Try These 12 Shopify Marketing Tactics To Sell More
The main goal of every online store is to drive traffic and increase conversions. On the road to achieving this goal, online merchants need powerful marketing tactics. They are the only surefire way to increase Shopify sales and make a decent profit.
A smart marketing strategy will start to change your online store for the better. Consider adding these must-try tactics to yours.
What Are Marketing Tactics?
Marketing tactics are techniques of promoting a business or a specific offer to customers. Typically, marketing tactics focus on achieving particular business goals, e.g. “Increase sales by 20%,” and target a predefined group of customers.
Top 12 Shopify Marketing Tactics
The following Shopify marketing tactics are ideal for staying within a small budget and achieving small business goals.
Email marketing
Shopify email marketing is one of the most effective channels for acquiring new customers. It involves generating subscribers and sharing promotional emails messages with them on a regular basis.
Example—
Illy, an Italian coffee producer, encourages customers to buy products by giving a special discount in this promo email.
If you’re a Shopify store owner, you can use Shopify email marketing apps to create and send out mass campaigns. These apps allow you to segment customer audiences, create high-quality emails with builders, and monitor how many customers open them and buy.
Here’s how to get started with email marketing:
- Get an email marketing app (every eCommerce platform provides plenty of options)
- Create marketing emails and structure them into campaigns (welcome emails, newsletters, abandoned shopping cart recovery, etc.)
- Schedule campaigns to be delivered at specific times to increase open and click-through rate
- Send out campaigns and monitor their performance inside your email marketing app’s dashboard.
Guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing involves the use of low-budget creative ways to promote a product or brand in specific locations. When properly implemented, this strategy allows you to have a direct offline impact on pedestrian traffic, which can be targeted in the same way as your chosen location.
Here’s a classic example from McDonald’s.
If your idea turns out to be interesting enough, you can also get some press coverage or even go viral by placing your ad in the right place, at the right time, and in front of the right people. Your ideas in this field will succeed or fail depending on their level of creativity and execution. A little luck won’t hurt here, either.
Factors to consider when using guerrilla marketing:
- Try to create a truly unique project — replicating another brand’s technique can ruin the message.
- Make it consistent with your overall goals. Even if you’ve captured people’s attention, the real challenge is getting your creative side to work with your brand or main message.
- Use it to complement your online marketing and vice versa. People need to be able to see a connection between your offline marketing and online branding. It’s best to have your brand name in plain sight so they can Google it.
Content marketing
Unlike direct advertising of your products and services, content marketing aims to reach your target audience through informational or entertainment online content on your website and blog.
The idea is that when your clients are attracted by this content, they will learn about how your products or services can help them solve specific problems. The content you use can be in any of the following formats:
- How-to articles
- Instructional videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics with useful info
Timberland’s blog is an excellent source of content marketing examples. The company’s blog features how-to articles, videos, news about the brand’s social projects, and looks for inspiration.
By supplementing your marketing tactics with content with more direct approaches like email marketing or advertising, you can ensure that your branding efforts help your sales as well. For example, you can distribute how-to articles via your email newsletter.
Blogging
For businesses, blogging means regularly posting new updates to your blog or website. While blogging is technically a part of advertising marketing, a separate plan is often required as it is a recurring project.
Since you regularly post new content on your blog, it is usually best suited for building brand awareness, recall, and loyalty. A blog can capture the attention of new potential customers who are hearing about your business for the first time, as well as remind the current prospects and clients of your business.
To start your business blog:
- List the common problems your target customers face
- Write blog posts about each problem and add your products as one of the solutions
- Publish at least one article per week to become a go-to, reliable place for getting fresh information
Example—
Whisker Bag, a company selling cat backpacks, shares helpful tips for cat owners.
Website pop-ups
Another powerful but underrated eCommerce marketing tool is pop-ups. They can be helpful in many ways. They can help build email subscribers, attract leads, increase sales, and more. Generally, weekend pop-ups work best.
For example, you can add email popups to your site to display them when they try to leave. A popup might contain a discount, coupon, free shipping — the choice is yours.
This popup from Luxy Hair, for example, gives away a $10 discount.
Free shipping will attract more customers, boosting your e-commerce sales. So by simply offering a discount coupon or free shipping, you can keep visitors on your site longer with the option to place an order.
Client reviews
About 87% of customers read online reviews before choosing to contact a business. Having reviews on your store builds the trust of visitors in your brand, and you can add them pretty easily.
Example—
Notiq, a Shopify store selling luxury notebooks, shares customer reviews immediately after product specifications.
Every eCommerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) has review apps for store owners. Try searching “customer reviews” in your platform’s app store to find good app options. Also, your website might already have this option built in.
Social media marketing
Using sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat to promote your business means you are using social media marketing.
Example—
Taylor Stitch, a clothing brand, shares these stunning photos of their products in action.
Marketers see social media primarily as the driving force behind brand engagement. Since you can include photos, graphics, videos, and emotion in your social media posts, you get different ways to express your brand.
Implement referral marketing
Referral marketing is all about getting new leads and sales from referrals. This could be your existing clients or other people who know about your business. For example, you participated in the “tell a friend” program, got a discount or something for free. By recommending a product or service to your friends, you participated in a marketing referral.
Example—
Pretty Little Thing, a clothing store, gives customers 10% off for a referral.
Referral marketing campaigns are very effective in selling and getting new customers. According to this case study from Mention.me case study, Pretty Little Thing was able to generate thousands of extra orders thanks to the referral program.
Personalized e-commerce experience
Ecommerce personalization is the showing of customized recommendations, offers, and other content based on specific characteristics of your customer (past data, demographics, and more).
Personalized and unique offers tailored to the interests and needs of customers will ensure a positive experience. For example, you can add a plugin to your store that shows related or similar products to make the browsing experience easier.
Add a social media plugin to your store
Many customers are discovering products on social media, especially on Instagram. But you can add your brand’s Instagram feed to your website and encourage visitors to shop entire looks!
Example—
Luxy Hair has an Instagram feed on the homepage, allowing visitors to get some nice inspiration from looks from real customers.
Collaborate with bloggers and influencers
Like everyone else, we tend to trust our colleagues, friends, and those we admire or know more than salespeople. We are constantly looking for recommendations on the internet to be sure of our choice. Influencer marketing takes advantage of the psychological effects mentioned above by applying this tactic.
You can collaborate with interested influencers to promote your products to potential customers. For example, an influencer creates a gift guide that includes your products and then promotes that guide to their fans. But you can create such a guide on your own, and bloggers will simply take on the responsibility of promoting it.
Attract new customers with live chat
Chat also allows you to communicate directly with your customers so that you can respond and resolve customer concerns when they want to make a purchase.
But that’s not everything‚—a chat can increase sales.
Example—
Whisker Bag uses a live chat to share discounts with new customers and encourage making first orders.
Chat tools allow you to target visitors on specific pages, after they’ve been on your site for a specific period, or even after they’ve arrived at your site via email.
Shopify Marketing Tactics: The Final Thought
There are many ways to promote your Shopify store… Here are some of the best ones, so consider using them to increase sales.
About the Author
Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.
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