Marketing for Shopify: Your Ultimate Guide to Navigate Shopify Marketing in 2023
With over 1.75 million merchants, Shopify continues to be the preferred platform for ecommerce business success in 2023. It has many affiliate programs, thousands of app integrations, SEO services, subscription solutions, and more. When it comes to having the tools and features you need to make money, you’re spoilt for choice.
In addition, its support in business marketing is impressive. It also ticks most of the boxes in this area in terms of brand awareness, customer retention, and sustained growth. However, integrating the strategies is your job, but don’t worry because it doesn’t need to be time-consuming or expensive.
In this marketing for Shopify 101, you’ll find out how straightforward it can be to market your business and keep your customers happy. We also discuss how subscription-first tools like Upscribe supports businesses like yours to deliver a top-notch CX.
What is Shopify Marketing?
Marketing for Shopify leverages popular online advertising techniques such as social media and email to advocate a store’s offerings. A winning Shopify marketing strategy will boost your brand’s awareness, customer loyalty, and sales.
At Upscribe, we’ll give you “the charge you need” to grow your Shopify storefront. Our powerful tools can support you in delivering a personalized customer experience for more loyalty and sales. And if you’re using another solution, our seamless onboarding will quickly migrate you onto our platform to start reaping the benefits immediately. The process is risk-free, and you won’t need to lift a finger.
Different types of marketing for Shopify
Even though Shopify makes it easy to grow and scale your business, how successful you are in generating revenue and profits is down to you. Getting the desired results involves finding your target customers, leading them to your storefront, then enticing them to spend and keep spending!
Here are some strategies to promote your Shopify store.
Use email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most influential forms of direct marketing you can use to grow your business. This traditional marketing method is not only the most popular, but also one of the most cost-effective, generating an average of $42 ROI generated for every $1 spent.
Email marketing promotes products and services, sends promo materials, develops relations with existing and potential customers, maintains brand engagement, and more. According to data, approximately 81% of SMBs leverage email for customer acquisition, as finding new customers sometimes costs more.
Types of email marketing
Another great benefit of email marketing is there are several types you can use to fit a purpose. The most common types of marketing emails include:
- Welcome emails – are used to make initial contact with a prospect and form a relationship. An excellent first impression should leave the possibility open to further communication.
- Email newsletters – these are typically used to achieve a particular goal and can be used for brand awareness.
- Lead nurturing – nurtures leads, as the name suggests. These can be used to promote discounted offerings, for example.
Example:
Schoolhouse provides timeless home furnishings. Their welcome email offers immediate value with 10% off the first order. This is a neat trick to kick off engagement and loyalty.
A welcome email like this works because of the promised discount in exchange for signing up for their newsletter. Thus, Schoolhouse receives a new email subscriber and makes a sale.
Once the customer purchases one of their beautiful pieces, they may stick around. If they sign up but don’t use the discount, with regular emails, they could be tempted to buy something in the future. If they do nothing, at least they’ve been told about Schoolhouse.
Product bundling and subscriptions
Product bundling is when complementary offerings are grouped as a “bundle” to be sold for one price. It encourages customers to spend more and helps you sell more products that aren’t selling quickly.
Typically, your bundle price will be lower than if your customer were to pay for the items separately. A bundle example could be mobile phone services that include cable and internet or a meal deal at a Mcdonald’s.
Many businesses include subscriptions as part of a package for recurring sales. Depending on your business model, your customers can decide on the subscription frequency; daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, for example.
Here at Upscribe, we are a subscription-first brand. We have processed over $650 million in subscription revenue for Shopify brands and can help you deliver a royal CX to keep your customers happy to spend. Our out-of-the-box tools are designed to get your subscription offerings to scale.
Example:
The best time for product bundles is during the holiday season, Easter, Christmas, or Valentine’s day. On these occasions, your customers are more likely to spend on things like presents, food, and party decorations.
Sephora offers a “holiday vibes” gift set with complimentary beauty items. To drive more sales, they make the set more appealing to their customers by including limited edition products or seasonal specials only for particular holidays.
Push notifications with promotions
Push notifications are another way to spread the word, drive traffic to your store, and boost sales. Adding promotions into the mix creates a winning combination.
A push notification is essentially an alert you can send directly to customers and can be implemented via your Shopify store by adding the push notification app.
Some of its benefits include:
- Reduced cart abandonment. You can send a personalized message to remind customers about items left in their cart.
