Imagine if in 1908 after building the Model T, top management at Ford declared:

“We have built the ultimate in automobiles. Further improvement is impossible. Therefore, all experimental engineering and designing activities are hereby permanently terminated.”

I wonder how long a car company would have survived with an attitude like that (or how long one would survive today as we move into alternative energy sources, self-driving cars, and more).

Successful people and successful businesses live with one question in the forefront of their mind:

“How can I improve the quality of what I’m doing? How can I make this better?”

Absolute perfection as a human being, a business, a product, or a website is unattainable. That may seem discouraging at first until you realize that means there is endless room for improvement.

The most successful people and businesses know this. Because of that, they are always searching for a better way.

But unless we have a plan for making those continuous improvements, it is easy to fall victim to ‘the status quo’ or to have your energy & resources pulled exclusively to what is ‘urgent’ rather than what is truly important.

The Monthly Improvement Plan

It is easy to get caught up in all the demands of your business to the point that you lose sight of the key elements of growth that truly drive your revenue & profit higher.

In the book Profit Hacking, I divided growth into three distinct elements:

• Traffic (the number of visitors who come to your website)
• Conversion (the percentage of visitors who convert into customers by making a purchase)
• Economics (the lifetime value of a customer)

Those are the three levers you can move to grow your revenue. You can increase the number of visitors your website gets, you can get more of your visitors to take the action(s) you want them to take, and you can get customers to buy more items (or buy more frequently or create new customers for you via word of mouth).

Because you spend so much time and energy working in, working on, and thinking about your business, you (and members of your team) come up with great ideas all the time about how to improve the performance in those areas….

….but the majority of those ideas end up in the “Good Idea Graveyard” (that sad place where things that would grow your business go when they get lost in the shuffle or never get prioritized & executed)….

….or I’m sure you’ve at some point or another hired an employee, contractor, or consultant to some kind to help execute an idea – – with the results sometimes being great and other times…..not so much….

To ensure you don’t lose any of your team’s ideas, create a simple Google Doc (or any shareable document – – word doc or spreadsheet will do) that your team has access to. You (or anyone else) can drop in any ideas you have during the month so they are there for your review each month.

You can make notes and house ideas for how to improve your business in the doc and then once a month, have two non-negotiable hours blocked off with key members of your team to review the ideas and figure out how to put the most solid ones to use.

You Often Find What You Are Looking For

If I asked you what you find annoying about your family members, I bet it wouldn’t be too difficult to rattle off a couple things pretty quickly. And it would likely affect your mood and how you (temporarily) feel about those family members.

But if I asked you what you love most about your family members, my guess is that you would swell with warmth as you listed off their most endearing qualities.

You can always find evidence or reasons to support what it is you’re focusing on. You can always come up with possible answers for the questions you ask yourself.

Be sure to ask yourself constructive questions – – especially when you’re feeling stuck as far as how to grow your business.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Where do my customers spend their time online? How can my business be present there and engage them so that they visit the site?
• What questions and concerns do my visitors have when visiting our site? How can our design, layout, images, and copy address those questions and concerns more effectively?
• Is there a complementary product (or service) our customers need regularly we can offer that would lead them to making purchases from us more frequently?

The #1 Reason Your Shopify Store Isn’t Making More Money….

From (frequent) personal experience, I know what it feels like to read an article that makes me want to take an action (even if that action is to follow a planning process that will lead to more focused, productive actions) but for me to not ever take the first necessary step to make reading that article anything more than entertainment (at best….a waste of time at worst).

Because of that, I took a couple minutes to set up a Google Doc in both Word format and Spreadsheet format for you to copy and share with your team.

Pick whichever makes more sense to you (I personally prefer the Word doc).

This all leads us to the climax of this article – – the #1 reason why your Shopify Store isn’t making more money….

It’s because not enough of your time and attention is on the Conversion portion of your Shopify Store.

You’d have to have been living in an underground nuclear fallout shelter with Christopher Walken (Blast From The Past reference….anyone….oh fine….) for the past few years to not have heard about A/B testing and conversion optimization and how it can increase your Shopify sales.

You probably think it’s a good idea to be doing it and you may even be putting in effort within your team or by hiring outside service providers to execute.

The problem is that there is a steep learning curve involved with A/B testing and it is demotivating to start.

I am all too familiar with the feeling of deeply knowing I should be doing something but that the time, energy, effort, and potentially money involved in starting is too great of a hurdle to overcome….there are only 24 hours in a day after all….

However, I wholeheartedly believe that every business that is serious about growth needs to be actively running at least one A/B test on their website at all times.

A/B testing is one of the surest ways to put your business in a position to experience those continuous improvements we talked about at the beginning. Even if a test you run “loses”, you will still learn something valuable about your visitors (about what they like or don’t like, about what resonates with them, etc).

