Scale Your Shopify Store With HubSpot

For an eCommerce business, revenue can be calculated by multiplying three variables: number of customers X average order size X average order frequency. While this equation isn’t rocket science, too many eCommerce businesses focus all their efforts on the first lever (total customers), and do not pay enough attention to the other variables.

In reality, all of the levers are important, and often the efforts with the best return are not related to new customer acquisition. Plus, if you are looking to invest more in new customer acquisition, then it is only logical to first ensure you have effective strategies for getting those new customers to make a bigger purchase (average order size), and to rebuy at a higher rate (frequency). Otherwise, you are missing out on opportunities to generate more revenue from the new customers you are working so hard to acquire.

To illustrate the business math some more, let’s use an example scenario. If an eCommerce business wants to double their revenue, it’s harder (and less cost effective) to try and double total customers. Whereas an increase of 33% across all three variables will actually more than double revenue for the business (see below).

100 customers X 3 orders on average X $30 average order size = $9,000

200 customers X 3 orders on average X $30 average order size = $18,000

130 customers X 4 orders on average X $40 average order size = $20,800

This post is meant to equip you with both the tools & tactics you need to improve each of these metrics. Meaning, you'll gain some new ideas on how to covert more customers, increase purchase frequency, and boost your average order size.

With the ultimate goal of growing your Shopify business with HubSpot.

Let's get started.

Marketing Hub

1. Attract shoppers to the store.

Tools Used: Social Media, Ads, SEO

Objective: In order for an eCommerce business to be successful, you need to find channels to engage with new prospective buyers and bring those prospects to your store. The tactics below highlight tried-and-true channels where a store can find & be found by their target audience, with the tools available in HubSpot that can help with the execution of these tactics.

1. First, as all marketers know, it’s critically important to have an intimate understanding of your company’s target personas. Further, it’s also critical to know your products and why shoppers buy your products.
2. With an intimate knowledge of your target buyers & your products, you have a great foundation for launching social media profiles and content that attracts & resonates with your target market. Don’t feel the need to only post glamor shots of your products in use, look for topics your audience also cares about and would want to see in their social feed. For example, if you sell pet grooming supplies, don’t just post photos of your grooming supply products, share photos of people’s pets, reshare pet-related content, participate in giveaways with other pet companies.
3. Pro Tip: Instagram and TikTok tend to generate the best return for eCommerce businesses. Those platforms are better for showcasing products, brands seem to still get organic visibility in people’s feeds, and once you have enough followers you can create shoppable posts that make it easy for someone to buy from you.
4. HubSpot’s social tools help make publishing across networks easier to manage, give rich analytics into what posts are resonating and which aren’t, and allow you to monitor the activity of competitors (Enterprise) and relevant conversations happening on Twitter.
5. In addition to building an organic social presence, paid ads can be a cost effective channel for attracting new, qualified traffic to the store’s site. Meta's custom audience targeting is a great way to leverage your current customer data, to attract more customers like those you already have. On Google, shopping ads can bring visibility to your store’s products as people are actively searching.
6. HubSpot’s ads tool is a great way to sync an audience list for targeting, and keep the information as up-to-date as possible. Furthermore, if you have a large eCommerce store, try further segmenting a customer list into a list of your best customers. As the 80/20 rule says, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers, so why not find more people who look like your best customers, and not just average customers?
7. When creating product pages, product catalogues, and making any other site updates, it’s also important to have SEO best practices in mind. Building a search optimized store will help attract prospective shoppers in the moment they are searching related topics. HubSpot's SEO features and integration with Google Search Console can also better monitor performance, catch site issues, and find opportunities for improvement.

2. Close new customers with relevant products & offers.

Tools used: Landing Pages, Forms, Ads, Email

Objective: Once a prospective shopper hits the store, the website should make it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for, and remove as much friction as possible from the online buying experience. In doing so, you can convert more visitors into customers, and as a bonus, boost the store’s average order size. The strategies below will go into more detail on how this can be done with website best practices and marketing tactics that present shoppers with relevant products & offers.

