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How Does Shopify Marketing Work?
Winback Team on Jun 23, 2021 8:04:00 AM
You finally built your eCommerce store using Shopify, and it is all good to mint money with different functionalities and its architecture in place. Now what? Marketing! Having built a Shopify store is indeed half-war won, but you will surely need a robust marketing strategy to attract high-quality traffic and drive sales. It can be as easy as posting on Facebook with some 29 other people tagged or running a complicated Google Ads campaign.
No single solution fits all Shopify marketing plans but getting started is always better than overcomplicating even before making any substantial progress. Today, I will discuss some of the time-tested methods you can capitalize upon for driving traffic to your web store. Let’s get started.
Things To Keep In Mind Before Starting Marketing For Your Shopify Store
Source: Monster Insights
Before we begin understanding how Shopify marketing works, you need to define certain things. Firstly, you should document your business case, your ideal target audience, demographics and psychographics, their spending capacity, and do a little research about your competitors. You need not copy them on an apple to apple basis but learning what already works for them is worth the time and effort. Next, you should create a content stack you can repackage and circulate on different platforms as required.
It will help keep your Shopify store’s brand image consistent and help save on your marketing budget significantly. Doing a little homework can work like a charm as it puts you in the best position to start marketing for your Shopify store. Based on your evaluation, you can create an integrated marketing budget and make sure that you do not go overboard in the beginning phase. Most Shopify store owners burn their cash in anticipation during the initial days of marketing and later stop their efforts altogether.
Social Media Marketing
The first thing you need to do is create social media accounts for your business on all leading platforms. Even if you are not planning to start full-fledged marketing shortly, you should make a few posts. It is very helpful as people try to verify your business’s legitimacy by finding your profile on the social media they use frequently. Having a few posts and a couple of followers is always better than being non-existent. In a way, this is no longer optional, and instead, it has become a necessity like it having a website back in the 2010s.
You should integrate your Shopify store with these accounts and enable social selling. It aids your followers and other users to make purchases, allowing you to make the most of your social media presence. Later you can also get started with paid campaigns.
Facebook and Instagram have the largest audiences. You can run paid campaigns on both of them together, with highly versatile filters, making it a perfect fit for newbie eCommerce stores. You can also explore other avenues depending on where your target audience spends most of their time. Remember, the same individual will have different expectations from your brand on various social media platforms, and thus, your content must resonate with their expectations and overall platform.
Affiliate Marketing
Source: Monster Insights
Affiliate marketing is recognized as one of the most cost-effective techniques to grow traffic and expand the customer base for online stores. Affiliate marketing is described as a win-win relationship where a person is known as an affiliate successfully refers a product to the customers & then receives the reward from the seller. The reward is granted to affiliates when orders are made through their affiliate links (link to the seller’s website) or coupon codes.
Affiliate marketing deserves a slot in your consideration because it provides several advantages like they are cost-effective, easy to track, and provides you with access to a broad pool of targeted leads. ClickBank, ShareASale, Rakuten Marketing, and CJ Affiliate are among the best avenues to find affiliate marketers for your Shopify store. Before inking any agreement, go through their audience and past campaign results. Also, document the deliverables on both your parts to put your eCommerce business in the best spot.
Influencer Marketing
Source: Woorise
Influencer marketing is a business strategy of using popular figures or people in the limelight to highlight your brand or product to their users, followers, or audiences. They act as the trusted intermediary between the company and the targeted audience to increase the probability of sales conversion. For any company looking to expand its brand awareness, influencer marketing is more riveting as compared to advertisements (Ads). Campaigns that utilize micro-influencers (5,000 to 25,000 followers) can help drive traffic to your Shopify store in a much more natural way.
Nano influencers (up to 1000 followers) can also be a great fit since they are more likely to have a highly targeted and engaged audience that trusts them as much as their close friends. The sales in this case are monitored using links similar to the ones used in affiliate marketing. The major difference between the two is that affiliate markets need not be experts or direct influencers. They just need to have a sizable audience and a platform where they can reach out to the masses even if they aren’t experts. The recommendation also doesn’t need to be a personal one. On the other hand, influencer marketing requires one to be associated with the field personally and make recommendations out of their goodwill.
