Double your revenue with the visitors you already have!

Improving conversion rates is the biggest challenge for online stores because there’s so much potential to be gained. The primary challenge for many online entrepreneurs is boosting conversions. And rightfully so, because if you can increase your conversion rate, you can afford to pay more for a click in Google, allowing you to profitably target higher-volume keywords. Alternatively, your marketing budget remains the same, and your profitability soars.

Either way, there’s a lot to gain. But why do so many conversion improvement attempts fail?
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What You’ll Get from This Article

In this article, I will outline the five obstacles that prevent you from doubling your revenue and share the 2x growth formula that I use. I will, of course, explain how to overcome these five obstacles. Revenue growth is hard work, make no mistake about it. However, I’m giving you 12 tips, each of which you can implement yourself in just 30 minutes. This way, you can immediately get started and move closer to achieving your goals!
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Start by Tackling the Low-Hanging Fruit

In addition to the significant gains to be made, many online entrepreneurs are leaving revenue on the table. That’s a shame because a few simple, effective tweaks can unlock this potential revenue. Read on to see if this applies to your webshop as well. I’ll show you how to double your online revenue without investing more in traffic and explain the underlying theory for you in broad strokes.

Growing an online store is a multifaceted discipline with great depth. That’s what makes it so interesting, but it also makes it challenging to get right. As a busy entrepreneur, you don’t have time for lengthy explanations, so here’s a summary to give you new insights that you can put into action right away to increase your revenue.
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Five Obstacles that Hinder Online Store Growth (and How to Overcome Them)

In my work as a Conversion Optimization & Growth Specialist, I help online entrepreneurs achieve their growth objectives every day.

Every entrepreneur has that goal on the horizon. I’m sure you do too. Whatever your objective may be, it’s likely growth. Because growth is a motivating factor for entrepreneurs, we even named our company after it: Polaris Growth is the North Star – your guiding point on the horizon.

Unfortunately, I often see online stores struggling to boost their conversion rates and revenue. This usually happens because they encounter one or more of these five obstacles.
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Obstacle 1: No Time for Growth

A common objection or pain point is a lack of time.

“I don’t have time for growth; we’re already swamped, and no one can afford to focus on growth on top of everything else.”

Or:

“I’m so busy working in my business that I have no time left to work on (the growth of) my business.”

Of course, running an online store takes a lot of time, but often a simple question can save you a lot of work.
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💡Tip 1: Find the Root Cause of Everyday Problems and Solve Them Structurally

When a problem arises, try taking a bit more time the next time it happens. Ask yourself where the problem originated. If you know the root cause, ask yourself: is this likely to happen again?

If a problem threatens to recur within 90 days, make sure you resolve it properly.

By doing this, you're making structural improvements to the processes of your webshop (and back office).

If you keep this up for 4 weeks, you’ll likely solve more than 4 problems that won’t come back again. This will free up time in your business to focus on growth.

💡Start Small – Begin with Just 30 Minutes a Week

Ask yourself which task or activity you can stop doing, so you can use the time saved to take the smallest step towards increasing your conversion rate. Every little bit helps. What can you achieve in that half-hour? The following tips will show you.
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Obstacle 2: Lack of Knowledge and Experience

You’re working hard but focusing on the wrong things, and as a result, you’re not impacting your revenue. “It just doesn’t work for us.” Unfortunately, there are many rookie mistakes that can be made when trying to grow your online store. However, there is a solution.

💡Tip 3: Stay hungry, stay foolish

Keep learning. The more you know, the better your questions become. With your knowledge, you’ll help take your business to the next level. But remember, you don’t have to know or discover everything yourself.

Ask for help

You know your field, and others know theirs. Use that to your advantage—get inspired and supported. Always work with professionals and partner up with someone who truly understands your growth and can focus on it entirely.

💡Tip 4: Use Customer Feedback as a Revenue Booster

Leverage the database of knowledge and experience you receive every day from your current customers.

I believe you already have the necessary knowledge and experience ‘in-house’, but you might be looking in the wrong place. Your customers provide feedback every day!

What are the five most common questions your customer service team receives?

If you have a clear understanding of this, delve deeper the next time you’re in contact with a customer. Can you ask follow-up questions to better understand the problem? Often, these are the first areas you can address.

