Boost Your Shopify Store with a Winning Marketing Strategy

No Shopify store has ever been successful without an effective marketing strategy.

To help you build your own, we’ve collated nine high-performing channels and tactics to include in your marketing plan, including:

• When to use it (and when not to)
• What it looks like in practice (including real-world examples)
• Tips, tricks, and tools to help you do it yourself

Let’s get into it…

Start With a SWOT Analysis

Before you decide which elements to include in your marketing plan, take the time to assess how you stack up against your competitors by running a SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: What do you do well?
• Weaknesses: What’s holding you back from performing better?
• Opportunities: What external factors could give you a competitive advantage?
• Threats: What external factors could limit your potential?

Here’s a theoretical example of a SWOT analysis for the D2C bedding brand Brooklinen:

Taking the time to run a SWOT analysis will help you hone your unique value proposition — AKA why people would buy from you rather than a rival.

Which, in turn, makes it easier to build a successful marketing strategy tailored to your brand and audience.

9 Channels and Tactics for Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you’ve performed your SWOT analysis, you can get on with building your marketing strategy.

Treat this next section as a pick-and-choose selection rather than a tasting menu. You don’t need to do every one of these to nail your marketing strategy — in fact, as you’ll see, some of these channels and tactics are a bad fit for certain brands and niches.

Your ultimate goal here is to identify 3 – 5 channels that will help you reach your audience, bring them to your store, and persuade them to buy.

SEO

When To Use It

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you generate more traffic to your store through organic search. It’s particularly effective in consumer niches with tons of search volume and keywords, such as:

• Beauty
• Fashion
• Home decor

That way, you can target lower-competition keywords that still see lots of searches.

But SEO isn't right for every business. For example, it doesn't work well for some very specific B2B niches, as it's difficult to work out what those audiences are Googling in the first place.

Case Study: Made In

Made In is a direct-to-consumer brand selling professional-grade cookware at affordable prices.

There’s a ton of search activity within this niche, making SEO a key growth channel for Made In. They get it right by targeting higher-volume, more generic terms on top-level pages, then getting more specific on deeper pages.

Here’s an example of how that works in practice:

Actionable Tip 💡

Effective SEO starts with identifying the right keywords, so here’s a brief top-level look at the keyword research process:

• Google a broad “seed” keyword that describes your niche (like “non-stick cookware”).
• Look through the autocomplete results and pull out more specific keywords that are relevant to your brand and products (like “ceramic non-stick pans”).

• Repeat the process for those more specific keywords and try to niche down even further (e.g. “ceramic non-stick pan with lid”).
• Map those keywords against your homepage and collections pages.

This basic manual approach works fine for stores with smaller product catalogs, but it’s not practical at scale. If you sell more than a dozen-or-so products across 3 – 5 categories, you’ll save a ton of time investing in a keyword research tool like:

• Ahrefs
• Keyword Insights
• Moz

👉 For a thorough walk-through, check out Ahrefs’ guide to keyword research for beginners.

Organic Social Media

When To Use It

Organic social media is a valuable tool for building brand awareness — especially on TikTok, where organic reach is still pretty high. And it can also help you engage existing customers and encourage them to buy again.

Kinda like SEO, organic social works best in big consumer niches like fashion and beauty. It’s least effective in dry, non-visual markets — which is why your for you page isn’t full of organizations like KPMG and Oracle.

Case Study: BLK & Bold

BLK & Bold is a Shopify store selling specialty teas and coffees.

It uses social media to share its brand story, like in this Instagram Reel featuring brand ambassador and NFL coach Deion Sanders:

This is an effective way to foster a sense of community among existing customers, making them more likely to stay loyal to the brand. And in the e-commerce world, loyalty = more repeat orders and a higher customer lifetime value 💰

It also helps BLK & Bold to quickly win over new audiences who stumble upon their content and share their values.

Actionable Tip 💡

To succeed at organic social media marketing, you need to target e-commerce friendly social platforms that align with your audience.

Use our handy comparison table to help you make the right choices:

Paid Social Media

When To Use It

Paid social media is a form of e-commerce advertising that helps you achieve a whole bunch of goals, from reaching and converting new audiences to encouraging repeat purchases from existing customers.

It’s a good fit for pretty much any Shopify merchant looking to drive immediate action (provided you’ve got the budget to pay for ads).