1. When analyzing a store’s website for more conversion opportunities, the first place to begin is with the products the store is selling. Make sure each product page is following best practices in regard to the product listing details (description, title, imagery, includes reviews), and also that the actual products are organized in a way that it makes it easy for prospective customers to get what they need from your store. Product bundles are a great way to improve the shopping experience, and make it easier for buyer’s to associate their circumstance with what your store is offering. For instance, an online golf store could sell a “beginner's bundle” that includes a golf bag, golf balls, clubs, and a glove. Each of these pieces could be sold separately, but put together in a bundle it makes it easier for the shopper to self-identify (as a “beginner”), and checkout easily with everything they need. They’ve also likely bought more than they might have otherwise, thus increasing your store’s average order size.
2. Seasonal products & seasonal bundles are also a great tactic for many stores that can leverage certain holidays or events to drive more urgency. For example, an online flower shop could offer “Valentine’s Day Bundle” with flowers, a vase, and a card. When promoting limited time products, it can be advantageous to have a special splash page that provides more details on the limited time event and links out to a variety of product listing pages. HubSpot landing pages are a good tool for creating these splash pages.
3. Two final tips for the product pages, are to include a guarantee and other recommended products towards the bottom of the page. The guarantee is typically in the form of a “money back guarantee”, and can help remove any friction or remorse a buyer might fear when shopping. Showcasing other recommended products is another great way to increase a customer’s average order size, as they see that product X and product Y are frequency purchased together. If an app solution is needed, Recommendify works well for Shopify stores.
4. Once your store’s product pages are optimized for conversions, the next series of tactics that can help close more customers and increase average order size with the use of relevant offers. One of the most common that you’ve likely seen as an online shopper, is the “orders above $X get Y for free”. The offer in this case is often free shipping, and the amount threshold should be set by each business based on what a reasonably “large” order size is where the company is still making a profit in a worst case scenario. Ideally, the threshold can also equate to the customer adding another item into their cart. So if the store’s items sell for a price between $25-$29.99 each, then a free shipping threshold of orders over $60+ can encourage customers to add 3+ items to their order.
5. Another popular offer for first time visitors / customers, is a welcome offer for new subscribers. In exchange for joining the store’s email list, you can give an offer towards their first order. For example, “subscribe to our newsletter for 10% off your first purchase”. The HubSpot pop-up form feature is a great tool for delivering this type of offer to the right visitors, at the right time. This all comes down to the targeting of the pop-up form, which for starters is controlled by where you choose to display the pop-up. The homepage is actually pretty good real estate for this type of offer, since the offer itself is pretty broad and you can cast a wide net with new visitors on the homepage. Do not target this pop-up on any pages within the cart checkout experience, and consider suppressing from specific product pages where the shopper might already be starting to buy anyways. Never give a discount to someone who was about to buy full price. Next, you can think about when to display this pop-up. One of the best targeting options is when people are showing intent to actually leave the website. It’s a final chance to grab their attention with an offer, before they leave. Lastly, with the more advanced targeting options in the pop-up forms tool, you can control for who you want to target. For instance, first time visitors (sessions = 1) on the website.
6. Once a shopper hits a product page and starts a shopping cart, the next two tactics will aim to convert as many as possible by reducing browse & cart abandonment. First, browse abandoners are those who visit the site, browse products, but leave the site before starting a cart. Retargeting ads are a great way to stay top-of-mind with these shoppers, and look to bring them back to convert. Meta has a strong retargeting solution with dynamic ads, and major ecommerce platforms like Shopify make it simple to integrate a collection of products so retargeting ads can include images of the products a visitor was browsing.
7. Next, for visitors who start a shopping cart and leave the website, abandoned cart email reminders & offers are another way to bring shoppers back to the site to complete their purchase. With the Shopify integration, setting up abandon cart emails is easy to do. Typically, the first reminder email is sent between 4-24 hours after the cart is abandoned. This email should act as a simple reminder, and nudge the shopper to complete their purchase before their shopping cart is lost. If you’d like to include an offer incentive, consider only doing so in additional follow-up emails. At that point, you are in serious risk of losing the full-price sale. For instance, a second email sent 1-2 days after the cart is abandoned could feature a limited time discount code to complete their purchase. After another delay, if the order still hasn’t been completed a final offer can include an even higher discount (like the discount plus free shipping). This concept is called a discount ladder where you start with small (or no) discounts, and progressively offer more to get someone to complete a purchase. Ideally they act early, but the longer they wait the less likely they are to convert, thus the increased offers to try and spur action.