It isn’t so much how your site looks & performs when it is first designed + built that matters. It’s what you learn and how you put that to use in order to improve from there that counts most.

Bigger success calls for business executives who continually set higher standards for how effectively their company runs. For Shopify Store owners, a huge part of that is in finding ways to improve the conversion rate of their website.

Top success is reserved for those with the attitude and understanding there is always room for improvement and the sooner the commitment to continuous growth is made, the better.

Building & designing a website only to rarely (if ever) run tests on it to improve how well it communicates with and serves your visitors is akin to Ford if they never innovated or improved beyond the Model T.

Every time you run an A/B test, you not only will gain valuable insight into your customers but you give yourself the opportunity to have a significant impact on your bottom line.

My team & I have seen single winning tests increase a Shopify Store’s conversion rate by 5%, 10%, and even up to around 20%.

When you increase your conversion rate, you are getting more from the traffic you already have. That means conversion increases lead not only to an increase in revenue but lead to an even larger increase in profit.

If you are not currently seriously engaged in A/B testing your site (by which I mean you are doing no A/B testing or your team is casually invested in the process), I encourage you make that the #1 item under ‘Conversion’ in your Monthly Improvement Plan.

To help you get the most out of A/B testing and help your Shopify Store reach its full potential, I have two invitations for you:

For those of you who don’t actively engage in conversion optimization activities like A/B testing, there are multiple valid reasons why the majority of Shopify Stores aren’t already doing CRO (conversion rate optimization).

That means you are in good company and it’s actually in a way good news if you’re experiencing success even without the benefits of CRO activity now or in the past. It means your profits can really start seeing significant growth faster than you may have previously thought possible with some conversion improvements.

Here are some of the main reasons why only the ‘early adopter’ Shopify Store owners are currently doing CRO (which means the sooner you get started, the larger of an edge you can gain on the early majority, late majority, and the laggards) :

• It can be difficult to set up and begin these activities.
• The experience, knowledge, and necessary skillsets may not exist on your team.
• You may not know what you should test (let alone how to actually properly execute a test).
• You may worry about messing up one or more of the moving technological pieces and temporarily screw up your site
• The possibility does exist that you’ll run tests that perform worse than what already exists on your site and those will cause you to actually lose revenue

For two years, Conversion For Good has helped Shopify Stores avoid these issues by handling the entire process for them.

In the past, the only way to work with us was by agreeing to a 6 month, $60,000 contract for our services. We guarantee at least 100% ROI on that service and are proud to say we’ve blown way past that ROI benchmark for every client.

But we have recently created a new way of working with clients that has been generating a lot of excitement. It has been called “an absolute no brainer” (and the client roster is filling up fast as past clients as well as potential clients from the past two years (who at various points seriously considered paying my team $10K+ per month) are taking me up on this offer at an astonishing rate so far).

If you are currently earning at least $100,000 per month through your Shopify Store, you may be a good partner for us. If you and/or your business exists to help make the lives of others & the world a better place, you may be a perfect partner for us.

Fill out the contact form on this page or email Sheila Herrera* with a little bit about you, your business, and your conversion goals to get the conversation started (and get your Shopify store on the path to increased conversions, revenue, and profits).

* in case the mailto:sheila@conversionforgood.com link doesn’t work, you can reach Sheila at sheila@conversionforgood.com

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If you aren’t yet ready to contact us to potentially partner (and/or you don’t have a Shopify Store and instead use other platforms, business models, payment processors, etc but knew the lessons of this post are insightful for many more business owners outside the world of Shopify), a great place to start is with my book Profit Hacking.

If for no other reason than to see the very interesting (and potentially devious muwahahaha) way of offering a digital product you can craft with a combination of Amazon + gumroad.

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And if you aren’t convinced that reading more of my words will help you make a lot more money than what I’m asking for with the above Profit Hacking offer, then may I interest you in some of my other favorite content on the site:

• The Dan Martell Series (the one where Dan goes Ham!)
• Run The Mile You’re In (lessons from running the 2015 Chicago marathon)

And if you would like to join my Insiders family, you’ll get in on one of the most talented, most interesting, and most extraordinary communities* in the universe (well the marketing + personal development ones at least)

* Superlatives taken from the LEGO Movie’s ‘The Special’ (if you haven’t seen that movie….go now and watch it….well join the Insiders and then go watch it…..check Netflix…maybe Redbox?)

Alright, thank you for reading all this – – I really do appreciate that you took the time to read my words. If you want more of them, I’ve offered a few wonderful options (including one where you get to choose how much you pay for a value packed Profit Hacking bundle and one where you get a unique insight into my marketing mind & personal search for my truth that is free-ninety-nine).

Hope to get to know you & hear about your business / mission!

Even if you choose to not take me up on either of these two invitations, I hope this article proves to be much more than “entertainment” and propels your business to greater success.

– Steven Daar