Shopify Marketing – How to market your online shop successfully

E-commerce is booming; almost everyone shops online these days – even the local baker usually sells their products online as well. Platforms such as Shopify now make it particularly easy to get started with e-commerce. But there’s a catch to this low barrier to entry. The sheer number of online shops is making it increasingly difficult to be found by customers. The real key to success for your Shopify shop therefore lies more and more in Shopify marketing. In this post, I’ll reveal how you can outperform your competitors with a professional marketing strategy.

Shopify Marketing Overview

Christian gives you an overview of the various Shopify marketing strategies

What is Shopify marketing?

Shopify marketing refers to all the strategies and activities carried out within and around the Shopify platform to promote your products to customers and boost your brand’s visibility.

Shopify marketing covers a wide range of areas, and it does not make sense for every brand to attempt to cover all of them in full. The measures taken depend on the current situation, the objectives set, the specific niche and the budget.

Shopify marketing experts can draw on your personal preferences and goals to create a bespoke marketing strategy, helping you move closer to your e-commerce goals step by step.

It’s important to note that Shopify marketing is a full-time job; don’t expect to generate large sums of revenue simply by setting up a Shopify shop and making half-hearted marketing efforts. In addition, there are many different areas to cover; ideally, you’ll have a team to handle the various aspects of Shopify marketing and outsource the tasks for which there’s no specialist within your team.

What is the difference between Shopify marketing and online shop marketing?

The difference between Shopify marketing and online shop marketing lies in the details. A Shopify shop is, of course, an online shop, but the Canadian e-commerce platform has a number of specific features that experts can utilise to get the most out of your Shopify shop.

In recent years, an entire ecosystem has sprung up around Shopify. The potential is almost limitless, and with Shopify Plus, it is now possible to grow from a start-up into a large corporation whilst continuing to use Shopify seamlessly.

These days, you can do almost anything with Shopify, but the question: “What’s the best way to go about it?” is more important than ever. That’s why it’s important to approach Shopify marketing with the necessary know-how. So, in the following, I’d like to explain in more detail the blueprint we use to build our personalised marketing strategies.

Here’s how you can approach Shopify marketing

It is not effective simply to do something at random. Marketing initiatives should be planned in detail and then evaluated so that their success can be assessed.

Our framework is structured hierarchically, which enables us to achieve the greatest possible effectiveness. The framework consists of four levels:

The stages are organised hierarchically: Foundation -> Conversion -> Visibility -> Scaling

First, you need to assess where your Shopify shop currently stands; then you can plan the next steps. Each stage involves its own set of steps, and you shouldn’t skip any of them if you want to achieve the best possible result. But perhaps you’re already well into the process and have implemented all the basics successfully so far. In that case, join the process wherever it makes sense for you, but be honest with yourself and try not to skip any stages.

Sometimes, being too close to the situation can lead to misjudging it. A fresh pair of eyes, looking at the situation with a new perspective, is therefore often a good idea.

Let’s now move on to the individual steps. You can implement our plan yourself or seek support; however, some of the steps require specialist knowledge, which is why our team consists of experts who specialise in their respective fields.

Shopify Marketing Level 1: The Basics

Just like a building, an online shop cannot function without the right framework. Only if the foundations are stable and fault-free can the shop grow properly.

That’s why you should first check whether the shop has been set up correctly, whether everything is working properly from a technical point of view, and identify which KPIs are key to achieving your objectives.

Technology

Shopify already provides a solid technical foundation. As a result, major errors are fairly rare. Nevertheless, you should check the existing shop. This requires a great deal of experience with Shopify. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll have to accept the odd mistake here and there. Alternatively, you can work with Shopify experts.

In principle, there will always be room for improvement, and as your shop is constantly evolving, new errors can always creep in; that’s why it’s good practice to carry out a technical check from time to time and pick the ‘low-hanging fruit’.

Tracking

Properly set-up tracking is essential for Shopify marketing, yet we still regularly come across customers who run into difficulties in this area. Before committing large marketing budgets, you should set up all the relevant tracking tools. This is the only way to analyse the results later and draw meaningful conclusions.

Google Analytics forms the very foundation of this and is even free of charge. This tracking tool allows you to analyse all your marketing channels in one place and offers many other ways to understand user behaviour.

Objectives

Together with our clients, we set achievable goals; here, we can draw on our experience as a Shopify agency, and the technical analysis alone reveals just how much room for improvement can be achieved with very little effort. Alternatively, you can, of course, set your own goals. Goal-setting is also a fundamental part of Shopify marketing and should be continually adjusted as goals are achieved.

KPIs

Ultimately, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be derived from the objectives. Each objective should be assigned performance indicators that define whether the objective has been met or missed.

