Make More Money From Dropshipping: A Guide To Retargeting With Push Notifications

So your dropshipping Shopify store is up and running.
It’s doing OK too. But, you’d like it to do better.

Like everyone else, you enjoyed the low thresholds for getting started with dropshipping. You’re attracting reasonable amounts of traffic.

You’re even meeting the average dropshipper conversion rates of 2-3% and know you’re meeting the average Shopify store ‘add to cart rate’ of 4.8% too.

That leaves at least 1.8 - 2.8% of sales that you’re losing out on.

If you could get more visitors to complete their purchase, you’d exceed dropshipping conversion rates.

If you could increase your customer’s lifetime value and convert more visitors to customers, you’d really be winning.

We know exactly how to do that.

It’s called retargeting and it’s not hard or expensive.
The great news is, we’re going to show you exactly how to do it. Retargeting is a great way to make more money from dropshipping.

Ready? Let’s go...

What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting is a form of advertising that puts you in touch with people who have visited your store. This includes people who browsed and never bought, people who abandoned their cart, and those who made a purchase from you and were never seen again.

With retargeted advertising, these customers and visitors are reminded of your store and the things they came to buy or browse. 

Retargeting can be done with SMS marketing messages and web push notifications or you may wish to opt for omnichannel notifications - the kind that combines web browser notifications with SMS and email.

Whichever you choose, the idea is to make the most of the introduction you have from someone visiting your online store. Push notification sign-ups can be requested just a few moments after someone arrives in your shop. The average opt-in rate for push notifications is 91.1% on Android. The average is 10% for web push notifications, but this can be increased with the right timing.

Once you have this, you can build a relationship that improves your customer’s lifetime value for your business.

What Are Push Notifications?

There are several different types of push notifications - and combinations of notifications too.

To put it simply, a push notification is a clickable pop-up message that appears on a user’s screen or browser, regardless of the device they’re using.

To go into a little more detail, let’s take a look at the kinds of push notifications available and how to use them.

Lifecycle notifications - these automated messages are used throughout the entire customer lifecycle. From welcoming messages to abandoned carts and re-engaging with customers you haven’t seen in a while.

FYI notifications - great for building a long-term relationship with customers and becoming one of their favorite online sellers. Firepush’s data shows 47.99% of sales are made within 2 - 30 days of a visitor first discovering your store. So nurturing the customer relationship with FYI notifications can boost your profits.

Transactional notifications - these serve two purposes. They let your customer know what’s happening with their order. They also build trust in your brand by showing their peace of mind is important to you.

Promotional notifications are the most often used notification in eCommerce sales. These can be used for driving sales, increasing customer engagement, and reinvigorating a customer’s enthusiasm to buy from your store.

Any and all of these push notifications can be used in retargeting efforts. When done well, you’ll build trust with buyers and convert more of your visitors too. All of which is great for your bottom line!

Understanding Where You Can Leverage Bigger Profits

To make more money from dropshipping, you need to understand the four key elements of every successful dropshipping store.
Traffic - the number of visitors to your store.
Conversions - the number of visitors that become paying customers.
Finding a few great products that sell REALLY well
Average order value - the total value of all items purchased in one session
Margins - the profit you’re left with once the supplier has taken their cut.

Traffic and margins are difficult to improve. Once you’ve reached a good level of traffic, it can become quite expensive to direct more visitors to your store.

Similarly with improving margins. Unless you can buy in bulk, it’s unlikely you can get a better deal from the supplier who is doing most of the heavy lifting. They’re storing, packing, and sending your items. The only way they can improve their profits, and therefore give you a better deal, is by accepting larger orders from eCommerce stores.

Finding great products for dropshipping requires a little research. Aside from traffic and conversions, it’s one of the most important influencers of your success. Once you’ve got a winner, it’s worth adding to your inventory. A few more irresistible items that your target audience will love are sure to boost your bottom line.

The great news is, you have lots of ways you can increase your conversions and the value of each order. You guessed it, retargeting is the key.

Using Retargeting To Increase Conversions

If just 2% of visitors are converting to customers, that leaves a whole 98% of visitors who visit, get to know a bit about your products, and then leave without ever buying.

If you’ve already got great traffic, it makes sense to optimize for it.

Welcome messages are one way you can do this. Triggered when someone signs up for one of your channels - SMS or push notifications - a welcome message often includes a sweetener for the new subscriber. Discounts or exclusive offers can be hard to resist. Sending these with a welcome message encourages more visitors to make a purchase.

Intelligent blends Shopify Plus store generated $92,000 from welcome messages alone. Their strategy was to welcome visitors with a brief introduction to the brand and an introductory offer. Their click-through rate from these messages was slightly over 10% - pushing them well beyond the 2% conversion rate of first-time visitors.

Another powerful way to use push notifications for retargeting is abandoned cart messages. Remember the statistic earlier on of the 4.8% average add-to-cart rate for Shopify stores? It’s estimated that around 70% of these potential customers abandoned their cart before completing the sale. If this can be improved - even by a few percentage points - it has a big effect on how much money you can make from your dropshipping store.

Set up an automated abandoned cart message for shoppers. This is usually done in a sequence of three messages. The first is sent shortly after the purchase is abandoned. The next two are sent within 24 hours of the attempted purchase.

The beauty of this is that you set up the message, specify the time frames, and then let it work for you.

Push notifications work best here as they are less expensive, highly visible, and are triggered faster than SMS notifications because they’re not reliant on personal details like email addresses and telephone numbers. If a visitor abandons their cart before providing these details, your push notification can still be sent.

Push Notification To Boost Your Average Order Value

It’s not just the conversion rate you can influence with push notifications. Increasing the value of a customer’s average order is also achievable with push notifications.

It can be done a couple of ways, but all boil down to either influencing the customer to buy more or purchasing more expensive items that deliver a bigger profit to you.

Cross-selling is a tactic used to great effect by Amazon. Customers are encouraged to purchase complementary items for the one they originally wanted. It’s simple and effective. Push notifications can be used to show products that work with the original item placed in a cart.

Up-selling is another effective way to increase orders by letting a customer know a similar yet more expensive item may fit their needs better.

Bundling products encourages customers to buy multiple items in one go. Subscription eCommerce stores often do this very well.

Promotions using a discount with a threshold is an excellent way to periodically boost sales with promotions. Encouraging customers to spend more to receive a discount is a common tactic used by both eCommerce store owners and brick and mortar businesses - because it works. Promotional push notifications can include countdown counters to add a sense of urgency. Discounts can be automatically applied at the checkout too, which is helpful for your customer. 

Shopify Plus store Pura Vida Bracelets uses daily deals to encourage their subscribers to return and spend more when they do with various discounted deals sent each morning to their subscribers.

It costs up to 25 times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain and improve the lifetime value of your existing customers. Push notifications are an effective way to make the most of the traffic already coming to your Shopify store. By re-engaging visitors, reminding almost all customers of their abandoned carts, and enticing new visitors to make a purchase with welcome messages and deals, you can improve your conversion rate and average order value. Push notifications are one of the simplest and most effective ways you can build valuable relationships with customers. This ultimately results in you making more money from dropshipping - just with a few simple ecommerce retargeting strategies that work.

Making the most of your Shopify Store visitors isn’t hard. With a little thought, a retargeting strategy can use automated push notifications to build better relationships with customers and trust in your brand. In turn, this can improve the average order value along with your conversion rates. Push notifications for promotional deals, lifecycle messages, or abandoned cart reminders help you capture more of the 4.8% of visitors who add things to their cart.