. High-end customers want to see beautiful photography and lifestyle images. Everyone wants to see photography that clearly shows the products. Clear photos that show features also reduces returns.
Personalization: Personalizing the user experience based on a visitor’s behavior and preferences can help to increase engagement and time on site. This can include personalized product recommendations, and customized landing pages for customers who are coming from an ad, blog, or other trigger.
Incentives and rewards: Offering incentives such as free shipping, discounts, and loyalty programs can help to keep visitors on a site for longer periods of time and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.
Optimize for mobile: As more and more consumers shop on their mobile devices, optimizing for mobile is crucial for increasing time on site. This includes using a mobile-responsive design and optimizing for mobile search. This is especially important if you have a younger customer, but granny is on her phone now and girl likes to shop.
Utilize social media: Social media can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to an online store and increasing time on site. Make sure your social media content links back to your website and also encourage social sharing.
Making it fun to shop: This is my favorite. We all do more of the things we enjoy and shopping is more fun with Stylaquin. How much fun? Data shows that Stylaquin shoppers stay on site a whopping 70% longer and view 185% more items. Here’s a link to a short video that explains how Stylaquin works.

So to wrap all this up, time on site is an often overlooked metric that absolutely impacts your site rank with search engines. Making your site more attractive, more personal, more interesting and more fun to shop will entice your customers to stay longer, buy more and come back more often.

Don’t get mad at Google, outsmart it! Having trouble getting your site to rank well? Wondering how to get to the top positions without paying for placement? Google is just an algorithm, once you understand how it works, you can learn how to outsmart it. Download your copy today!

P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.

AI is going to destroy keyword SEO

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Stylaquin1

AI built websites are going to destroy keyword SEO

Here’s a bold prediction about how AI will change SEO: engagement is going to become the single most important metric in determining your website’s Google rank, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than you think. I read an article by tech thought leader, Om Malik, titled AI & Internet’s existential crisis. The threat he pointed out is that AI can create almost infinite websites with SEO designed to rank well with Google and other search engines in less time than it takes a person to come up with a good keyword strategy. Remember content farms that were only limited by the number of humans they could find to create cheap content? Now there’s no longer a limiting human factor. The sites that use AI to manage SEO will outperform the sites that are created by humans. The proliferation of machine-made sites, linking and amplifying each other in an ever-expanding web of SEO keyword goop will inevitably muddy the waters of the internet to the point that keywords, and even content itself, can no longer be trusted as the best way to direct searchers. Wow. That’s going to make online marketing even harder. It will look like what happened to email marketing—only it will happen in months, not years.

So what’s the pushback?

What will the search engines do when faced with a tsunami of content? Well, Google recently limited the content crawled on websites and started favoring new content. That means the AI content bots will adjust and start refreshing content more often. AI can iterate on one top-ranking piece of content infinitely. Every time search engines defend against an AI strategy to beat the algorithm, AI sites are going to come up with new strategies. It’s going to be a never-ending whack-a-mole game at mind-boggling speeds. The Google and Bing bots are going to be using AI to detect AI content. AI-generated sites are going to be constantly adjusting to stay ahead of the algorithm. But, wait. STOP! If all the legitimate sites are using AI too, how will the search engines sift through all the churn and clutter to determine where to send searchers?

Does Your Site Do This?

Searchers not bots

Remember, Google’s #1 success metric is how happy searchers are with the results provided. Google’s job is to make people happy by finding the best website, or information, to answer the searcher’s query. Without reliable keywords and unique content, how will the search engines determine which sites to send searchers to if there are umpteen million of them all looking remarkably the same? More importantly to you—how will you get the search engines to send searchers to your website?

What about ads?

You can, and probably will, spend a ton more money on advertising. But even ad spend is directly linked to your site’s SEO rank. So how do you outsmart AI and also make nice with the search engines?

Change is coming!