Shopify Marketing Level 2: Conversion

Once the foundations are in place, you can get started on the conversion. This involves ironing out all the rough edges of the shop to ensure a seamless shopping experience for the customer. It’s important to understand where customers drop out and what is still stopping them from making a purchase.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) draws on a range of best practices that have proven their worth in real-world scenarios. These cover all areas of your online shop that influence your customers’ purchasing decisions.

Depending on the initial situation, conversion rate optimisation can lead to a significant increase in turnover. Optimisation ensures that more visitors become paying customers and should therefore always take place before any efforts are made to increase traffic.

A simple arithmetic example:

If your conversion rate is at the lower end, say 1 per cent, then you’ll need 100 prospective customers to generate one sale. So if you attract 100,000 prospective customers to your site via paid advertising, 1,000 of them will become paying customers. That costs a lot of money and you lose 99,000 potential customers.

However, if you improve your conversion rate to 2–3% beforehand, you can generate 2,000–3,000 customers with the same advertising budget. Furthermore, by applying the right strategies, you can also increase the average basket value.

Experience in Shopify marketing shows that improving the conversion rate from 1% to 2–3% is easier to achieve than doubling or tripling the website’s traffic.

This is how your online shop benefits from exponential growth; at every stage, we adjust different parameters, and each of these can be seen as a multiplier.

Newsletter Marketing Automation

Newsletters are a very popular marketing tool due to their high conversion rate, and should never be overlooked in Shopify marketing. The reason for implementing them so early on is that you should build up your mailing list as quickly as possible. Every email address means money in the bank for you.

For successful Shopify email marketing, you should create different customer journeys and segment users into appropriate target groups. A/B testing will help you identify what works for your target groups. The first journeys should already be set up before you move on to the next step of the Shopify marketing plan.

There are numerous tools available for email marketing automation, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Here’s a brief overview:

• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is an extremely popular platform known for its user-friendliness, wide range of features and flexible pricing. It offers tools suitable for both beginners and advanced users.

• Constant Contact: Constant Contact is known for its user-friendly interface, customisable templates and detailed analytics. It is particularly well suited to small businesses looking for a reliable email marketing service.

• Sendinblue: Sendinblue offers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools, including email marketing, SMS marketing and marketing automation. It stands out for its powerful features and competitive pricing.

• AWeber: AWeber is a well-established email marketing platform offering a wide range of features, including a simple drag-and-drop builder, autoresponders and comprehensive analytics.

• GetResponse: GetResponse offers features such as email marketing, marketing automation and landing page creation. It is known for its A/B testing, segmentation options and integrations.

Shopify Marketing Level 3: Visibility

A successful e-commerce business needs one thing above all else: customers. If you’re not visible, you can’t sell. Now that the basic framework is in place and the shop is converting well, it’s time to drive in a flood of traffic. There are all sorts of platforms and options available, but if you want sustainable growth, you simply can’t do without search engine optimisation.

Search engine optimisation

Ideally, search engine optimisation allows you to grow organically over time, thereby building a growing customer base. However, as there are so many factors to consider with SEO, as a non-expert you’ll quickly find yourself at a loss.

The good news is that Shopify is already optimised for search engines right from the start. Nevertheless, mistakes do tend to creep in from time to time. An SEO audit is therefore the ideal starting point for Shopify SEO.

Search engine optimisation is, broadly speaking, about being found by customers using relevant keywords. As the owner of a pet shop, for example, you’ll want to be found using the keyword ‘dog collar’. It’s particularly important to appear amongst the top 10 search results, as these are displayed on the first page. Logically, the higher the ranking, the better: the number one position gets the most clicks, whilst anything below number 10 is competing for just a few.

When it comes to SEO for online shops, it is particularly important to assign appropriate keywords to each product, category and page, and to implement them correctly. Another key point is to provide customers with the best possible user experience; as we have already taken care of this in Stage 2, the first rankings may already be on the horizon.

To begin with, Seobility is an ideal tool for those on a tight budget, and even beginners will find it easy to use. This is because, after crawling the site, the tool provides clear, easy-to-understand recommendations for action that can be implemented straight away. In addition, the online shop is assessed across the categories of Technical & Meta, Structure and Content, providing a rough overview.

Anyone with a bit more knowledge of SEO can use the SEO Spider Tool. For websites with fewer than 500 URLs, you can even use the free version here.

If you want to get off to a flying start with SEO, then Sistrix is the right choice. The tool leaves virtually nothing to be desired and can be a great help in keeping track of all the figures and metrics. However, getting to grips with it is a little more difficult than it is with Seobility.

Pay-per-click marketing

Whilst there is no substitute for organic visibility, it does require a great deal of time and energy. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your online shop won’t appear on the first page for highly competitive keywords overnight either.

That’s exactly what PPC adverts are for. Whilst you have to take many factors into account for organic rankings, in Google’s case you can buy an even better position through this method. This means potential customers will find you straight away.