Search Engine Optimization And Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are focused on improving your Shopify store’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! apart from new entrants like DuckDuckGo. SEO refers to the organic portion where you optimize your web store to meet various criteria laid down by the search engines. Right from using site encryption (SSL certificates) to building backlinks, a broad range of activities is included under this umbrella term. This is a slow approach but it gives long-term results and you should design your web store in line with the SEO best practices. Not doing so will sabotage all your efforts since people will ultimately use search engines for reaching your store.
SEM refers to buying spots on high visibility areas of the SERP in exchange for money temporarily. You need to find the relevant keywords, create keyword buckets, design campaigns to target different search intents and monitor the results as a part of SEM for your Shopify store. Google also allows you to run ads only for the items that are in stock which can be helpful as advertising out-of-stock items do more harm than benefit.
These paid advertising services are the largest source of revenue for Google and can be a great way for a new business to get traction. In the digital marketing industry, generally, the pay-per-click (PPC) model is used since the person posting the ad doesn’t have to pay for it until the user clicks the ad. These PPC ads can be small & text-based or larger visual ads or even video ads. Google also has a separate Shopping Ads section for eCommerce stores. It allows the website owners to get their product and service in front of the right customers at the right time by choosing the proper keywords. This can be extremely helpful in benefiting from seasonal demands and viral trend-based sales.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to build your audience, generate traffic and sales for your eCommerce business. Setting up a blog can help you to build a community around your brand and your products. It also helps you to build your reputation in a particular field of your interest and become a figure of authority. More often, it helps you to advertise and appear more trustworthy to your potential clients.
It falls under the category of on-page SEO but we are covering it separately because it can increase your visibility by leaps and bounds. You can also collect the email addresses of your blog’s visitors and drive traffic using newsletters making it a powerful way to channelize leads. Blogging is one of the best ways to market your Shopify store as it produces recurring advantages while putting you in a better position to convince your web store visitors. Especially when Shopify stores make 3x the growth as compared to other stores, it is worth the extra mile:
Email Marketing & SMS Marketing
Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible, and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and encouraging repeat visits to the website. Email marketing also allows you to create targeted and personalized messages, making it easier to connect with people. It is one of the basics for eCommerce success as there are always visitors and new customers who will never return to your store once they visit. Therefore, sending riveting broadcasts and building an email gives you a way to retain the traffic. It is also the best option to remain connected with the customers.
Apart from the advantages, email lets you build ongoing customer relationships & it doesn’t get influenced by third-party gatekeepers. It is incredibly effective at driving sales because emails provide a one-on-one communication window through a consent-based approach. You can send numerous types of emails including but not limited to newsletters, promotional messages, cart abandonment, upselling, cross-selling, down selling, and transactional emails. Given its staggering 4200% ROI, it should indeed be on the top of your Shopify marketing priority list. No doubt, emails are considered bread and butter for eCommerce stores.
Many Shopify owners tend to overlook SMS marketing while thinking of marketing strategies to increase their sales. But the fact is that SMS marketing is the best form of marketing in terms of open rates. An Adobe report discloses that the open rate for SMS is 98%. Yes, you read that right! Email marketing also plays a crucial role in increasing sales for Shopify stores, but with Email marketing, you will only see open rates of 20% or so, as that is its average open rate.
If you want to implement SMS marketing for your Shopify store, you must check out WinBack. They are the best in the industry when it comes to SMS marketing. With WinBack, you can recover up to 34% of abandoned carts, which will prove to be a game-changer for your Shopify store. Not only that, WinBack’s customers have seen 35X ROI on every dollar that they spent on WinBack. Well, what more could a Shopify owner ask? Drop us an email to discuss how we can help you decrease your abandoned cart rates and increase sales.
Summing Up
You would have got an idea of the individual roles of different channels in Shopify marketing but we would like to state that it requires you to orchestrate them in perfect harmony to get the best results. You should focus on these channels from day one but instead of striving for perfection, it would be best if you spend some time and learn what works the best for your brand. Also, align them to your core Shopify marketing strategy and systematically target each platform. I hope this article adds to your knowledge of how Shopify marketing works.
