If you choose Shopify as your e-commerce platform–the world is your oyster.
Shopify can support as much traffic and sales as you can throw at it.
“Whether you sell online, on social media, in store, or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered.”
–Shopify.com
You have the potential to reach millions of shoppers and sell products across the world on an e-commerce platform that does most of the heavy work for you.
Their biggest challenge is getting this worldwide audience to notice them and care about their brand.
Sadly, the old adage of ‘Build It And They Will Come’ doesn’t stand true for owners of any e-commerce store.
Although Shopify automates the sales process, the hard work of attracting an audience is still up to you.
While having great products will certainly help you sell via word of mouth marketing — a solid marketing strategy can accelerate the the growth of your brand and business.
Where should you start?
Pay-per-click advertising could certainly have a place in any e-commerce marketing strategy.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have advertising platforms where you either pay for every person that views your ad or for every person that clicks through to your website.
You’ll need a fair chunk of capital to set this up though — and it’s likely you’ll need to hire an expert to create effective ads that reach the right people and don’t waste your money.
PPC can be an effective method of driving sales, but it’s no walk in the park.
Ideally, you’ll want to run this alongside marketing campaigns that don’t take a chunk of your profits for every customer they send your way.
The most effective of these marketing efforts are social media marketing and email marketing.
Below, we’ll examine the pros and cons of both and suggest how you can make the most of each of them for your business.
Social Media Marketing
The main benefit of social media marketing is the size of the audience you can reach.
Almost two billion people are active Facebook users. There’s more than 800 million active monthly users on Instagram, and around 330 million monthly active users on Twitter.
Depending on the platform — when a social media user engages with your content, an alert is issued which all of their connections could potentially see.
This exposes them to your brand and opens the possibility of them engaging and alerting the people in their network.
As a result of this ripple effect, a great piece of social media content could be viewed by hundreds of millions of people.
This concept is often referred to as ‘going viral’ and is the aim of most businesses with a social media account.
It can present a great opportunity to build and grow your brand.
It’s also brilliant for engaging with customers.
Social media allows customers to publicly comment on your brand, make requests for future products, and air any complaints they may be harboring.
This gives brands the opportunity to build their brand image, learn what their customers want, and give better customer service.
The major disadvantage of social media is that you’re limited by the rules of the platform you’re publishing on.
Facebook recently tweaked its algorithm so that only a small portion (reportedly less than 7%) of a business’ followers would see an individual post, forcing page owners to pay for more exposure.
If Facebook or any other social media platform decides it wants to ban you, censor you, or delete your posts, there’s little you can do to stop them.
Email marketing
Email marketing is widely regarded as the most effective digital marketing methods.
Almost everyone on the internet has an email address (and you need one to open a Facebook or Twitter account) and this is the medium where people go to conduct business.
Unopened emails will remain in a user’s inbox until they are dealt with, unlike social media posts which disappear into the ether of their news feed.
Research from MailChimp suggests that the average open rate for emails from ecommerce companies stands at 16.75%.
That’s a lot higher than the reported reach of Facebook posts.
Also, there’s a lot less noise to compete with compared with social media timelines, where you’re only ever two clicks away from a cat video.
Perhaps the most empowering element of email marketing is that there’s no-one in the middle to answer to. No-one can censor your emails or delete your list of email addresses.
You’ll have to sign up to an email marketing software provider, like MailChimp or Drip, to reach a large email list quickly and easily.
These platforms will charge you once your list reaches a certain size, but the additional sales you can make from an email list should hopefully cover this cost.
What sort of content should you send?
Most of the top online stores run both email and social media campaigns.
The type of content you send to your email and social media subscribers will have a huge impact of on click-throughs and sales, so this needs to be considered deeply.
Studies suggest that videos are proving to the most engaging social media content, partly because this type of content is being prioritized by most social media algorithms.
Live-streams, infographics, and short-form ‘stories’ are also popular.
As a rule, any content with eye-catching visuals is likely to serve you a lot better, regardless of the platform.
The most important digital marketing rule to remember?
Give, give, give.
Web users (and people in general) are naturally averse to hard-sell advertising interrupting their experience.
The best marketing campaigns are those that offer something interesting, entertaining, or useful while subtly hinting that buying a product could help them.
This process is called content marketing — and it’s the best way to maximize your email or social media capaigns.
Content that is interesting, entertaining, or useful is far more likely to engage a web user — and result in that increased exposure your brand is craving — than a hard-sell.
Focus on creating fantastic content with a subtle call-to-action at the end, send it to your subscribers, and watch your sales from email and social media soar.
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