Running an ecommerce business on Shopify isn’t just all about building an online store and waiting for the customers to come magically. Persistence plays a huge part too. However, persistence could fall short if you don’t know the right Shopify marketing strategies and tools to lead potential customers to your store.
Ecommerce is undoubtedly the future of doing business. Within this year alone (2024) retail ecommerce sales are expected to reach the $6.4 trillion mark. And in 2027, global retail ecommerce sales are projected to reach a jaw-dropping $8 trillion. (Source: statista.com)
But because more and more businesses worldwide are adding ecommerce to their business models, competition has become very stiff for every niche. However, it does not make success impossible. It’s just that the marketing game has changed. And you must play by the rules if you want to succeed.
In this article, we’ll show you the strategies and marketing tools to help you arm your business with enough bullets to fight your way to success. After learning and applying these things, you’ll be on your way to growing your sales by 3x or probably even more.
Let’s get started.
Marketing With Shopify Has Changed
Source: Pexels
Although there are crucial aspects of marketing that don’t change, technology is constantly evolving and what might be an effective marketing strategy today might no longer be so in the future.
Imagine this: before social media, the main marketing channels for brands were TV ads, print ads, and billboards. But when social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram came, they made marketing campaigns more accessible for smaller brands with limited budgets.
In a way, they leveled the playing field for all. Now, marketing is headed to a major makeover once again as automation and machine learning become more rampant.
Truth be told, marketing with Shopify has changed. And here are the things you need to know to get up to speed.
Social Media Virality
As mentioned, social media platforms are marketing powerhouses that make building brand awareness more accessible to businesses of all sizes. And with new updates now and then, it has become easier to reach more potential customers by becoming viral.
Facebook Reels, for example, is a highly effective marketing tool that if done right, would make your brand viral for practically zero marketing expense.
Another example is publishing valuable or entertaining posts across multiple social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn, etc.
As such, social media virality is the goal for any social media marketer, and it should be one of your goals too.
Alternatives To Your Brands Are Just A Few Clicks Away
Even if numerous marketing tools are within reach and it has become easier to act on marketing efforts, the competition has become stiffer.
That’s because alternatives to your brands have become accessible to your target customers. Though it might sound harsh, brands are easy to replace when customers want a fresher and better product.
Thus, an effective Shopify marketing strategy must be compelling enough to make customers want to buy from you.
Customers Trust Other Customers More Than Self-Praising Ads
Among the major shifts that we’ve witnessed in marketing is customer preferences. Before, customers were anchored to creative and self-praising ads.
But nowadays, potentially new customers trust customer reviews in your marketing strategy more than your in-house ads. That’s because customers nowadays have become more discerning with what they buy. It could also be that they are already flooded with other similar ads when using social media platforms.
As such, you need to include gathering customer reviews in your marketing efforts to help you sell your products.
Automation & AI Gain More Traction In Marketing
Automation & AI are gaining more traction in Shopify marketing as months go by – especially for larger brands. 80% of executives in the retail and consumer space expect their businesses to use AI automation by 2025 (Source: analyticsinsight.net)
This shows that AI marketing tools are becoming a staple for businesses. And because AI tools can be cost-effective and efficient when used in reaching your target audience, you should consider adding them to your strategy as well.
Marketing Costs Continue To Rise
Marketing costs, particularly ad costs continue to rise. According to Search Engine Land, cost-per-click or CPC on Google increased by 10% on average.
As such, new Shopify store owners must have a concrete plan when planning to run paid marketing campaigns or else, they’d be facing a massive ad spend with underwhelming results.
But this does not mean that you shouldn’t include paid ads in your marketing efforts. You just need to be sure about it.
Good to know: To battle the rising costs related to marketing, Shopify launched two new updates, among others, that marketers will surely love:
- Shop Campaigns: allows merchants to run instant campaigns via the Shop app.
- Shopify Audiences: drives up to 2x audience retargeting conversions for every dollar spent using insights that are only available in your online store.
Shopify Marketing Strategies And Tools To 3x Your Sales
Effective Shopify marketing strategies attract customers from all your marketing channels to your online store. Ultimately, your target customers should be convinced to buy from you.
Additionally, marketing also includes retargeting existing customers so they keep buying your products.
However, achieving these things isn’t as easy as you may think. It’ll require a concrete marketing strategy and some advanced tools to achieve your ultimate goal.
Luckily, we have a cheat sheet of everything you need to do to revitalize your marketing strategy and increase your sales three-fold and probably more!
