"Growth is Making Friends" — How to Become Friends with Your Customers Using Shopify
How can you grow your commerce business?
At StoreHero, we provide a Shopify-specialized growth hacking support service called Commerce Hack to many commerce operators.
Through this work, we arrived at one conclusion: growth is about making friends.
Rather than simply selling products, by becoming friends with your customers, they not only buy from you — they also spread the word about your products to those around them on your behalf.
So how do you become friends with your customers?
In this post, we introduce the first steps you can take to build a growing base of close, loyal customers.
StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support business growth through detailed operations that manual workflows can't handle, as well as large-scale execution of growth initiatives.
If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction materials here
Gifting
If you've just launched your Shopify store and have no customers yet, one approach is to find influencers or potential target customers on Instagram and other platforms, and gift them your products to build a connection.
By looking at posts and followers on Instagram and YouTube, you can identify people who seem like a good fit for your brand and reach out with a gifting offer.
Paid tools like HypeAuditor and analisa.io make it easy to analyze followers on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts, saving you the time of researching manually.
Once you've gifted someone and found a person you can connect with, make sure to communicate actively — ask for their thoughts on the product, get their feedback on product development — and build the relationship properly.
By the way, when gifting, rather than collecting each person's address individually and arranging shipping, you can issue a 100% discount coupon from Shopify and send the coupon code to that person — this lets them complete a standard order flow, making the process much more efficient.
Since gifting is often done at scale, streamline these operations so you have enough time to focus on meaningful communication.
Website Features
Featuring customers on your website is an effective way to build closer relationships.
In particular, interview articles are easy to create, so we highly recommend giving them a try.
By interviewing customers not just about their impressions and how they use the product, but also about their values and outlook, you can deepen the relationship significantly.
To conduct interviews efficiently, some people send a list of questions by email and collect responses — but if your priority is building a genuine connection, doing it in person is the better approach.
Beyond interviews, creating a collection page featuring a customer's favorite products is also an effective strategy.
By using Shopify's collection feature to create a curated collection of a customer's favorite products — and including their comments and reasons for choosing each item — you end up with content that also drives sales. Customers will likely share it too.
Shopify's Blog and collection features make this easy to set up, so give it a try.
Live Streaming
Communicating in real time via live streaming is a great way to build closer connections.
With live streaming, customers can directly experience the host's face and voice, which allows you to build rapport much more quickly than communicating through text or photos.
Collaboration streams are also a great way to build relationships with your co-hosts.
Live streaming is exciting, but there's a certain tension in knowing you can't re-record. When you push through that tension and successfully complete a stream, something like a real friendship tends to form.
Live streaming is an effective method not only for connecting with viewers, but also for building relationships with collaboration partners.
Surveys
Surveys are another effective way to build connections.
By reviewing survey responses, if you find someone who has answered with genuine passion about your brand or products, you can reach out to them individually and invite them to participate in an interview, a live stream collaboration, and more.
Rather than reaching out blindly, you can focus your communication on people who seem like a great fit — making it much easier to execute the kinds of strategies we've introduced so far.
Personally, I use Typeform for surveys. The UI is more user-friendly than Google Forms, and it makes it easy to build logic that changes questions based on previous answers — very convenient.
Members-Only Events
Hosting members-only events and networking gatherings is also highly effective.
Zanerobe is a great example of a brand that built customer relationships by hosting DJ events.
Zanerobe is an apparel brand — they don't sell music-related products. Yet they chose to host a DJ event as a way to deepen their relationships with customers.
SaaS companies like Salesforce are well known for leveraging event marketing aggressively, and we can expect commerce operators to increasingly adopt event marketing strategies going forward.
Executing CRM Operations with StoreHero
StoreHero supports merchants on Shopify who are facing challenges growing their sales, by helping them execute growth initiatives thoroughly and consistently.
For CRM initiatives as well, we leverage our growth platform StoreHero to enable highly granular operations — such as personalized product recommendations and targeted offers via email, LINE, and customer account pages, all driven by purchase history, customer attributes, and product/SKU performance and inventory data — achieving the kind of detailed execution and large-scale initiative rollout that is simply not feasible with manual operations, and supporting continuous, sustainable growth.
We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with CRM or growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to reach out. Learn more about our free store diagnosis here
Summary
We introduced the first initiatives to take when it comes to becoming friends with your customers.
Make good use of gifting, website features, live streaming, surveys, and events to build genuine connections with your customers — and turn those connections into growth.
At StoreHero, we carry out these kinds of initiatives together with Shopify merchants. I personally take part in live streams and interviews myself — and compared to adjusting ad settings, directly engaging with people face-to-face is a lot more fun.
I hope you'll give these strategies a try as well.