You only pay when customers actually land on your site. As you have to spend real money on this, your adverts should be optimised as much as possible. To do this, you need data. To analyse what works and what doesn’t, you should start with a small budget.

Setting up the campaigns is relatively intuitive, but achieving profitability may require more expertise.

Organic growth and paid adverts go hand in hand in Shopify marketing. Paid adverts help you generate quick revenue, some of which you can then invest in your SEO budget. The same applies to PPC marketing on social media channels.

As well as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, common PPC channels include Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Pinterest Ads and Twitter Ads, which brings us to our next chapter on Shopify marketing.

Social media marketing

We all use social media. What began as a network for friends has now become a marketplace for advertisers. Although the adoption curve is already well advanced and users are becoming increasingly wary, with the right approach, social media channels are still an excellent way to build a loyal following.

At the same time, an unprofessional online presence or the absence of the usual social media channels gives rise to justified scepticism amongst potential customers. So anyone wishing to establish a well-known brand simply cannot afford to ignore social media.

Here, too, there is a whole separate set of skills that needs to be learnt. Furthermore, the platforms can differ quite significantly from one another, so it is not simply a case of creating universal content and then rolling it out across every platform.

Ideally, you should decide which channels best suit your brand and your target audience, and focus on those.

Shopify Marketing Level 4: Scaling

Now that you have laid the foundations in the previous stages, prepared your shop for your customers and started to boost your online visibility, in this final stage we will focus on evaluating and scaling up these measures.

Analysing data, deriving steps

Now the Shopify marketing really gets going. Thanks to your efforts in Stage 3, the first users should already have become aware of your shop. Using tracking, you can now check whether conversion optimisation has delivered the desired results. If this isn’t the case, you should repeat Stage 2 until the conversion rate reaches a satisfactory level. Only then should you scale up.

It is also time to take stock of your SEO, PPC and social media efforts. Analyse which channels have performed well, where the greatest potential lies and what best suits the brand. Perhaps there are social media platforms that simply don’t suit your brand – limit yourself to the channels that work and try to scale them up.

Try to spread your budget evenly between organic growth and paid adverts. If you’ve opted for SEO and Instagram, then complement these channels with Google Ads and Instagram Ads.

Scaling and synergy effects

The groundwork has been laid; now the hard work begins. By analysing your previous efforts, you should by now have a good sense of what has worked, where, and to what extent. The next step is to scale up the activities that have proved successful. Adjust your PPC budgets and keep an eye on your ROAS. There are also other ways to expand your Shopify marketing.

By the way: There are many variables to consider in Shopify marketing, and we adjust them step by step. By coordinating the measures effectively, we achieve synergy. This means that the various channels reinforce one another and, when combined, deliver the best return on investment.

Content marketing

By providing relevant content relating to your products, you can engage customers at every stage of the customer journey. At the same time, content marketing is one of the cornerstones of SEO. More high-quality content boosts your authority within your niche, which can lead to better rankings for your product pages. That’s why a blog is still highly relevant for any online shop. But content marketing now encompasses many areas:

• Blog posts
• Podcast
• Videos, YouTube channel
• Guest contributions
• Interviews
• Webinars
• Infographics

And anything else that offers added value to your target audience. A Shopify blog can be seen as a good starting point, as creating text content is relatively inexpensive. Various AI tools now make the process much easier, but the content must still be unique and, above all, helpful. You can then build on this with all your other initiatives via the blog.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is an effective way to boost your brand awareness and grow your follower count on social media. The first step is to establish a professional social media presence. You can then reach out to suitable influencers for your brand to complement this.

Don’t get too hung up on having a huge number of followers. Influencers with fewer followers often have a more loyal following. It’s important that the target audiences align and that the collaboration comes across as authentic; otherwise, the campaign could damage your image.

By working with carefully selected influencers, you can cement your brand in the minds of your target audience. A successful campaign will build trust, boost brand awareness and accelerate your growth on social media, whilst also driving conversions.

Summary

Shopify marketing isn’t just exciting – it’s also a vital tool for success in e-commerce. Let’s summarise the key points once again.

• Shopify has now become a platform for businesses of all sizes and offers many advantages over rival platforms.

• Shopify marketing is demanding and time-consuming; it cannot be done on the side. If you lack the necessary resources, outsourcing is an effective solution.

• By following the right approach, you can benefit from synergy effects and exponential growth.

• Our Shopify marketing framework comprises four stages: Foundations, Conversion, Visibility and Scaling

Conclusion – Holistic Shopify marketing is a hell of a lot of work

That’s it for the theory; now it’s time to put it into practice. As you can see, Shopify marketing is very comprehensive and labour-intensive. Don’t expect your student intern to manage all the channels at once. Of course, I’ve only been able to cover each topic quite superficially. You can find more details on all aspects of Shopify marketing here on our blog.

If you need support, book a free consultation now so that we can work out together what stage you’re currently at and how we can help you using our framework.