Tip: You can track the impact of all these marketing strategies via your Shopify admin. Shopify has a comprehensive analytics and reporting tool to help you monitor the numbers on your store.
Design An Unforgettable Online store
The first Shopify marketing strategy that we want to talk about is your online store as it will be your primary tool that will convert your audience into lifetime customers. With that responsibility, it is only fitting that your store is designed to look its best.
Store design isn’t just all about aesthetics. It has a lot to do with functionality, navigation, establishing trust, and convincing new customers to buy.
According to Sagapixel research, 81% of website owners decide to redesign their websites because of low conversion rates. Moreover, HubSpot found out that 88% of users will not return to a website after a poor experience.
As such, how your online store is designed will dictate your conversion rates.
Store customization tool: PageFly Landing Page Builder
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (10,000+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $24 per month. Free plan available.
If you want to create a unique Shopify store, you should consider using PageFly Landing Page Builder. This app has more than 100 templates for products and homepages or you can create one from scratch.
Use A Live Chat App
Customer service is one of the most important aspects of an online store if you want to acquire new customers or retain existing ones. The most preferred customer service method of online shoppers is live chat, especially if they are in the process of choosing a product.
In a Tidio research, they found out that 41% of customers say that they prefer real-time customer service via live chat over other methods, such as email or phone support.
The good thing about Shopify live chat apps nowadays is that they no longer are “live chat” apps. Instead, these apps allow you to see what’s in your customers’ carts and recommend additional products. As such, they have become potent sales tools as well.
Live chat app: Shopify Inbox
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 (4900+ reviews)
Price: Free
You don’t need to spend money if you want to add a live chat widget to your Shopify store. Shopify Inbox is a completely free solution trusted by thousands of Shopify merchants. This simple solution allows you to talk in real time to your customers and send product recommendations if needed.
Leverage Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are potent marketing tools that all online businesses should take advantage of. Especially if you are just starting. Social platforms are a cheap alternative for Google if you don’t want to run paid advertising campaigns.
But if you want to run paid ads, you can also do so with a highly targeted approach to reach your target audience.
Leverage Facebook & Instagram reels as well as YouTube shorts to upload good quality videos for a chance to become viral. This aids in building brand awareness.
Additionally, you can leverage Pinterest to curate boards that will be attractive to your niche. And finally, you can use X (Twitter) to reach untapped audiences to announce your campaigns.
With many social media platforms to choose from, it’s not necessary to use all of them. Instead, choose one or two platforms and go all in on them till you see results. Unless you have a team that could manage all social accounts for you.
Social media marketing app: Vibe Shoppable Instagram Feed
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 (20+ reviews)
Price: Starts at $6 per month. Free plan available.
According to Instagram data, 70% of users use the platform to decide on their next purchase.
That’s why almost 98% of US marketers use Instagram for their companies. (Source: insiderintelligence.com)
Thus, Instagram is among the top marketing channels that deserve attention. It’s also an additional sales channel for your business as you can sell directly to your customers from the platform through your Instagram feed or individual posts.
This is possible by using an app like Vibe. Vibe allows online store owners to create shoppable posts wherein customers can click on certain products featured within the post and they can purchase it directly from the platform.
As such, make sure that Instagram is one of your Shopify marketing strategies.
Reward User-Generated Content or UGC
Continuing our discussion about social media platforms, did you know that you can also use other people’s content to market your online store for you?
These types of content are called UGC or user-generated content. UGCs come across as more authentic compared to self-praising ads by brands. As such, some users might see UGCs as more transparent and reliable.
Thus, promoting user-generated content is a potent marketing strategy in building brand awareness as well as encouraging target customers to try out your products.
With that in mind, you don’t have to wait for your customers to create content for you. Instead, encourage them to create one and incentivize their efforts through discount coupons, and exclusive deals, and more.
UGC app: Toolstoy Shoppable Video & UGC
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (170+ reviews)
Price: Starts at $19 per month. Free trial available.
Toolstoy Shoppable Video & UGC is a great tool that allows you to pull user-generated content for your brand from Instagram, TikTok, and more.
You can then add these videos to any page of your Shopify store. In addition to that, you can make all these videos shoppable. As such, customers can add-to-cart whatever product is shown in your UGC section.
Build Your Audience
Using a social platform to draw customers to your Shopify store is a good marketing strategy. But the only way to pull them into your sales pipeline is if they sign up for your email marketing newsletter. As such, your online store should have the ability to acquire emails from your target customers.