3. Nurture customers to make more purchases.

Tools Used: Email, Workflows, Ads, Integrations

Objective: The purpose of this last group of marketing tactics is to increase a customer’s number of orders. In the equation outlined in the overview, this is represented by the average order frequency variable. Implementing the tactics below will make it easier for customers to rebuy, expose shoppers to other products they might enjoy, and bring back those who start to lapse.

1. Before jumping into the tactics, let’s first set the stage with a visual. The image below shows a customer's buying cycle, from the very beginning on the left side, through active purchasing behavior, and lapsing towards the end on the right side. Across the top are marketing strategies an eCommerce business can look to activate within these different stages. We’ll focus on three strategies within the “active customer” and “lapsing activity” areas of the graphic, but all of these strategies are valuable and worth taking time to review.
   
2. Cross-sell. After a customer’s first purchase is complete, a great way to encourage them to rebuy is by recommending other complimentary products or services. For instance, if a golfer purchased a set of golf clubs, they might be in need of some new club covers as well. Using a segmentation strategy like RFM can help to first identify first time customers, who recently completed a purchase. In this case, “R” i.e. recency would be 0 and “F” i.e. frequency would be 1. Meaning a first time customer just completed a purchase today. In HubSpot, standard eCommerce properties would be orders count and recent deal close date. With this as the starting list or enrollment criteria, contact could then be entered into a workflow that would branch based on products purchased and recommend other product categories for the customer to explore.
3. Replenishment Series. Replenishment reminders are great tactics for businesses with products or services that are consumed or expire and can be repurchased. The timing of a replenishment campaign is all dependent on when the product or service typically needs to be repurchased. For a consumable good, like nutrition bars, a customer would likely eat an entire pack within 1-2 weeks. For other goods, like work gloves, the product might start to deteriorate after 6-months with frequent use. In a real-life example, a HubSpot eCommerce business selling work gloves to safety managers (managers of warehouse workers), knew that teams had to maintain certain workplace standards to pass regulation guidelines. Guidelines mandate worker gloves must be replaced every 180 days. This made for a perfect replenishment campaign, as the countdown around the 180-day expiration provides highly relevant context to safety managers, and the reminder emails make it easy for them to repurchase and maintain compliance with related regulations. Going back to the RFM segmentation framework shared above, in this example “R” i.e. recency of 180 was really the key and building lists and workflows.
4. Win-Back Series. Like replenishment campaigns, win-back campaigns are reminders to customers to repurchase a product. What makes win-back campaigns unique is timing. As the graphic illustrates, win-back campaigns are targeting customers who have really started to lapse and are at-risk to never return again. Effective win-back campaigns recognize these stakes, and communicate with urgency to the lapsing customer. Special limited time offers or discounts can also help to get customers to take the goal action of buying again. Another difference between replenishment emails and win-back emails, is that win-back emails don’t necessarily have to be product or service oriented. It’s just as much (or more) about the customer’s larger relationship with the business. So where a replenishment workflow would either branch based on the product(s) purchase and/or be built as a deal-based workflow, a win-back workflow could simply be a contact-based workflow with no branching that’s centered around lapsing customers (high “R” value). The lapsed customers can also be pulled into a list and used as a custom audience for ad targeting with specialized messaging. And depending on a customer's value (represented by "M" - i.e. monetary spend), a personal outreach from a member of the team could even be worth considering as an ROI-positive effort (see Sales Hub Section 1.4, 1.5 below).
5. Finally, before concluding a section on nurturing strategies, it’s important to recognize a few app add-ons that can also increase a store’s average order frequency. First, are apps that allow customers to subscribe to a product. A popular Shopify app is called Recharge, which enables a store to allow for customers to subscribe and have a product automatically reorder on a set schedule (every 30 days, 60 days, etc). More native Shopify solutions might also suffice for your needs here too. Store owners can also incentivize customers to subscribe by also adding in a recurring discount. This is a great way to lock in recurring revenue and increase the store’s average order frequency. With Shopify, custom tags will be placed on the customer record which also sync to HubSpot. So if a customer has a tag that contains “active”, you’d want to suppress any irrelevant marketing since you know they’ll soon purchase again via the automatic subscription. It’s also a great opportunity to nurture a customer into adding a subscription. For example, after a customer completes their second or third purchase, “F” i.e. frequency is 2 or 3, you could trigger a reminder email that outlines the benefits of subscribing instead of having to visit the site to purchase each time. Loyalty programs can also help incentivize customers to reorder and accrue points towards rewards. Smile.io is one app that integrates with both Shopify & HubSpot making it easier to sync loyalty data.

