The fact that eCommerce has blown up in recent months is no longer news. But it’s not just eCommerce itself that has grown. eCommerce has additional industries supporting it and they have piggybacked on its growth.
eCommerce platforms like Shopify are now increasingly becoming the mainstay of many online businesses if the unprecedented shift to online selling and buying that’s been gathering tremendous momentum is anything to go by.
Despite the gradual easing of the global health crisis restrictions, which had a phenomenal effect on brick-and-mortar stores across the globe, eCommerce platforms’ popularity and usage is unlikely to slow down.
This is largely because most consumers probably feel more comfortable using online platforms like Shopify than they were some two or three years ago.
But while this is good news for online businesses in terms of a growing online consumer base, it also presents a bigger challenge as well in the form of competition.
According to Statista, the United States digital buyers are projected to increase to 278.33 million by 2024 up from 256 million in 2020. While the revenue generated from eCommerce in 2020 amounted to US$431.6 billion, it is estimated to increase to US$563.4 billion by 2025.
Image Source: Statista
This kind of growth means that more and more eCommerce stores are joining Shopify and other eCommerce platforms, which also means competition within these platforms is getting stiffer by the day.
Image Source: eCommerce CEO
But competition aside, Shopify still powers many online stores globally. To put its popularity into perspective, let’s look at some numbers.
You get the picture, right?
While Shopify is a great choice for eCommerce, it doesn’t guarantee your success. The million-dollar question is, what are you doing differently to set your Shopify store apart from the rest and keep growing your sales?
If your Shopify store has not been performing particularly well or you have just launched yours and you are looking for tips and tricks on how to promote your Shopify store like a pro, then you have come to the right place.
In this article, we will highlight growth-oriented tactics to market and grow your Shopify store without necessarily spending a fortune.
Despite being an age-old communication tool, email is still being widely used by marketers today to market their products and services, generate, nurture and convert leads. Email marketing is particularly effective for connecting your Shopify store with your target audience.
Image Source: Mailchimp
According to Mailchimp, eCommerce email marketing has an open rate of about 15.68 percent and a bounce rate of 0.19 percent, which is quite impressive. It gets better.
For every dollar spent on email marketing to promote your Shopify store, you will get an average of $42 in return. This makes email marketing one of the most effective digital marketing tools that you definitely need to start using today to promote your Shopify store.
Using email marketing is pretty much straightforward. You just need to grow an email list, which you can then use to send relevant information, discount codes, promotions, and content. To make it more effective, you should use automated email marketing platforms to send new messages and responses to customers.
Deals are also an effective tactic to use to attract buyers to your Shopify store. Even if your pricing is competitive and even a tad lower than your competitors’, your customers might occasionally shop elsewhere for reasons best known to them, or if they come across a deal they simply can’t say no to.
So, to make sure that your customers remain loyal and that you keep attracting more and more prospects, you must also offer them unbeatable deals. You can try deals such as ‘Buy One Get One Free’, free shipping on particular orders, discounts on quantities to encourage buyers to buy large quantities, or a reward program to encourage loyalty, among others.
What you need to do is identify specific seasons or holidays and create a deal around them. This will definitely drive the much-needed traffic to your Shopify store.
Blogging is still a must-have for online businesses. This is because consumers are now also increasingly consuming digital content, especially when researching products or services they are interested in.
Blogging is also an inexpensive tool that you can use to attract new customers to your Shopify store. Eighty percent of companies say that they acquire new customers through consistently blogging.
This particular tactic comes in handy when you want to enhance your search engine optimization. When you create relevant blog content and do it consistently, you provide search engines such as Google and Bing with fresh content to index.
This also gives you an opportunity to slot in keywords that your target customer will use to find your online store. Not only that, but you also position yourself as an expert in your field as well as build credibility for your online business.
When someone wants to buy something online, where is he or she likely to go first? Google, right?
This action makes perfect sense because, first, Google is the largest and most used search engine with over 92 percent of the market share. Second, customers expect to find pretty much everything about a brand, business, or company on Google even before they consider sourcing for the information from other digital platforms.
Image Source: StatCounter
This is why you need to ensure that your Shopify store can be found using Google. Google My Business simply puts your Shopify store on the global map. It’s also great for first impressions since it shows that you are modern and trendy and customers love that.
Instagram is arguably one of the most popular social media platforms today with over 1 billion users globally. This is obviously a huge space for online stores and a good enough reason to take this platform super seriously.
Image Source: eMarketer
In terms of its usage, close to 33 percent of global Instagram users were aged between 25 and 34 years, which makes it ideal for marketers.
However, just posting images of your products alone is simply not enough. You need to enable shopping on your Instagram account. This way, your customers and prospects can easily and instantly purchase what they see instead of having to hop from one platform to another.
Influencer marketing is a digital marketing trend that many businesses are using to grow their customer base and ultimately their bottom line. Digital advertising budgets are increasingly being redirected to influencer marketing mostly due to the fact that most consumers are now using ad blockers to keep adverts at bay.
42.7% of internet users aged between 16 to 64 years old use ad blocking tools at least once a month, according to a survey by Hootsuite. To get around this, most brands now use influencers to reach their target audience.
You just need to identify influencers that you are willing to work with, send them a few samples of your product to try out, and then wait for them to share their experience with their followers. This is an effective tactic for building credibility and boosting traffic to your website and store.
Yes, Shopify is great. But it won’t do the selling all alone.
You surely use other platforms to track your sales, stay in touch with your customers, manage your financial data, and more, right? You are also probably no stranger to acronyms like CRM, ERP, or to solutions like email marketing automation.
But were you ever frustrated by having to migrate your data from Shopify to either of these solutions? If you’re not yet using integration, you surely were.
Your Shopify dashboard holds A LOT of data. So does your CRM or your email marketing solution. Why not bring them together?
With integration, you could have a bird’s-eye-view on all the data about a customer in a single dashboard. This includes data pulled from Shopify (like purchases made, types of products, frequency of purchasing, and more) AND data from your email platform (like email open rates, email clicks, and others).
Briefly put, integration is the solution that gives unparalleled insights into your customers’ minds. With integration, you can easily create better campaigns.
In fact, these campaigns pretty much create themselves. With combined insights, you know exactly what a customer is and isn’t interested in. Why bother sending them a discount code from hiking boots when they have ignored all your outdoorsy emails so far? Stick to sending them what they like and win their hearts forever.
SyncApps helps hundreds of eCommerce companies all over the world integrate Shopify with their mission-critical solutions. We offer Shopify integrations for some of the most popular software: Salesforce, NetSuite, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and more.
Check out the full list of Shopify integrations here. And don’t forget you can always start with a free plan — NOT a free trial, but a plan that’s free forever!