However, it’s worth noting that average click costs are expensive in some e-commerce niches:

Case Study: Everlane

Fashion brand Everlane primarily uses social media advertising to support new product launches, like in this example that appeared on Facebook and Instagram:

As you’ll see, this ad is packed with actionable language like:

• Meet…
• Order now
• Shop now

It also builds urgency with the promise of free shipping for customers who “order now”. This is a smart play given that 92% of consumers say free shipping offers influence their purchase decisions.

Actionable Tip 💡

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok allow you to reach hyper-specific audiences based on age, language, location, interests, and more.

But by trying to laser-target exactly the right audience, all you’re doing is pushing your click costs higher and missing out on a bunch of potential customers who don’t meet your specific criteria.

Instead, target a broader audience — like women in the US — then leave it to each platform’s algorithm to automatically find the demographics that are most likely to engage, click, and purchase.

Email Marketing

When To Use It

Email marketing is best for nurturing your existing e-commerce leads and customers with targeted promotions and product recommendations based on their browsing habits and/or previous purchases.

The ROI is super high, so anyone with an existing audience should be using email.

The downside, of course, is that email won’t do anything for you if you have zero names on your marketing list.

Case Study: Duradry

Antiperspirant brand Duradry consistently nails email marketing.

They don’t run too many discounts, which is sensible — audiences get bored by constant sales messaging.

But when they do launch a promotion, they use automated email sequences to ensure everyone on their marketing list knows about it. For example, take a look at the timings around their 2024 “early Black Friday” campaign:

Now, let’s dive into the final email in the sequence to see how Duradry persuades customers to take action.

For starters, they keep their offer super simple:

Because a flat 30% off everything is a whole lot more compelling than a promotion with tons of terms and conditions.

They subtly encourage customers to buy in bulk — thereby increasing average order values — by explaining “why people are stocking up”:

And their email copy is loaded with urgency and scarcity-inducing language, which encourages customers to buy right now:

Actionable Tip 💡

As we’ve already noted, email marketing is only as effective as the size (and quality) of your marketing list.

So even if you already have a ton of email addresses, it pays to capture more. And the best way to do that is with email capture popups, like this one from hot sauce brand Fly By Jing:

Be sure to give shoppers a compelling reason to hand over their email address, such as:

• A discount on their first/next purchase
• Free shipping
• A free gift
• Early access to a promotion
• Exclusive content (provided your content is good enough)

Learn How to Double (2X) Your Shopify Sales with Product Labels

• Boost sales by highlighting key features with product badges
• Increase conversions by promoting scarcity, urgency and social proof
• Sell more with targeted promotions to increase average order sizes

See the guide

Content Marketing

When To Use It

Content marketing isn’t really a standalone channel. Rather, it’s a way to support other content-hungry marketing channels like email, social media, and SEO.

It’s an effective way to showcase products and engage with potential customers via any of those channels.

But if you’re not using those channels, you can live without content marketing too.

Case Study: Bored Cow

Bored Cow is a Shopify food and drink store selling alternative dairy products.

Blog posts are their main form of content marketing. Specifically, they create recipes designed to inspire shoppers to try their products for the first time or experiment with new purchases:

This content doesn’t just sit, unloved, on Bored Cow’s blog.

Instead, they get as many eyes on it as possible by sharing seasonal recipes with their email list:

Image source

This strategy works well because the content is genuinely valuable. And because it’s not overly sales-y, there’s no reason for customers not to click through.

Actionable Tip 💡

Short of content ideas?

No problem. Just plug a seed keyword — like “alternative milk” — into Answer the Public, which uses Google autocomplete data to surface related real-world searches:

In a matter of seconds, you can generate dozens of potential blog titles.

Now all you’ve got to do is pick the best, write them up, and share them!

Search Ads

When To Use It

Search ads are like SEO, except you pay for the opportunity to show up in relevant search results. That means they’re super effective at generating traffic (and hopefully sales) fast.

However, just like with social media advertising, click costs can be expensive. So if you’ve got a limited budget, search ads might not be for you.

And if your conversion rate is low, you can easily spend a ton of money on search ads with minimal return.

Also, if you sell something that’s hard to describe — like custom or one-of-a-kind products — search ads might not be a good fit, because people won’t know what to search for.