Sales Hub

1. Manage high value accounts.

Tools Used: CRM, Tasks, Calls, Templates, Sequences, Meetings

Objective: Grow both your B2C and B2B revenue streams. We've covered tactics that mostly pertain to your consumer (B2C) audience. With HubSpot's best-in-class CRM and deep integration with Shopify, you can also better manage your business-to-business (B2B) relationships. These accounts could be distributors, wholesalers, marketplaces reselling your products, and/or large businesses placing bulk orders for their own use. These B2B accounts represent a meaningful source of revenue, so it’s important to manage the relationships closely. Enter: HubSpot Sales Hub.

1. Use Company Records. The first step towards managing B2B relationships effectively in HubSpot, is to properly represent the B2B customers with company records. This is important for effectively segmenting both the B2C and B2B audience inside HubSpot. Most eCommerce platforms view each customer as a unique individual, which is where HubSpot’s CRM can add immediate value by better representing businesses.
2. Set Key Fields. With company records created and all current B2B clients and current prospective businesses represented in the CRM, the next step is to assign ownership. These the team members responsible for managing the relationship with an account. By leveraging the default “company owner” field in HubSpot, there’s out-of-the-box views, reports, notifications and more that are easily enabled. Other key fields to think about are the lead status and lifecycle stage fields on the company record. Ideally, these can be automated based on what's happening with the people at that company (communication, purchase behavior) and give the assigned owner, as well as the leadership team, a quick overview as to what's happening with key accounts.
3. Use Company Views. Use saved views to stay organized inside the CRM. With key fields set (see previous step), an account owner's saved views should include some default “me” views that will only show company records assigned to them. In combination with accounts they own, would be statements including the lead status of their accounts. This will effectively organize accounts into groups - like their 'new' accounts, ‘connected’ accounts where they've established a relationship but there's yet to be a purchase, or conversely ‘bad timing’, ‘bad fit’, ‘unqualified’ etc. for a catch-all view for accounts that have been deprioritized.
4. Use Tasks & Task Queues. Tasks, and task queues, can also help manage outreach, and set reminders for follow-up when someone commits to next steps. For example, if a B2B customer says they plan to place another order next quarter, the owner could create an email follow-up task towards the end of the current quarter / start of the new quarter to check-in with their account contact.
5. Sales Enablement Tools. With B2B relationships effectively organized, let's now focus on the actual outreach your team will be doing. With HubSpot's sales enablement tools, your B2B account owners be more efficient and effective with their outreach.
1. First, be sure everyone has connected their inboxes to HubSpot, and installed the sales plug-in. This will ensure all the sales tools are at your fingertips, and that communication automatically logged to the HubSpot CRM.
2. Making calls from the HubSpot CRM also ensures phone activity is logged automatically, notes, and/or the recording is saved to the related record.
3. Next, build templates for common outreach. For example, templates that follow-up after a free sample was shipped to a prospective B2B account, or a check-in email to see if a company’s first order arrived.
4. Use sequences to automate 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th outreach attempts, so you don’t waste time tracking who hasn’t responded and sending manual follow-up emails. For example, turn the free sample email into a series that nudges the prospect for a reply over the course of a couple weeks.
5. The meetings tool makes scheduling a time to talk a breeze. For instance, if a new B2B customer needs help placing their first bulk order, then the meeting link can make scheduling a frictionless experience.

2. Delight top customers.

Tools Used: Lists, Email, Landing Page, Form

Objective: When applied to eCommerce sales, the Pareto principle (or 80/20 rule) states that 80% of a store’s revenue comes from 20% of customers. With such an outsized portion of sales coming from a small cohort of customers, it’s important to give this group some well deserved attention and extra appreciation. A great way to do this is by starting a VIP program.