That way, you can send email campaigns whenever you have an ongoing promotion. Luckily, you can do that with a pop-up app.
- Newsletters
- Pop-ups
- Social media platforms
Pop-up app: EcomSend Pop Ups, Email Popups
Rating: 5 out of 5 (8500+ reviews)
Pricing: Free
A pop-up app like EcomSend is a godsend for startup Shopify store owners. Despite being packed with features, it’s completely free. With attractive and customizable pop-up forms, you can grow your email marketing list if done right.
Nurture Your Audience
Nurturing your audience is the best Shopify marketing strategy to convert leads into customers, as well as retain existing customers within your brand.
Nurturing your audience means that you continue to provide value even if they aren’t making a purchase yet. But the goal is to make them make a purchase.
You can do this using email marketing campaigns – that’s why building an audience is crucial. Additionally, you can launch a customer loyalty program to keep your existing customers engaged and happy.
Your Shopify admin is a very powerful tool to gain insights regarding the status of your potential and existing customers. Shopify automatically segments customers into several categories such as email subscribers, abandoned carts, returning customers, and more. Check it out by going to your Shopify admin > Customers > Segments.
Email marketing app: Yotpo Email Marketing & SMS
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (7,700+ reviews)
Price: Starts at $19 per month. Free plan available.
One of the best apps for launching email campaigns is Yotpo. Yotpo is an email marketing & SMS app that allows merchants to send emails and text messages to their customers to keep them reminded of the brand. You can also use this app to send exclusive deals and coupons to encourage repeat purchases.
Publish Valuable Content
Content marketing such as blogging is a very powerful long-term strategy to increase organic traffic to your brand.
Yes, you can publish blogs on your Shopify store and you can use these blogs as tools for your marketing campaigns.
You can publish niche-related blogs so you can naturally promote your products. Moreover, you can use content marketing to establish brand awareness by publishing helpful content that draws the audience to your brand.
Blog app: Bloggle Powerful Blog Builder
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 (200+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $25 per month. Free trial available.
It doesn’t take a huge marketing budget to launch a content marketing campaign. If you’re a new online store owner, you can write the blogs yourself for zero cost. As such, it’s one of the cheapest Shopify marketing strategies that you can do to ensure the long-term sustainability of your business.
Bloggle is a good blogging tool if you want to build unique blog pages on your store.
Optimize Your Website
Content marketing is very closely related to website optimization. Because the only way to attract organic traffic to your blogs is through SEO or search engine optimization.
SEO means researching the right set of keywords that you can add to the individual pages of your Shopify store. But in addition to that, optimizing your online store means improving its speed and navigation.
Research shows that for every second your website loads faster, conversion rates can increase by 17%. (Source: bidnamic.com)
As such, if you’re still using a free theme and you’re planning to upgrade to a paid one with more features, we recommend using a natively fast Shopify theme to tick website speed off your optimization list.
SEO app: Booster SEO & Image Optimizer
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (7,400+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $39 per month. Free plan available.
Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy. As such, you cannot expect it to return immediate results. However, it’s worth investing in if you're in it for the long haul.
Booster SEO is a great tool to optimize your online store pages. It also comes with an automated image compressor to make sure that your store loads fast every time.
Quick read: Shopify SEO: The Definitive How-To Guide For Beginners
Learn To Upsell & Cross-Sell
Upselling is encouraging your customers to buy more quantities of a product that they intend to buy. And cross-selling is encouraging your customers to buy other products related to their original purchase.
This is such a powerful Shopify marketing strategy. In fact, 49% of customers have bought products that they did not intend to buy because of a personalized product recommendation. (Source: invespcro.com)
This is the importance of knowing how to upsell and cross-sell in your online store.
Upsell & Cross-Sell app: Upsell & Cross Sell – Selleasy
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (1,700+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $8.99 per month. Free plan available.
Selleasy is a powerful upsell & cross sell app to increase the cart value of your potential customers. With this app, you can add personalized recommendations on the product pages, checkout pages, and even in the customers’ carts. This app is powered by AI. Thus, you can ensure that your customers are getting useful recommendations.
Recover Abandoned Carts
By default, ecommerce businesses like online stores lose a lot of potential sales in their day-to-day operations. In fact, more than 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. (Source: baymard.com)
Thus, if you’re wondering why the bounce rates and abandoned carts in your online store are high, it can be said that it’s one of the natures of the business.
However, you can do something about it. Abandoned carts are not yet lost sales. Well, some of them may be, but you can still recover them through abandoned cart email campaigns.