That’s where my bold prediction comes in. I think the most likely answer is going to be a huge shift in the importance of customer engagement as a key SEO metric. Customer engagement may well become the most important metric used by search engines to rank websites. Think about it for a minute. Customer engagement is the hardest metric to fake. Engagement tracks events, the things shoppers do on your site. Getting shoppers to engage with your website, look at more products, click on more things, play with more things, and return to your site more often is the only way to improve your engagement score. AI can’t help with that. You can’t fake real people having fun and participating in an experience of discovery. But you can make a website more fun to shop, more interesting, more memorable, and more likely to get return visitors. The easiest way to increase engagement is simply by adding Stylaquin to your website. If you’re a Shopify store and haven’t taken a few minutes to check out how Stylaquin get’s shoppers to view 180% more products, stay 70% longer, and come back 25% more often, now might be a good time watch the video below and visit the Shopify App Store. If you’re not on Shopify, give us a call, or join our waiting list.

Whatever strategy you use to create more customer engagement on your site, be creative, have fun, and don’t lose sight of the simple truth that you can’t out-iterate AI, but you can be way more fun to spend time with. As humans, we all seek out fun things, and happily go back to the things we enjoyed doing. The best engagement strategy is to be the website that’s the most fun to shop!

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about increasing engagement here’s a blog post on How to Increase Engagement Without Spending a Fortune.

New versus Best Sellers

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Stylaquin1

New versus Best Sellers and how best to leverage them both

Highlighting new items and best-selling items is just good marketing. They are both great way’s to get customer’s attention, but they function differently in marketing, though there is overlap in the type of customer they will appeal to. Let’s start with best sellers.

Best Sellers

These are the most popular products and the backbone of your store’s sales. Never underestimate the awesome power of best sellers. Merchants have something called the 80/20 rule where 80% of sales come from 20% of products. Where stores get into trouble is that they get bored. I remember when I was an Art Director at L.L. Bean everyone was sick to death of telling the bean boot story. That’s the story about how L.L. sold his first batch of bean boots but most of them fell apart. He took back every broken pair and replaced them with the now famous bean boot and the rest is history. It’s a great story. Every time we ran it, sales went up. Especially with new customers. But everyone in the company had heard it a thousand times so they rolled their eyes when it came up. Best sellers are like that. They are often the tried and true, boring products, that just keep selling. Not the shiny new products that everyone is excited about. Do you have a best seller collection? You should, it’s easy and it works. Customers who are new to your brand will be looking to see if you have anything that interests them. Best sellers are best sellers for a reason, make sure they’re featured on your home page. Use them on landing pages for ads and promotions. Think of them as both a gateway drug to your brand and a favorite bedtime story you can tell often.

Does Your Site Do This?

New

New is also powerful, but serves a different purpose and a different customer. New is a magic word, customers never get tired of it. (There’s a Bar Hop on magic words that may be of interest.) Your existing customers will already be familiar with your best sellers so new items are the best way to get their attention. On a Shopify website it’s easy to create a collection of new items that keeps itself automatically updated. Having an automated NEW collection is an easy set it, and forget it strategy. You can also make sure your home page shows some new items, so that returning customers have a reason to stop by. There’s an important truth in marketing that it’s easier to get more customers to buy, than it is to get customers to buy more. Best sellers are more likely to get customers to buy than new items. It goes back to the 80/20 rule. If you don’t know if you should feature a best seller or a new item, go with the best seller. Most of you traffic will be new visitors and best sellers are your best bet.

Is that all there is?

So is that all there is to NEW and Best sellers? Nope. You can use this strategy in your ads and customer emails. In ads, focus on best sellers. They are already proven winners. In existing customer emails, focus on New with a dash of best seller. Think of it as you get new customers in the door with best sellers and then keep them interested with new items. Best sellers are also a treasure trove of goodness for emails that don’t offer discounts. Your customers love these items so talk about where they came from, what makes them amazing, all their benefits, and finish with other items that are similar, complimentary, or also best sellers. If you only send out discount emails you are going away free money and training your customers that they shouldn’t pay full price.

If you enjoyed this video, and got some good info, please join our mailing list. If you’d like to see a Shopify app that increases the number of items viewed by 180%, increases time on site by 70% and just makes online shopping more fun and engaging, here’s a link to the Stylaquin Video in the Shopify App Store.

P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.