1. Segment top customers. First, build an active list of your top customers. The threshold for what constitutes a VIP doesn’t need to be an exact science, you can start by using the RFM framework (specifically, frequency & monetary) to see how many contacts have made at least X many purchases and spent over a total of Y. Look for a list size that’s roughly your top 20% so there’s a large enough cohort to engage, while still feeling exclusive & earned to those invited.
2. Create a VIP registration form. Since these are your best customers, the invitation to join the VIP program is a unique opportunity to not only surprise & delight, but also to solicit feedback in return. When creating the VIP enrollment experience, first create a landing page and form that explains the benefits of becoming a VIP and asks the customer to opt-in via completing the form to unlock the benefits described on the page. You’ll want to skillfully balance the amount of questions you ask and how you ask them, to make the VIP enrollment form not feel like they are taking a survey. For instance, if the VIP package includes a choice of swag or a free t-shirt, then asking them to confirm which gift they’d like or to respond with their shirt size are both logical questions to ask. Then as a continuation, asking these VIPs what they love about your brand or if there’s anything you can do to improve their experience can be a short and sweet way to gather valuable feedback from your top customers (while still being contextual & relevant).
3. Invite top customers to enroll as VIPs. Once you’ve segmented your group of VIP prospects, the next step is to invite them to enroll in the program. Depending on the size of your customer list, this could be done with a personal touch via a 1:1 email template and/or through a workflow that triggers an email soon after the recent purchase that would have put them over the qualifying threshold. The email should generate some excitement, as they’re receiving an exclusive offer with exclusive perks. If the VIP setup includes a form, then the call-to-action in the email should be to complete their VIP profile, complete VIP registration, accept their VIP nomination, or something of the sort.
4. Deliver special perks. A VIP program wouldn’t be complete without the added perks. Some example ideas for VIP perks could include access to special offers or content (like VIP-only offers, or insider access to a company newsletter including sneak peeks of new products in development). VIP offers could also include priority access to the support, like a “VIP-only” phone line or prioritization of VIP tickets in the queue. Or the classic, SWAG gifts that everyone loves. Bonus points if the gift is on-brand (for example, a branded coffee mug could be a great VIP giveaway for a company selling coffee beans).
5. Analyze VIP profiles. As always, the last step for any strategy is to analyze how it’s working, make improvements, and then repeat the process. In this case, it’s also important to analyze the actual VIP responses given on the registration form. Your best customers will have great feedback for what else they’d like to see from your brand, and be able to provide unique insights on what they love about your brand.

3. Report on store sales, top customers, accounts and products.

Tools Used: Analytics Tools, Reports, Dashboards

Objective: While reporting isn’t solely a function of Sales Hub, we’ll take an opportunity in this section to dive into some valuable reports for eCommerce businesses can glean from HubSpot. These reports will help you monitor everything from your site performance, to insights into your B2C and B2B audiences, to analyses on what products are selling, and combinations thereof.

1. eCommerce Dashboard. Before jumping into custom reports, it’s worth noting the Shopify <> HubSpot integration has an eCommerce dashboard. The dashboard comes pre-built with reports that are worth reviewing as a starting point.
2. Site Performance Reports. Another modified analytics view that’s helpful for eCommerce businesses is the traffic analytics contact conversion rate. When viewed overtime, the conversion rate provides an insightful trendline into how different sources and/or changes to the website itself are impacting the store’s overall conversion rates. Did a promotion on the homepage drive conversions? Is the new design layout leading to more purchases? These are questions this report can help answer at a glance.
3. Custom Customer Reports. In addition to the out-of-the-box source reports, the customized contacts report below is a helpful way to analyze the three key eCommerce growth metrics presented at the onset - average order value (AOV), average number of purchases, and total number of customers. This could be a simple chart that just shows the metrics themselves, or a more visual representation of these metrics by another factor (i.e. source data). Pro tip: make sure you’ve filtered for the right data in the report. For example, if HubSpot contains both B2C and B2B contacts, you’d want to filter for just the consumer contacts for a “B2C” view as the B2B contacts could artificially boost metrics like AOV.
4. Custom Company Reports. Like the custom contacts reports, company reports can also be used to analyze growth metrics among the B2B audience. More traditional company reports, like views of which accounts have spent the most. Views of revenue by industry, company size, or other standard company properties might sound like straightforward company reports, but for an eCommerce business that just started using a CRM these B2B insights can be invaluable for understanding who the best B2B customers are and what those companies look like.
5. Custom Product Reports. With the Shopify integration, a product library will be created in HubSpot and incoming orders will have product line items attached to each record. With cross-object reports in HubSpot, you can use order & product information to visualize which products are driving the most revenue, which are purchased most often, and more. These insights can be used by a store to know which products to highlight on the homepage, and other highly-traffic pages like a product listing page.