Abandoned Cart Recovery app: Cartly Abandoned Cart Recovery
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 (1,100+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $14.99 per month. Free plan available.
Cartly is an email marketing tool that’s focused on recovering abandoned carts and converting them into sales. It automatically tracks pending carts in your online store and sends emails to the users (along with discount coupons if set) to encourage them to complete the purchase.
Run Google Ads
If executed right, Google ads can guarantee an immediate increase in sales to your online store as they place your brand on top of search results whenever potential customers look for something in Google.
However, Google ads require some technical skills. As such, you cannot just wing it as it will make a dent in your marketing budget. It’s expensive to run paid advertising campaigns on Google.
Be that as it may, it could pay huge dividends because it is effective in acquiring new customers for your brand as according to Google, paid ads in their platform could return $8 per every dollar spent.
Google Ads app: Facebook Ads, Google Ads & AI
Rating: 4.7 out of 5 (450+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $150 per month. Free trial available.
As mentioned, Google ads require a substantial marketing budget. As such, it’s best used by medium to large businesses. For startups or smaller ones, it might not be the best direction. Social media marketing might be the more cost-effective choice.
Facebook Ads, Google Ads, & AI is a Shopify app that lets you create, run, and track ads on Meta and Google through the help of AI.
Harness The Power Of Customer Reviews On Your Homepage & Product Pages
84% of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising (source: performancemarketingworld.com). Additionally, 91% of individuals aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (source: brightlocal.com).
Thus, customer reviews in your online store are crucial to acquiring your target customers. The statistics speak for themselves. You can no longer gain the trust of your target audience through traditional advertising.
Customer Review app: Loox Product Reviews App
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (19,900+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 per month. Free trial available.
Gathering customer reviews is one of the best marketing strategies that you can do. However, you can only get good reviews if you have good products.
Indeed, social proof is an important business commodity. And to make the most out of these reviews, consider using Loox. This app allows you to display video-format product reviews on your online store.
Collaborate With Niche Social Influencers & Other Brands
49% of social commerce shoppers have had an influencer’s recommendation impact their purchase. (Source: digitalmarketinginstitute.com).
Thus, social media influencers play an instrumental role in growing your brand. However, you should find the right influencer to partner with. Preferably one that’s related to your online store niche.
And here’s the thing, you don’t need a large marketing budget to partner with influencers. In fact, you can make them come to you instead by using the app below.
Influencer Marketing app: Shopstar Influencer Marketing
Rating: 5 out of 5 (10+ reviews)
Pricing: Starts at $4.99 per month. Free trial available.
The Shopstar influencer marketing app allows influencers to purchase your products at a discount in exchange for valuable content about your brand. As this allows you to partner with multiple influencers, Shopstar has a management tool to help you track every partnership you have.
Shopstar is powered by AI.
Reward Referrals Through Affiliate Links
According to Finance Online, 65% of business entities secure up to 20% of their annual profit through strategic affiliate partnerships. Thus, affiliate marketers are instrumental in generating more sales in online stores.
This makes affiliate marketing a potent Shopify marketing strategy for acquiring new customers for your online store.
In Shopify Editions Summer 2024, Shopify launched the Youtube Shopping Affiliates. This allows merchants to sync their products from Shopify to YouTube so affiliate marketers can easily tag their products. However, this is currently available only to Advanced and Plus plan users.
Affiliate Link app: AfterShip Referral & Affiliate
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (2,400+ reviews)
Pricing: Free
Referral marketing can be hard to track. Doing it manually just won’t cut it. That’s why you need an app like AfterShip if you want an efficient referral marketing experience. With this app, you can run referral campaigns regardless of your business size.
Conclusion: Take Advantage Of These Tips In Marketing For Shopify Store
As you noticed, the list of Shopify marketing strategies mentioned above is a combination of free marketing campaigns and paid advertising campaigns that require an earmarked marketing budget.
You don’t need to exhaust all the strategies on this list to be successful in Shopify. Instead, the better approach is to start with easier ones. That way, you can execute them with relative ease and with minimal cost.
For example, social media marketing, blogging, pop-ups, and live chats can be immediately executed without spending money. Besides, startup businesses find success by just leveraging social media marketing tools.
And after you reach a certain growth, and if you want more, you could venture into paid campaigns such as ads and email marketing.
The most important thing that you need to remember is that you should be consistent in your marketing.
Read more: Best Shopify Apps To Increase Sales: Top 30+ Free and Paid Apps