6 ways to improve your Shopify site’s speed

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Is your Shopify site slower than you'd like? Here are 6 ways to speed it up!

Why is site speed important?

Site speed is important on two fronts. First, it affects the user experience. A slow-loading website will frustrate users and make them more likely to leave. We’ve all been there, the spinning wheel is a super buzzkill and it sends the wrong message about your brand. Second, site speed can impact your search engine ranking. Google and other search engines take site speed into account when ranking websites, so faster sites rank higher in search results. Remember the higher your site’s rank, the less you pay for ads, that’s a nice benefit all by itself.

Before you add any app to your site you should check your site speed. If it’s slow, fix that first. Many of the top websites around the world have surprisingly bad site speed scores, but if you’re a big fish you can get away more than if you’re a little fish. Regardless of what size fish you are there are compelling reasons to make site speed a priority.

How to check your site’s speed

So first things first, here’s how you check your site speed. Open a web browser and go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/. Type in your site’s URL and hit the Analyze button. Go ahead and do that right now, I’ll wait.

So now you know your site’s speed and if you are over 80, well done! If you are between 50 and 80, you can improve it with these tips, but it doesn’t have to be the first thing you do right now. If you are between 25 and 50, make it a top priority. If you are under 25—stop, drop, and roll!

Does Your Site Do This?

Optimize your images

Images are one of the biggest contributors to slow loading times. The goal is to optimize your images by reducing their file size without sacrificing quality. The biggest gains are made by choosing the right image format. Jpeg files are significantly smaller than png files. I asked my adorable dog Pudge to give me a hand with this. The jpg of this handsome fellow at 1200×1600 with high quality output is a mere 748 KB. The same size png is a brutal is 4 MB.

If we dumb them down to low quality, the jpg is only 260 KB while the png is still a whopping 1.2 MB.

But before you start hating on jpgs we need to look at the difference between a photo and an illustration. When it comes to illustrations and type, the png has a slight edge coming in a 2KB rather than the 9 KB of the jpg.

So how do you choose? The first thing to ask is do you need a transparent background? If the answer is yes, you can only use a png. Jpegs do not support transparency. If you don’t need transparency, go with a jpg for photos. When it comes to Illustrations pngs are a better choice, not just because they are a tiny bit smaller, but they’ll have sharper, crisper edges. So image files for typography, symbols, or illustrations are better as pngs.

You can use tools like Adobe Photoshop, TinyPNG.com or Kraken.io to compress your images. If you are working in Canva the default is Png so be sure to change the output settings before you download.

Delay popups

Popups are a great way to collect visitor emails and promote products with special savings and offers, they can also be a significant drag on your load time. When search engines measure your site speed, there is something called time to first paint, which is just a fancy way of saying how long it takes before a visitor can see the site. Some things are super quick to load, like Stylaquin, but apps that have to call and display large amounts of data, can take seconds, which is way too long in online time. The easy way around this is just to have the popup load after the site speed has been measured. A short delay of 15 seconds should do it.

Lazy load your images

Lazy load tells browsers not to load images that are not going to be visible until they’re needed. Remember how I said that search engines are measuring time to first paint? If you have lots of images below the fold the browser is going to load all of them before it tells the search engine that it’s done. Lazy load tells the browser to stop loading the images that aren’t being shown, so the time to first paint is much faster. There is a bit of a delay when visitors scroll down but it’s usually imperceptible. Lazy load is a feature of most Shopify themes so check with your theme provider about where that setting is.

Remove unused apps

Apps can slow down your store, so remove any apps that you’re not using. Apps like Stylaquin are super lightweight. Some apps are not so well behaved. If you’re concerned that an app is slowing down your site, the first thing to do is measure your site speed with the app on, and then again with the app off. Be sure to measure 4 to 6 times with the app on and the same number of times with it off. Site speed tests are affected by internet traffic, server speed and the vagaries of the web. It’s likely that you will get a range of results and testing multiple times keeps you from jumping to conclusions. I’ve seen results that make it look like an app is speeding up a site, but the next test showed it slowing down the site. To be confident you need to run the same test multiple times and preferably at different times. You can check your admin panel to see which apps are installed on your store.