Service Hub

1. Drive more sales with faster responses.

Tools Used: Conversations, Templates, Snippets

Objective: In the online shopping world, sales move fast. A visitor on your website can convert into a paying customer in a matter of minutes. In some cases, however, a prospective customer needs a key question answered prior to a sale. If those questions are answered, they are likely to purchase. If not, they might leave the site and likely not return again. Thankfully HubSpot’s conversations tool comes equipped with a universal inbox and live chat capabilities, so your team can offer shoppers an easy way to get in touch and for you to answer them quickly to drive more sales.

1. Get started with conversations. When getting started, you’ll first need to configure the inbox and connect your communication channels. While the bullets below will focus on setting up live chat on your store’s website, it’s also worth noting that an email alias, website form, phone line, or even a Facebook Messenger Account can be connected to the conversations inbox. This can give your team gained efficiencies by reducing the number of places they need to use to respond to questions.
2. Create a chatflow. Once you’ve configured your inbox and invited your team to the account, you can get started building a chatflow. Follow the instructions linked here to create a standard live chat window that appears with a welcome message. You should specify when the live chat appears, which users are assigned, and more based on what is realistic for your team. Do not offer live chat if your team can’t reply. This is setting up for a poor user experience.
3. Page targeting. Another setting that’s worth highlighting separately is the targeting options for chatflows. The default will be for the chatflow to display on all pages. Instead of this default, consider limiting the live chat to appear on only high-intent pages. This could be a collection or product listing page, and also on the individual product pages. These are areas on the website where a customer might have a specific question prior to sale.
4. Use snippets. Snippets are a great way for your team to save time on every live chat conversation. These pre-built messages can easily be called into a chat conversation via a shortcut # name that your team can create. Examples of helpful snippets are a “welcome” message that includes a nice introduction, a “goodbye” message that wraps the conversation neatly, and any other responses to FAQs in-between.
5. Analyze live chat conversations. Speaking of frequently asked questions (FAQs), it’s important to analyze the common questions your team is receiving through live chat. If you see trends, consider updating the product page itself to proactively answer inquiries many visitors are thinking about. Chances are that if more than a couple people ask a question via live chat, it’s safe to assume that others are also wondering about the same thing and are leaving the website because they can’t find an answer.
6. Report on team performance. In addition to analyzing incoming questions, it’s also important to monitor team performance to ensure live chat inquiries are being resolved effectively & efficiently. These default reports provide good insight as a starting point, with “Average Chat Response Time by Assignee” as one view that can help hold the team accountable to fast response rates (ideally less than a minute).
7. Experiment With AI. As part of HubSpot's Breeze suite of products, a teams have access to a new Customer Support Agent. The idea is that AI can provide immediate, accurate responses to commonly asked questions by accessing libraries of content you've amassed. We're still relatively early in this new age of AI, and AI is only as good as the data you are feeding it. So don't jump to this step before you've done the requisite work of first speaking with customers yourself and assembling the right answers to common questions. Even then, consider your AI launch an experiment, with close supervision required.

2. Survey customers for product reviews.

Tool Used: Feedback Surveys, Connected Apps

Objective: A key step towards moving from funnel to flywheel, is to treat customers as an input to future growth instead of a sales output from the past. By providing a delightful experience and finding your delighted customers, you can proactively ask them to promote your business and crank the flywheel faster.