Case Study: Sephora

Cosmetics retailer Sephora demonstrates how to build trust through search ads.

Now, you might think that a global brand like Sephora already has a strong enough reputation. But in a world where just 47% of brands are seen as trustworthy, they can’t afford to take any risks.

That’s why Sephora adds trust factors — like review scores and customer support response times — to search ads:

This approach helps boost search ad conversion rates. And a high conversion rate improves your ad account’s quality score — which means lower click costs.

Actionable Tip 💡

Remember, Google isn’t the only search engine.

Bing makes up approximately 4% of the search market, so about one in 25 searchers are using it.

More than half of Bing users are over 35, with roughly one-third aged 45+. In part, this is because Bing is the default browser on all new windows PCs — and a lot of older users simply never change it.

This is important, because in some e-commerce niches, Microsoft Ads — Bing’s ad platform — offers lower costs per click (CPCs) than Google Ads:

In all these niches, the difference is either pretty marginal, or Bing is substantially cheaper.

So if you’re in one of those “cheaper” niches and/or are targeting older audiences, Bing can help you do it at a fraction of the cost of Google search ads.

BONUS Actionable Tip 💡

Connect your store to the Google and Microsoft advertising networks via the official Shopify apps:

• Google Ads Shopify app
• Microsoft Ads Shopify app

Shopping Ads

When To Use It

Shopping ads are another form of search engine-based pay-per-click (PPC) ad.

Like search ads, they’re great for getting lots of eyes on your products in a short space of time. Plus the click costs are pretty cheap:

So if you can afford a little ad budget, there’s no reason not to run shopping ads.

The only real downside is that, with a couple exceptions, you can’t use shopping ads to promote non-physical items.

So if you’ve got a Shopify store selling online courses or e-books, shopping ads ain’t the one.

Case Study: Soak Sunday

At first glance, there’s not much to shopping ads.

They’re just a single image and a short description. So there’s nothing much you can do to influence the click, right?

Actually, no. Bath and body care brand Soak Sunday shows that you can cram a bunch of information into your search ads if you’re smart about it:

In <20 words, they’ve included:

• Their brand name
• Product benefits (cruelty-free and vegan)
• Product description
• Returns information
• Product weight

Those are all valuable details that could persuade a shopper to buy from Soak Sunday rather than a competitor.

Actionable Tip 💡

Imagery plays a big part in shopping ad success.

Because there’s not much space to play with, your best bet is to keep it simple. Here are some quick best practices:

• Ensure your product takes up 75% – 90% of the image.
• Use a solid, light background that doesn’t distract from your product.
• Include minimal (or zero) product staging — this isn’t a creative shoot!
• Meet the minimum size requirements of 100 x 100 pixels (or 250 x 250 for clothing images).
• If you’re promoting a bundle, be sure the image shows all items in the bundle.

👉 For further guidance, check out Google’s shopping ad image guidelines.

Shopify’s Shop App

When To Use It

The Shop app is a Shopify-built e-commerce marketplace featuring products from thousands of Shopify merchants, each of which gets its own storefront on the platform.

It’s totally free for merchants and it (potentially) helps you reach a wider audience of consumers who are actively looking for products through the app. Plus it’s easy to set up — you just need to add the Shop sales channel via your Shopify admin.

So you might as well use it!

👉 Read Shopify’s walk-through on how to set up the Shop channel.

Case Study: Glossier

There’s nothing wrong with adding Shop as a sales channel and forgetting about it.

However, Glossier took things several steps further by giving customers exclusive early access to their Boy Brow Arch pencil through the Shop app.

The campaign leveraged the app’s location technology so that only people who scanned a QR code on physical billboards could purchase the product.

Image source

This added a layer of exclusivity to the campaign, which helped Glossier build hype around the launch.

Actionable Tip 💡

If you’re going to add the Shop app as a sales channel, be sure to set up Shop chat too.

That way, customers can start a chat with your support team while they’re browsing your products on the app — so you can answer their questions (and close the deal) in real time.

All you need to do is install the free Shopify inbox app.

(BTW, we like Shopify Inbox so much we named it one of the best Shopify apps for e-commerce.)

Influencer Marketing

When To Use It

For smaller and/or new Shopify stores, one of the biggest barriers to growth is reaching new audiences. With so much competition out there, it can be hard to persuade shoppers to explore something new.