Update your theme

This one is something that often gets filed under “Things to do when I have time”. Because of all the good things that come from having a fast site, you may want to move it up in the to-do list. Older themes may not be as optimized for speed as newer themes. It’s always a good idea to keep your theme up to date for security reasons as well.

Make sure your theme uses a CDN

This one is for nerds and developers. A CDN (content delivery network) can help to improve the speed of your store by caching your website’s content on servers that are closer to your customers. That way a customer from France gets the same load time as one from the US. All the free Shopify themes use the Shopify CDN by default, so you’re all set if you are using a free Shopify theme. If you paid for your theme, and you have done all the easy things we already covered, it’s worth checking. Using a CDN is especially important for stores that sell worldwide or across a wide geographic area.

The easiest way to determine if your non-Shopify theme is using a CDN is to email your theme developer and ask.

If you’d like to see this content as a video Click here. If you’d like to see a lightning fast Shopify app that increases the number of items viewed by 180%, increases time on site by 70% and just makes online shopping more fun and engaging, click here for quick demo of Stylaquin.

How to get customers to stay on your site longer

Posted on June 2, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to get customers to stay on your site longer

Time on site is the term used to measure how long a visitor stays on a website. Why is time on site important? It’s the often overlooked metric that measures how engaged and interested visitors are with your website. The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more likely they are to interact with the content, explore different products, and ultimately make a purchase.

Time on site does a lot of good things for your site. Let’s break that down into 4 components.

Increased engagement: The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more engaged they’re likely to be with your content. We spend time with stores we like, so increasing time on site also leads to increased brand awareness, product interest, and ultimately, sales.
Improved user experience: If visitors are spending a lot of time on a website, it’s a good indication that they’re finding the site easy to navigate and the content valuable. This kind of positive user experience increases customer loyalty.
Better search engine rankings: Time on site is one of the metrics that search engines use to determine the quality and relevance of a website. If visitors are spending a lot of time on a site, search engines see this as a sign that the site is providing high-quality content and improve its ranking accordingly.
Higher conversion rates: When visitors spend more time on a website, they learn more about the brand and products, which leads to trust, which, as I mentioned in the Hump Day Bar Hop on SEO Metrics, leads to higher conversion rates. In addition, longer time on site is often an indicator that a customer is closer to making a purchase.
Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer? Here are some thing to consider:

Does Your Site Do This?

Improve the user experience: A good user experience is crucial for keeping visitors on a site for longer periods of time. This includes factors such as site speed, easy navigation, and clear product descriptions.
Offer engaging content: Providing high-quality, relevant content can help to keep visitors engaged and interested. This can include product videos, blog posts, customer reviews.
Eye Candy: Making sure your site visually appeals to your target customer is crucial for extending time on site. High-end customers want to see beautiful photography and lifestyle images. Everyone wants to see photography that clearly shows the products. Clear photos that show features also reduces returns.
Personalization: Personalizing the user experience based on a visitor’s behavior and preferences can help to increase engagement and time on site. This can include personalized product recommendations, and customized landing pages for customers who are coming from an ad, blog, or other trigger.
Incentives and rewards: Offering incentives such as free shipping, discounts, and loyalty programs can help to keep visitors on a site for longer periods of time and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.
Optimize for mobile: As more and more consumers shop on their mobile devices, optimizing for mobile is crucial for increasing time on site. This includes using a mobile-responsive design and optimizing for mobile search. This is especially important if you have a younger customer, but granny is on her phone now and girl likes to shop.
Utilize social media: Social media can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to an online store and increasing time on site. Make sure your social media content links back to your website and also encourage social sharing.
Making it fun to shop: This is my favorite. We all do more of the things we enjoy and shopping is more fun with Stylaquin. How much fun? Data shows that Stylaquin shoppers stay on site a whopping 70% longer and view 185% more items. Here’s a link to the Stylaquin video.

If you’d like to watch this as a video here’s the link.

What does keeping your content fresh actually mean?

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to keep your content fresh

What does “Fresh” even mean?

