To grow, brands need new ways to connect with potential and current consumers. With a series of updates, Shopify wants to respond to this. In this article, we would like to give you an overview of the most relevant updates.

Reach valuable prospects with Shopify Audiences

Finding new customers through digital ads has not only become more difficult, but also more expensive. To counteract this, Shopify Audiences has been developed. This new application makes it possible to identify your “next best customers” and collect them into an audience. Concretely, based on machine learning, Shopify will generate a list of consumers who are likely to buy the type of product you want to sell more of. These “high intent” consumers can then be directly targeted on advertising platforms like Facebook, which makes it very interesting from a digital marketing perspective.

Some advantages of Shopify Audiences are an improvement of the overall targeting strategy (reaching more qualitative lookalikes), a decrease in the acquisition costs, and an improvement in the return on ad spend.

For your information, Shopify Audiences is currently only included in Shopify Plus.

Boost conversion by combining discounts

Discounts encourage consumers to buy more and more often. By combining discounts, you can create even more attractive offers. Which promotions can you implement? Combine multiple automatic discounts in one order, combine automatic discounts with free shipping or let shoppers apply a combination of discount codes themselves at the checkout.

Some examples are:

• Multiple automatic discounts: spend €100 on t-shirts and get 10% off, and spend €150 on trousers and get 20% off.
• Automatic discount combined with free shipping: “2 for 1” on a certain product category, with free shipping for orders over €100.

(Shopify, 2022)

Manage the core aspects of your business with Metafields

Metafields sound technical, but they are easy to understand. At their core, they are about adding extra information that is not present in Shopify’s platform by default, but is necessary for your business to grow. After all, every business has specific needs that are unique to its products, customers and business goals. Ultimately, Metafields is about sharing the right content with the right audience in the right context.

Example: La Boutique Moso, a beauty retailer, uses Metafields to provide additional context about products. The Metafields work as a tagging system, classifying product types into easily sortable categories that are accessible via the search function. This makes it possible to filter products based on skin type, skin problem, durability, and so on. Metafields not only boost conversion but also improve SEO search results as Google’s search engine crawls content stored in Shopify’s Metafields.

Stay in close contact with your consumers with Shopify Inbox

It would be a hassle to monitor communication with consumers on individual platforms. That’s why Shopify has made having conversations easier by centralizing all chats in one place. Retailers can choose to enable the chat feature on the website, as well as merge conversations from Facebook, Instagram, or other messaging systems.

You can find all updates of Shopify Editions ’22 here.

Do you have any questions about these updates? The Dotters would love to hear from you!