Making The Most Of Shopify Marketing Tools To Grow Your Shop

Shopify marketing tools could jumpstart your sales this year. That’s because Shopify is an easy-to-use eCommerce platform that can help you get an online store up and running quickly. Fortunately, there are a variety of options that let you promote Shopify stores.

Use this guide to learn all about Shopify marketing and learn how you can become an expert Shopify marketer in no time.

Shopify Marketing Features Worth Checking Out

Whether you’re selling online or in person, marketing is simply the act of promoting and selling, connecting buyers and products. And if your goal is discovering how to promote a Shopify store to sell more products, you’re in luck. Shopify marketing is made easy by the range of tools that come built into the platform. In fact, there are so many built-in Shopify marketing features that it can be hard to know where to start!

Shopify Blogs

Not every marketing effort puts selling front and center. When you use a blog or other type of informational content as a soft selling tool, you deliver something of real value to your readers and give them a reason to trust you. Posting interesting and relevant content can draw customers to your website, and that’s where the selling can start. You’ll have an advantage as soon as they land on your website, because they’ll see you as an expert they can believe.

Every Shopify store has a default blog called News. Use News on your eCommerce site or create your own blog with a custom name. Visit your Shopify admin, then go to Online Store > Blog. Click Create blog post to begin.

What should you blog about? Check out our in-depth post on blogging to learn more about why you should add a blog to your online store and what blog topics will work best to draw in customers.

Use Shopify Gift Cards

The US market for gift cards topped $170.78 billion in 2021 — and that’s not even the most eye-popping gift-card statistic to consider. Slightly more than half of US adults forget to redeem those gift cards. That means gift cards can be a significant source of income for your online store, and since they may never be redeemed, much of that value might stay within your business. Even better, studies show that consumers who do redeem a gift card spend significantly more than the value of the card.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Shopify has made gift cards available on all plan levels. Of course, that could change at some point in the future, but for now, take advantage of this easy way to drive more sales. Simply create gift cards as a new product in your Shopify store, customizing the name, image, sales channels, and denominations.

Shopify gift cards can be delivered digitally, via email, and redeemed online or in person. If you’d like to use a different app for gift cards, visit the Shopify App Store to check out what’s available. Before you do, be sure to read our full post on the best gift card systems for small businesses to learn more.

Marketing Via Online Channels

Have you heard of multi-channel selling? That means selling not just from your website but using the whole of the internet to promote your products. Shopify makes this practice easy, too, giving users the ability to link their stores to social media sites and established marketplaces. With the caveat that accessing some of these may require a free or paid integration, here’s a list of some of the popular options readily available thanks to Shopify integrations:

• Amazon & eBay
• Instagram
• Facebook
• TikTok
• Etsy
• Walmart Marketplace

Discounts & Coupon Codes

Coupons are as popular as ever, with as many as 88% of shoppers regularly using coupons and nearly three-quarters of online shoppers searching for digital coupons on store websites. That means offering coupons to customers is a good strategy for increasing sales, despite the loss of profit you might see by providing discounts. In fact, discounts and coupons not only attract new shoppers but also keep existing buyers happy and loyal. And customers who save money on an in-demand product often end up adding additional items to their shopping carts and spending more money at your store.

Shopify lets users create coupons and discount codes, including BOGO offers (buy one, get one) and free shipping discounts. You can apply these offers to specific products or categories or limit them to specific customer groups. Customers can enter discount codes online at checkout (or in person, if you are using the Shopify POS). Track the effectiveness of your different coupons and discounts using the Sales by discount report through your Shopify admin. You can update and manage existing discounts from the Discounts page in Shopify.

Abandoned Cart Recovery Tools

Drawing customers to your website and persuading them to put items into their online shopping carts takes a lot of marketing work. So you definitely don’t want to let shoppers navigate away from those carts without completing the sale. And if they do, you need the tools to contact them and convert those sales.

Fortunately, Shopify includes abandoned cart recovery tools with every plan, automatically saving data on your store’s abandoned checkouts for three months. To view the data, visit Orders from your Shopify admin and click Abandoned checkouts. Once you view the data, you can manually email those customers or create automatic emails that remind them to complete their purchase. Customize the available email templates by adding your logo or color scheme, and set the time for automatic recovery emails, choosing a time between 1-24 hours after abandonment. You can even include a special offer or discount, to entice them to complete their purchases.

Sales Reports As A Marketing Tool

Shopify attaches some basic sales reports to your Shopify store. Although many users eventually find they’d like to access more detailed information, the built-in reports are a great way to start analyzing your sales and your customers’ behavior. If you’re ready to study more detailed or in-depth reports, visit the Shopify app store to see what’s available.

From your Shopify admin, go to Analytics > Reports and, in the Sales section, select Show all. Here’s a partial list of the reports you can access:

• Sales over time
• Sales by product or SKU
• Sales by discount
• Sales by channel
• Average order value over time
• Sales by hour, day, or month
• Sales by product
• Sales by traffic referrer

You can use the filtering and editing features to customize your sales report, and you can add columns to an existing report.

Buy Buttons To Market Your Stuff

Make it easy for customers to buy, and they’re more likely to buy than if they face a bunch of hurdles to get to your products. One of the ways Shopify helps make buying easy is through the availability of buy buttons.

What’s a buy button? It’s a flexible way to make products more accessible and accessible. All you need to do is copy and post a small bit of code into a website, blog post, social media update, or email. The code allows customers to make their buying decision while you already have their attention. It’s easy for your customers, and it can be profitable for you. And Shopify makes it easy for you to deploy buy buttons to bring in more sales.