- Increase customer retention. You can use your customer’s store behavior and segmentation to send relevant and personalized messages.
- Get noticed more. Customers notice push notifications more than SMSs, for example. Notifications are excellent for sending deals and offers to inactive customers, keeping your brand front and center in their minds. This might lead to them coming back to your store.
Example
Here’s an example of how a push notification can promote new products and inspire engagement. Using language like “Just arrived” can create excitement around your new products and a slight urgency to be one of the first customers to own it.
Customer loyalty programs
Loyalty programs offer customer incentives like rewards and discounts. They can help attract and retain customers and encourage recurring business. Loyalty programs will take your customers from product-focused to brand-focused. The benefits of an engaging loyalty program include the following:
- Better CX for repeat business. Customers feel more valued when they’re rewarded.
- Higher customer long-term value. The more customers spend, the more valuable they are to your business.
- Develop a stronger brand. Loyal customers are more likely to tell a friend about your business.
Example:
One of the most traditional loyalty programs ecommerce businesses use is points rewards. Customers acquire points based on their purchases, and a collection of these points can get them a reward like a discount or a freebie.
Starbucks is one of the more famous brands that uses point rewards. Have a look below:
How to Succeed at Shopify Marketing
Perform competitive research and analysis
Know who your competitors are. Find out what they’re doing and not doing to help with pricing, differentiate your offerings, and make your marketing strategies stand out. Fortunately, you can use their website and social media platforms for research to support your analysis of their strengths and weaknesses.
This valuable activity can highlight any potential growth barriers that you need to work on and your unique advantages. In addition, keep an eye on market trends to identify fresh opportunities and use them to keep up with your customer’s changing needs.
Spread the Word
Create valuable and engaging content
Post regular and engaging content on social media platforms to drive more traffic to your business. You can share direct access to your product pages or add a blog to your store to discuss your offering and other overlapping topics. This increases your online presence and makes it easier for search engines to find you.
For engaging content, consider adding a quiz. People love the challenge and entertainment factor of a quiz and are more likely to share them. They’ll feel more involved in your business, and you get to communicate your brand voice in a fun way.
Shopify offers several apps to create and add your quizzes. Here are some quiz ideas:
YouTube videos are another form of highly engaging content. However, it takes guts to get behind a camera. If you’re interested in video marketing but concerned about filming yourself, influencer marketing is your best bet!
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing allows you to work with someone who has a rep for being a guru in your industry. They’ll use their established following on social media to draw attention to your business by naturally weaving it into their content.
On YouTube, explainers or product demonstration videos showcase your offerings and let your customers see their benefits applied to real life.
Search engine optimization
SEO improves your store’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Its main advantage is to bring the people looking for your offerings to you. Search engines generally use the same method to determine your position in the search results. Fortunately, in addition to the marketing strategies we’ve discussed, Shopify automates many SEO best practices for you.
Here are some other techniques to consider to appease search engines.
- Use keywords. Include the words your customers use to find you on Google in your content.
- Use alt descriptions. To help search engines better understand your content, they use alt descriptions to determine whether your content is one of the best results.
Ensure your pages load quickly and your site is optimized for mobile. Shopify offers themes that handle speed and responsiveness. They also send your site details to Google so you appear in the search results.
Assess and benchmark your marketing success
Shopify’s built-in analytics help you to track and analyze your store front’s trends and help you determine whether your techniques are making a positive difference, but here are some things you can do to:
- Check your income statement. How much profit are you making now?
- New customers. Are the people buying from you new or existing customers?
- Customer satisfaction. For example, surveys, reviews, social media comments, or asking them whether they’ve found what they are looking for lets you know whether you’re delivering a good CX.
- Keep up to date with the market. Know the current state of the industry. If your profits have dipped, and so have your competitors, it could be an excellent time to introduce something new.
And use benchmarking.
Competitor research will come in handy for benchmarking. Find out how well their performance is regarding brand awareness or how well their offerings are doing and compare notes.
Use Upscribe for a Royal CX
Shopify makes marketing your business easy and helps you understand its effectiveness. Getting your strategy right takes time and several tweaks – and ongoing tweaking. However, when everything comes together you can sit back and enjoy your success.
Consider integrating Upscribe to support your subscription solutions. We help you reduce churn and increase loyalty by leveraging your customer data for a personalized experience. And you can offer your customers the option to add products to their subscriptions or create product bundles. Plus, many more ways to help you deliver the best CX by unlocking the value in your business.
Schedule a demo today to learn how we can help.