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E-commerce marketing can be a challenging task to organize and execute if you don’t have much experience with it or you don’t possess the necessary eCommerce skills or knowledge. That’s why so many first-time (and even experienced) e-commerce marketers and business owners fail.
That being said, there are some techniques you can use to get your e-commerce marketing off the ground and make your Shopify store prosper. Hence, here are the six smart tips to improve your Shopify eCommerce marketing strategy.
First and foremost, you need to use social media to its fullest when marketing your online store. Social media marketing is often considered to be one of the most effective and efficient types of digital marketing, so using it only to half its strength would be counterproductive. Here are some tips on what you can do with social media:
- Start an Instagram Brand Account: The first and most important step is to start your own Instagram brand account which will help you reach an online audience specifically on the platform. There, you can announce new products, post sneak peeks, engage with the audience in different ways, and so much more.
- Launch A Facebook Store: Another social media platform to use is Facebook. There, you can launch a Facebook store that can easily be integrated with your Shopify store. This way, you will be able to reach even more potential customers.
- Create data-driven content ideas: You can use a hashtag research tool to come up with ideas that are more likely to generate engagement, hence organic growth.
- Leverage User-Generated Content: UGC or user-generated content is the content created by your audience. Your followers could be posting their reviews or creating other types of fan content that you can then repost on your own social media accounts to show that you care about them.
- Cross-Promote on Different Platforms: It’s one thing to use a single social media platform but using several of them can be increasingly effective. Cross-promoting your brand on your website, blog, TikTok as well as on your different social media accounts will help you attract more traffic to your store while also increasing your social media follower count.
- Use Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing has recently become a particularly common social media marketing technique. Basically, you find users on social media with a significant follower base. These users are referred to as influencers and can promote your business to their audience. The key is to find the influencer that fit your brand the best and have the target audience that is just like yours.
- Provide Customer Support: Something that many marketers and business owners are seemingly still unaware of is that social media can be used for providing customer support. Twitter can be great for this, but you can also use Facebook Messenger to set up either live chats or chat bots.
#2 Experiment with Email Marketing
While social media marketing is definitely essential to your Shopify eCommerce marketing strategy, you should also use email marketing – and particularly, you need to experiment with it.
As experts from the essay writing services reviews suggest, “Email marketing has been used for so long that many customers are simply tired of receiving brand emails. That’s why businesses need to get more creative with their email marketing.” Here are some things to try:
- Capture More Email Subscribers: To actually kickstart your email marketing campaigns, you should first have enough email subscribers. That’s why you need to aim to capture more of them by promoting your newsletter in different ways and encouraging more users to sign up for it.
- Send Wishlist Reminder Emails: Perhaps one of the best features you can set up in your store is the wishlist option for customers to be able to add products that they want to buy. However, these customers can forget about their wishlists fairly quickly which is why you should send out wishlist reminder emails to encourage them to complete their order and make a purchase.
- Segment Subscribers Thoroughly: When asking users to sign up for your email newsletter, make them answer a few simple questions so that you can segment them into different groups. Doing so will help you personalize emails better and increase email open and conversion rates. For example, one user could be interested in makeup products from a particular brand while a different user could be interested in personal hygiene products from a variety of brands as long as they are below a certain price.
- Give Out Promo Codes and Gifts: Another way segmentation will benefit you is when you send your email subscribers personalized promo codes and gifts. These will help you better connect with your audience and make your customer more loyal to your brand.
- Collect Feedback Regularly: Emails are not a one-way channel as some marketers might think. In fact, collecting feedback from your subscribers regularly will help you improve your newsletters and better understand what your audience likes.
- Inform Subscribers About Sales: Like promo codes and gifts, sales can be incredibly appealing to your subscribers. That’s why you can use emails to inform your audience about discounted products, holiday sales, and more.
Business success heavily depends upon marketing. Here are the Top Shopify Email Marketing Services to help with your marketing effort.
#3 Take Your Sales to A New Level
Marketing is often considered in isolation from other aspects of your business, but this shouldn’t be the case. In fact, the best thing you can do is consider your sales and marketing as two sides of one coin. Consequently, to improve your Shopify eCommerce marketing strategy, you should also improve your sales by taking them to a completely new level.
One way to do this is by upselling your products. When your customer has an order with a particular set of products, you can ask them if they want to get the same products but of a premium quality or size (e.g. a bigger bottle of shampoo). This way, their order will be almost the same, but you will earn more. You should also try to anticipate future sales by expanding your product variety.
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#4 Increase Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is quite a topic that encompasses many aspects of your marketing strategy, but it is essential to the effectiveness of your e-commerce marketing campaigns. How much users engage with your social media content can define how many more users will see this content on their explore pages and find out about your social media brand accounts. Likewise, engagement on your website can lead to your online store ranking higher in search results.
However, there are also other things to consider when it comes to customer engagement. One of these is closely related to customer support. For instance, by having a live chat on your online store, you can engage your store visitors in a variety of ways. You can provide customer support to past clients while also persuading potential customers to buy your products by answering their most burning questions.
The eCommerce market is dynamic beyond comprehension. For that reason, you should strive to continually develop both your selling efforts, as well as your customer engagement strategy.
#5 Personalize and Reward
As mentioned earlier, personalization is a great way to encourage your customers to come back for more and even become returning customers. After all, all the best websites and brands use personalization, so it is now considered a requirement rather than an optional approach. Try to personalize your marketing in different ways and on different platforms, from social media to emails to on-site optimization.
Another thing to think about is a loyalty program or a reward system you can set up for your customers. In a way, this can also be used in conjunction with personalization. A customer who regularly buys a certain set of products from you could be given bonus points that they can use as a discount for buying these very products. This shows that you care about returning customers and want them to be coming back.
#6 Make Your Store A Welcome Place
Last but not least, you need to make sure that your store is a welcome place that is easy to explore. You don’t want your customers to be spending a lot of time looking for the products and information they need. This can only lead them to change their mind and leave your website altogether. Here are some tips on how to make your online store better:
- Optimize for Mobile: Many of your online store visitors won’t be viewing your store from their desktop computers. Instead, they could be using different mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. But if your website is not optimized for mobile, your store won’t look right, and users will be leaving it faster than they came upon it.
- Optimize Product Pages: At the same time, you need to think about optimizing product pages as well. All your product pages need to have relevant product information, but they should also have the right keywords, meta description, and other SEO elements.
- Make Navigation Easier: Website navigation is difficult to test correctly because there are just so many things to consider. Moreover, you don’t always have the perspective of your customers, so you might not even notice some of the issues they see. Have a detailed menu, build an intricate internal linking system, and run tests to find any hidden technical errors. Also, ask for feedback from your site visitors to solve any other issues that arise.
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Final Thoughts
There is no denying that email marketing can be quite overwhelming, especially if this is an area you do not have a lot of experience in. You can find some advice and examples on successful email marketing campaigns in our Successful Email Marketing Campaign Examples for eCommerce Store guide.
All in all, using the right techniques for marketing is perhaps one of the most important things you need to remember when you start planning your Shopify eCommerce marketing strategy.
By actively experimenting with the eCommerce marketing techniques presented in this article, you will be able to significantly improve your Shopify strategy and promote your store more effectively, attracting more traffic and getting more sales.
Ana Mayer is a freelance writer who is a qualified specialist in the field of digital marketing. She writes for different news portals and thematic blogs that help her stay at the heart of the programming and technology news. Such work gives her the opportunity to write articles on the most relevant topics of today.