If you don’t know, make sure you find out. Discuss with your team that for two weeks, you’ll ask every customer one question during interactions. What didn’t work well for the customer? What was unclear? Dig deeper and see if you can resolve these issues.
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Obstacle 3: Too Many Ideas

You can also have too many ideas for growing your business. Without a clear goal, everything seems equally important. However, you lack a clear plan that prioritizes your growth actions. Moreover, not all ideas are good ideas.

Stick to This Rule
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An idea that comes directly from a customer (or multiple customers) is worth more than an idea from a team member who doesn’t regularly order as a customer.

💡Tip 5: View the Funnel Through Your Customer’s Eyes

You might be looking at a different funnel than your customers. To find out, check which portion of your traffic is mobile and what the conversion rate is.

See Your Website Through Your Customer’s Eyes
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One of the first things we do with our clients is ensure that you see the webshop from your customers’ perspective. You work on your desktop, but your customers are (probably) on mobile.
That’s logical because you’re working in an office on a computer. However, this can give a distorted view since your customers might be using mobile devices. In 90% of the B2C webshops we work with, the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices. That’s where the traffic is, and therefore where the opportunities are. Any ideas for desktop alone can probably wait. Fix the issues on mobile first!

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💡Tip 6: How to Identify Which Device Category Brings in the Most Traffic

Check in Shopify (Google Analytics can work too if set up correctly) which device category brings in the most traffic and what the conversion rate is on mobile.If more than 50% of your traffic is on mobile and the conversion rate is lower than on tablet and desktop, navigate through your webshop on an older iPhone (with a smaller screen), a newer iPhone model, and two Android devices. Also, use an older Android device with a smaller screen and a newer one. If you don’t have access to these devices, try using a tool like: www.browserstack.com. 

Shopify is 100% Mobile Ready, but Your Theme Might Not Be

Shopify itself is mobile responsive, but there might be minor styling errors in your theme or custom design tweaks.

If a button is slightly off-screen, a customer can’t place an order. This issue might occur on an older iPhone but not on a newer model. So, go through every step of the funnel with different phones with your entire team.
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Overcome the First Three Obstacles with Focus

Does this sound familiar? How many of these obstacles have you experienced firsthand? As mentioned, you’re not alone, but it can be frustrating. In my experience, the way forward is as follows:

You’ve probably heard this word a hundred thousand times, and I’m going to say it again: F O C U S. The key to your success lies in how you channel your energy into growth. This applies to many things in life (fitness, education, love, career, etc.), and it’s just as true for the success of your webshop. Focus on what’s most important. Here’s how to find the right focus:
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💡Tip 7: Create Focus with This Step-by-Step Plan

1. Set your objective. Take a good look at your goal: what do you want to achieve?
2. Do you want to increase revenue? Alright, but by how much? What should your conversion rate be? What’s your target average order value? Higher conversion, great. But how much higher? When will you be satisfied?
3. Establish a numeric goal, such as a 10% increase in conversion.
4. Focus on the lever that will drive the most growth. This way, you’ll get results with minimal effort. You’ll learn about these levers later in the article.
5. Next, set priorities: concentrate on the two or three most important steps you can take right now. Tackling the biggest hurdles blocking your growth will yield the greatest results. Leave the smaller issues for now. If you try to handle everything at once, your energy will be spread too thin, and you’ll make little progress on each front.

In my next article, I’ll explain exactly what you can do to focus on revenue growth itself.
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Obstacle 4: Not Driven by Data

Decisions are not based on (accurate) data but on intuition and opinions. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Without accurate data, you can’t make good decisions—it’s that simple.

A more difficult issue arises if you don’t have accurate data. It’s like having a ‘false’ compass—your tool is not reliable. Fortunately, Shopify’s transaction data is always accurate, so you can rely on that. Google Analytics is an excellent tool that should not be missing when you’re optimizing, but it must be properly set up.

💡Tip 8: Ensure Your Data is Accurate

I can’t stress this enough: make decisions based on accurate data! Shopify’s transaction data is always correct, but data from tools like Google Analytics can have errors. Don’t blindly trust the outputs of any analytics tool. Compare the number of transactions from the past month in both Shopify and Google Analytics. If the difference is greater than 10%, you cannot rely on Google Analytics data, and there’s work to be done.