When you ask experts how to get more organic traffic, one of the things that always makes the list is keeping your site fresh. Fresh is a pretty vague term. Fresh like lettuce, or fresh like potatoes? It turns out that there are different measures of fresh and they are measured differently.

The most basic measure is fresh content like new blog posts, articles, and videos. No real news flashes there. If you are a Shopify site that doesn’t add lots of new products then adding a blog and posting often will help, we’ll get to how often later.

Social media is another thing that search engines look at. Your instagram posts, TikTok videos, and Facebook updates all count. Google, which owns YouTube, not surprisingly favors video and YouTube channels. You can see where it starts to look like a racket.

So what tools do Search Engines use to determine what’s new?

Search engines use web crawlers to visit websites and index their content. When a web crawler visits a website, it looks for new content that has been added since the last time the website was crawled. Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, typically crawls popular websites several times a day, while it may only crawl less popular websites once a week or even less often.

There are things that admins and website owners can do to encourage web crawlers to crawl their websites more frequently. One is to make sure that their websites are well-indexed and that they use the right keywords and phrases throughout their content. If you are not sure how to do that there are apps that will streamline the process. Shopify has over 500 in their app store.

P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Crawler-friendly web design

Your website’s design can make a big difference in how often it is crawled by web crawlers. Make sure your website is designed in a way that is easy for web crawlers to navigate. Important safety tip: none of that has anything to do with what you can see or even if it looks good. You can have a visually stunning website that is simply awful for web crawlers. Remember, web crawlers are machines, they don’t have taste, they aren’t cool, hip or even alive. They only understand what you tell them with words. So what does a website that’s beautiful to web crawlers look like? It looks the same as one that is ugly to web crawlers until you get into nitty gritty. Web crawlers want images that are named for what they show with alt tags and meta descriptions. They like URLs that are all short, concise and help describe where they lead. Don’t use URL shortening services like Bitly unless necessary. Web crawlers may have difficulty crawling and indexing shortened links, because shortened links often contain no information about the destination page, making it difficult for web crawlers to understand what the page is about.

Avoid using Javascript and Flash, and be sure to provide alt text for all images and videos. Using an SEO app that scores your content is a good idea. It’s easy to miss things and having a machine point out what the machines are looking for just makes sense. It is literally the blind showing you how to lead the blind.

Submit your website to search engines

If you are a new site, or if you don’t think your site is being crawled, you should submit your website to search engines through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Submitting to these two will tell all the search engines that your website exists and that you want it to be indexed. You only have to do this once. If you want to see if your site has already been indexed you can check in any browser by using the site: operator. Simply type site: followed by the URL of your website into the Google and Bing search bars. If your website appears, you are being indexed.

So what is the right amount of freshness?

The sweet spot for most sites is posting two to three times per week. This gives you enough time to produce high-quality content while still keeping your audience engaged. If you can’t afford a content creator, and you have other time pressures, do your best. Freshness is important, but not the only thing that search engines look at. It’s better to have high quality content on a regular basis than crap every day. If you are a Shopify store and want an easy way to boost your engagement stats check out Stylaquin.

If you’d like to see this content in video form click here or visit our Hump Day Bar Hopping page where you’ll find all the fun and informative Hump Day Bar Hopping with Stylaquin videos.

Knowing what your customers want makes marketing easy (er)

Does Your Site Do This?

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

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Bundling

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Leverage your best sellers

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Start with Bestsellers

Let Shopify do the heavy lifting

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Put a bow on it!

Enticing customers to stay longer can have a big impact on your SEO rank

Let’s break that down into 4 components.

Does Your Site Do This?

Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer?

AI built websites are going to destroy keyword SEO

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Change is coming!

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New

Is that all there is?

Is your Shopify site slower than you'd like? Here are 6 ways to speed it up!

Why is site speed important?

How to check your site’s speed

Does Your Site Do This?

Optimize your images

Delay popups

Lazy load your images

Remove unused apps

Update your theme

Make sure your theme uses a CDN

How to get customers to stay on your site longer

Does Your Site Do This?

How to keep your content fresh

Book a Quick Demo!