1. In the world of eCommerce, promotion can mean a few things, but we’ll focus on promotion in the form of customer advocacy through positive product reviews. Why does this matter? More positive product reviews, leads to new prospective buyers having more confidence, which leads to higher conversion rates on product pages, and ultimately, more sales.
2. First, before getting into the specifics, it’s important to understand the different types of surveys that exist and are available with HubSpot’s feedback tool (NPS, CSAT, CES). Read this blog post to learn more.
3. To gauge how happy an eCommerce customer is, there’s two types that make sense to use. Which you choose, depends on when it’s being sent and to who it’s being sent to.
4. Loyalty surveys (NPS) are a popular choice for understanding a customer’s overall satisfaction with your brand. This makes more sense to send to customers who have been around longer, and to trigger the timing of the send between purchases. For example, customers with recency “R” around 15-30 days, frequency “F” above 2+, and monetary “M” at a high enough threshold to indicate they were decent size purchases. This indicates a good time to check-in with repeat customers, and see how happy they are with your brand. If they respond positively, follow-up to see if they’ll leave a product review on the website.
5. Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) on the other hand, are better for understanding a customer’s disposition after a more specific event. For eCommerce businesses, this is typically used to measure their satisfaction with the buying experience and/or actual product they received days later. Using the RFM framework again, this could be a recency “R’ of 0 or just a few days post-purchase. Again, depending on the customer’s response to the post-purchase survey, decide whether or not you’d like to invite them to leave a review on the site.
6. Lastly, it’s also worth noting there are popular app extensions for eCommerce surveys. One app in particular, Yotpo, makes it easy to send surveys post-sale and even easier for customers to leave a review after clicking their rating from within the email. Yotpo also has an integration with HubSpot (link here). If your goal is to get as many reviews as possible, Yotpo is a great tool for sending post-purchase surveys. With HubSpot surveys, you can also isolate those that had a positive experience and invite them to leave a review on the website, meaning smaller quantity but higher quality.

3. Track customer cases to improve customer experience.

Tool Used: Tickets, Tasks, Workflows, Reporting

Objective: With HubSpot conversations, all incoming inquiries from customers across live chat, email, form fills, and even Facebook Messenger can be replied to from one inbox. For some channels and/or types of inquiries it can also be advantageous for organizations to more formally track customer cases. By doing so, teams can track response times, resolution times, common categories of cases, cases volume over time, and more. This helps management ensure they have the right staff, available at the right times, trained to give the right responses. The result is faster, better responses to customers and a more remarkable customer experience that’s likely to foster brand loyalists and advocates.

1. To get started with tickets, first review how tickets are created. You should decide how you want tickets created in the account, whether manually by service reps, automatically via HubSpot, or some combination of the two. For eCommerce businesses, there tends to be a larger customer base and therefore more potential for incoming questions. Finding an automation solution for ticket creation is likely going to be the most productive for the team.
2. If your account has Service Hub Professional or Enterprise, you should also review the ticket pipeline and decide if it makes sense to create multiple pipelines so that there can be unique stages within each for distinctly different types of cases. Otherwise, customer or default ticket properties will likely be enough to manage in one pipeline.
3. Beyond ticket creation, you should also look for opportunities for automation to reduce the amount of manual work the service reps need to do. Here’s a related article on how to automate the ticket status property as an example. This not only saves reps time, but also creates more consistency across the team so it’s easier for managers to check-in on their team.
4. With ticket creation & automation complete, the next step is to ensure the reps are equipped with saved views that will help them manage their individual ticket pipelines. This article provides an overview for the board page, which reps should review as they’re getting started to learn the fundamentals of how to find and manage tickets.
5. Tasks and task queues are another great way of driving efficiency and guiding the team to action tickets that require their attention. For example, a ticket that's been waiting on a response for more than a couple days. Or a ticket that's been responded to, but you haven't heard back from the inquirer to know if they received the answer they needed.
6. As you are triggering routine tasks, you should also consider leveraging templates & sequences at the same time. These moments of standard follow-up are perfect for prebuilt templates or sequences, so the team can action their ticket-related tasks even faster.
7. Finally, with the ticket process implemented and the service team diligently addressing cases in HubSpot, reports and report dashboards will aggregate the most important metrics and bring new insights to the team. To get started, checkout the default service dashboard and customize as needed for your business.

Before we end, let's do a quick summary of what we've covered.

First and foremost, eCommerce businesses need to rethink their formula for growth.

Growing your customer base is only one part of the equation. Increasing average order size and order frequency are both just as important as growing your number of customers.

With HubSpot, you have a suite of tools that can help you improve all three of these metrics. Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub.

This post provided you with both the tactics and the tools you need to better leverage Shopify and HubSpot together.

With the ultimate goal of growing your eCommerce business.

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