Install Elevar or Little Data in Your Shopify Store

These tools fix all issues between Google Analytics, Facebook, and Shopify. This way, any transactions recorded in Shopify but not appearing in Google Analytics, Facebook, or Klaviyo will be added. Install these apps: https://apps.shopify.com/gtm-datalayer-by-elevar and https://apps.shopify.com/littledata
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💡Tip 9: Create a New View and Filter Your Own IP Address

If you haven’t yet filtered your own sessions in Google Analytics, this is a good tip for you. Exclude IP addresses from your office, warehouse, and home addresses in a new view. This way, sessions from your staff on the website won’t contaminate the data. Again, make sure to do this in a new view. If you make a mistake, you’ll always have all the data in your original view. It’s simple to do in 5 minutes. Learn how to filter out your own IP address from Google Analytics here.

When it comes to growth-related actions, your numbers need to be accurate.|
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Obstacle 5: Competition is Increasing

There’s fierce competition online. It seems like competitors are bidding more and more, and online marketing is becoming increasingly expensive. And that’s true. Your competitors are bidding more because they can afford it. Their average order value is higher, their conversion rate is higher, or their customers shop more frequently with them. Or they simply have a larger budget.

Competition is tough and only getting tougher. With increased competition, customer acquisition costs also rise: we’re all targeting the same customer, driving up costs for that one customer.

However, even with a smaller budget, you can generate more revenue or be more profitable than your competitor. I’ll show you how to do that.
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Doubling Your Revenue as a Formula

Now that we’ve discussed how to prepare for doubling your revenue, you’re ready to create an environment where your webshop is set to grow, without needing to invest in more traffic.

The 4 Levers to Increase Your Revenue

There are four ways to grow your revenue, with the last one being traffic growth. But we’ll leave that one aside for now. I’ll explain why later. The four ways are:

1. Get your customers to return more frequently (Frequency)
2. Get your customers to spend more money per order (Average Order Value)
3. Get more orders by increasing your conversion rate (Conversion)
4. Get more orders by increasing your traffic (Traffic)

The Simple Formula to Double Your Revenue

It sounds simple, but it really works: your revenue is straightforward to calculate using this formula: F x AOV x CR x T

So when you increase the value of these variables, you automatically increase your revenue. The question is: which ones, and how?

The Illusion that More Traffic Automatically Means More Revenue

A common misconception is that doubling your traffic is the answer to doubling your revenue. This assumption is easily made because you know what your current conversion rate is. However, your traffic is likely already covered through marketing channels like Google Ads, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Affiliates, etc.

Investing in more traffic through these channels usually results in less relevant visitors. This will cause your conversion rate to drop, your acquisition costs to rise, and ultimately, your ROI will decrease.

Additionally, you have little control over these channels as you are dependent on the algorithms and policies of the major social and tech companies.

Finally, it’s an “uphill battle”: once you have a lot of traffic through these channels, you’ll face more and rising competition, which leads to even higher costs. If you then spend less on traffic, you’ll immediately see fewer transactions. Read more about it here.

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Focus on Frequency, Order Value & Conversion Instead

That’s why I say: it’s much smarter to focus on the other three—frequency, order value, and conversion—before considering more traffic. How do you do that? Here are my top tips:

Increase Frequency

Use email marketing to bring your customers back. Automate this, and you’ll have the cheapest way to boost your frequency. A Harvard study (originally from the 1980s but recently updated for e-commerce) shows that a 5% improvement in retention can generate up to 95% more profit!
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💡Tip 10: Brainstorm How to Find More Customers Who Will Buy More Often

Who buys from you more often than your average customer? Who are the ‘super-buyers’? Brainstorm and check your Shopify backend to identify these buyers. Do you see patterns?

Increase AOV

Simple but effective: raise your prices. Focus your energy on securing more large orders instead of more small ones. You can also do this through bundling, up- or cross-selling, by raising the free shipping threshold, etc.

💡Tip 11: Brainstorm a Package and Increase AOV

Which products could you bundle? If you don’t have an immediate answer, find out which products are often bought together. Can you create a package out of them?

Increase Conversion

Improving your conversion rate is the biggest challenge, but it’s also the most sustainable lever for success and revenue growth. In a nutshell, it comes down to these four steps: research, analyze, formulate solutions, and implement.

Conclusion & Next Steps

Hopefully, you now know how to overcome the five obstacles to webshop growth. Use the practical tips in this article. I’ve structured them so that they can all be completed in under half an hour.

Get started on these. In the next article, I’ll share how to systematically tackle the two levers that are often underutilized: increasing frequency and average order value (AOV).

If you can’t wait, check out my Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your Shopify Conversion.

💡Tip 12: The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your Shopify Conversion

Also read: The Formula for E-commerce Revenue Growth