SEO Shopify Marketing Tools

How important is search engine optimization? You can build the best Shopify store in the world, but if you don’t keep SEO in mind, you won’t go very far. If you want to succeed at online selling, you definitely need to understand the basics of SEO. And if you’ve built your store on Shopify’s framework, you can rest assured that you’ve got a solid foundation already under you.

Shopify stores come with built-in SEO tools that make your store more appealing to search engines. That includes:

• Automatically auto-generated canonical tags added to each page to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results
• Automatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt riles
• Automatically generated title tags that include your store’s name
• Themes include social media linking and sharing options
• The ability to edit title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, web pages, products, and collections
• Editable alt text for images

Shopify Email Marketing

Email is a fast and free way to connect with your customers. And Shopify’s Email program makes it easy. It includes pre-built templates and tracking, and you can manage your email campaigns from right within your Shopify admin. Best of all, you don’t need any coding experience whatsoever to create branded emails. Shopify provides the tools you need, like in-line editing, moveable content blocks, and customization options. You can even pull branding, product, price, and more information directly from your store.

Shopify Emails go out with your store’s domain name. That helps both to build loyalty and to avoid spam filters. You can track your emails from your dashboard and view reports on open rates, sales, and more. It’s free for up to 2,500 emails a month, with costs that go up as your business needs grow. After that cap, you’ll pay $1 for each additional email you send, with no monthly commitment. It’s available on all Shopify plans and all users have access to the complete Shopify Email feature set.

Paid Advertising

If you’ve got an advertising budget, Shopify is ready to help you spend it! With built-in connections to some top advertising options, like Google Smart Shopping and Facebook Ads, you can connect with your target audience wherever they are. If you choose Google Smart Shopping, you can set a daily budget and then sit back and let Google run the advertising campaign for you. Track your campaign across all your sales channels, with reports from your marketing dashboard.

Shopify Marketer Integrations

As you can see, Shopify comes with enough marketing tools built in to get you started. If you’re ready for more, head on over to the Shopify App Store, where you’ll find a dizzying array of options, including a satisfying number of free Shopify apps you can add to your store in addition to paid integrations.

Once you’re on the app store, use the pulldown menu to view the searchable categories. Under the Marketing tab, you’ll see six categories: SEO, content marketing, advertising, email marketing, direct marketing, and market analytics. It’s worth taking your time to explore the app store, because the number of apps available is so great. Apps are rated by actual users on a 5-star scale and reviews are available, so you can tell at a glance which apps are worth investigating.

With 4,200+ apps to consider, it’s impossible to list all those that deserve a look. However, to get you started, here’s a baker’s dozen categories with some top picks highlighted, including free and paid apps. Use this list of highly-rated addons to kickstart your own explorations:

1. CRM: Help Center Live Chat & CRM, 3dsellers CRM & Helpdesk, Skylio CRM Connector, and Product Quiz Maker by Prehook
2. Loyalty: Gameball Loyalty & Rewards, BON Loyalty Rewards & Referral, Joy Loyalty Program, and Referral Candy
3. Analytics: Report Pundit, BeProfit, Better Reports, and Lifetimely Profit & LTV
4. SMS Marketing: Postscript SMS Marketing, Automizely SMS Marketing Email Pop Up, Live Chat & SMS by Flowio, and Contlo Email SMS & Web Push
5. Email Marketing: Klaviyo Email Marketing & SMS, Automizely Email Marketing, OrderlyEmails, and Shopify Email
6. Product Reviews: Product Reviews by Shopify, Ali Reviews, Trustreviews, Judge.me, and Helpful Product Reviews App
7. Live Chat: Shopify Chat, Tidio Live Chat & Chatbots, WhatsApp Customer Service, and PushOwl Web Push Notifications
8. SEO: LayoutHub Easy Page Builder, SEO Ant & Image Optimizer, Sitemap & NoIndex Manager, DH SEO-All-in-one SEO Booster, and Sitemapify
9. Content Marketing: Image Gallery + Video, RightCopy, Archive App, SEO Blog Optimizer, and Poloriz Shoppable Stories
10. Advertising: Feed for Google Shopping, Pinterest “Pin It” Button, and Omega Multi Facebook Pixels
11. Upselling & Cros-Selling: Back In Stock Restock Alerts, Frequently Bought Together, Bundler Upsell Bundles, and HA Bundles, Upsell & Cross-Sell
12. Promotions: Countdown Timer Bar, Ultimate Sales Boost by Hextom, UpPromote Affiliate Marketing, and SmartPopup Promotion Popup
13. Order Recovery: Rivo Abandoned Cart Recovery, Abandoned Cart Recovery by CartConvo, and Tapsend SMS Cart Recovery

Whatever you do, don’t let the sheer volume of available Shopify marketing possibilities overwhelm you. Start slowly, and experiment to see what works best for your store. Make sure you have a starting budget in mind before you visit the app store, because the price tag for individual apps can really add up if you’re not paying attention! The most important takeaway is that you have endless options for how to promote a Shopify store. So pick an area or two to focus on and get started.

Note: If you’ve read this far and still aren’t certain that Shopify has the tools you’ll need to set up and successfully market an online store, take a look at our list of top Shopify alternatives. Although we feel Shopify is a good choice for many business owners, we know it’s not for everyone. That’s why we’ve taken the time to produce in-depth comparisons, including putting Shopify up against tough competitors like Square and Shift4Shop. Shopify isn’t the best store builder unless it feels right for you.

Shopify Marketing FAQs