Influencer marketing is an ideal solution.

By working with influencers, you get to tap into their established audiences and leverage the trust they’ve built with their followers to drive sales. Indeed, 36% of consumers say influencer posts are the best way for brands to convince them to try new products.

Case Study: Warby Parker

D2C eyewear brand Warby Parker runs influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram and TikTok to promote USPs.

For example, this collaboration with @stayathomebun focuses on the brand’s pledge to donate a pair of glasses to someone in need with every purchase:

This sort of ethical angle is a big hit with consumers, given that 82% of shoppers prefer a brand’s values to align with their own.

Actionable Tip 💡

Don’t have the budget for a Kardashian-grade influencer marketing campaign?

No problem.

Fact is, smaller influencers often deliver better results (and they’re much cheaper to work with).

Indeed, influencers with <15,000 followers have significantly higher average engagement rates than larger accounts across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

4 Ways To Get the Most Out Of Your Marketing Strategy

You’ve chosen your marketing channels and launched your first campaigns.

But the work doesn’t stop here — you’ve still got to find ways to turn your followers, email subscribers, and store visitors into paying customers.

Here are four methods to help you out:

Boost Conversion Rates With Product Badges

The faster a visitor to your store finds a product they love, the more likely they are to buy.

So it’s in your best interests to showcase your top products and promotions. And the most effective way to do that is with product badges.

Product badges help you:

• Draw attention to sales, discounts, and special offers,
• Highlight top-selling, in-demand products
• Generate buzz for “coming soon” products

All of which helps to boost your store’s conversion rate.

Grow Your Shopify Sales by over 175% with Flair

• Increase sales using product badges and sales banners
• Maximize conversions with scarcity, urgency and countdown timers
• Automate promotions with targeted rules and scheduling

Learn more

Guide Shoppers With Targeted Popups

We’ve already mentioned how popups play a key role in growing an email marketing list.

But did you know they can also help you guide shoppers along the path to purchase?

For example, check out this popup that shares targeted product recommendations with returning shoppers based on their previous purchases:

Image source

Use popups like these to remove barriers to purchase by quickly steering shoppers toward products you know they’ll love.

Track Customer Behavior Through Shopify Analytics

Shopify’s reporting and analytics tools help you get a clearer understanding of your audience and how they interact with your site.

This is essential to leveling up your marketing campaigns — because the better you know your audience, the easier it becomes to create messaging that feels truly personalized. Which is a big deal, given that 73% of shoppers expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations.

The Reports screen in your Shopify admin includes dozens of pre-built reports, covering everything from top-performing discounts to your average order value over time.

You can use this information to optimize your campaigns in any number of ways.

For example, use the Sessions by location report to identify the regions/cities your audience lives in, then create localized email/ad campaigns targeting those locations.

A/B Test Messaging and Offers

Top-performing Shopify stores are constantly A/B testing different imagery, messaging, and user journeys. That way, they don’t have to guess when creating new campaigns — they already know what works best.

Here are some examples of things you can A/B test:

• Popup design
• Email subject lines
• Promotions (e.g. percentage discounts vs free shipping)
• Ad images and captions
• Calls to action

When running A/B tests, remember to only test one variable at a time.

Because if the two “versions” are too different, you won’t be able to say for sure why the winning variant performed better.

FAQs

How do I get more people to see my Shopify store?

Effective marketing helps you get more eyes on your Shopify store. For example, use:

• SEO and search ads to target shoppers actively searching for products like yours
• Social ads to reach new audiences who are most likely to be interested in your brand and products
• Influencer marketing to tap into the existing audiences of influencers in your niche

What are the best strategies to increase Shopify sales?

There are two strands to increasingly sales on Shopify:

• Attracting more traffic to your store
• Converting more website visitors into paying customers

The most effective strategies for increasing sales often combine both of those elements.

For example, you can increase store traffic with search or social ads, then boost conversions with product badges to highlight your top-sellers and best promotions.

Which Shopify apps are useful for marketing?

Top Shopify apps for marketing include:

• Flair, for increasing conversions
• Shopify Email, for email marketing
• Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, for search/shopping ads
• Pop Convert, for website popups
• Judge.me, for product reviews

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