Shopify is a robust platform to initiate your eCommerce business. It provides a straightforward and intuitive interface that can help you develop a store with ease.
Let’s imagine your store is ready to launch, how will you make a profit out of it?
Launching your store to the public doesn’t mean you’ll attract traffic and collect revenue. You need a precise marketing strategy to amplify your Shopify store’s reach.
Now you’ll be stuck with a question, how to promote Shopify store?
To ease it out for you, we pursued our research on Shopify store promotion and found out some of the best ways to promote your Shopify store. Dive into this article to know the 50 brilliant ways to achieve Shopify store promotion.
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50 Proven Ways to Promote your Shopify Store
Your Shopify store needs to be promoted in every possible way if you want to sell your products to the customers.
In this digital era, there are a plethora of feasible ways to promote your online store,
Run a referral program
Loyal customers are essential for a store because they stabilize your revenue. The best answer to how to advertise your Shopify store is by turning your loyal customers into brand advocates.
Initiating a referral program in your store will encourage your existing customers to refer your store to their friends. This will expose your store to a new audience, increasing your sales on the go. With a referral program, both the referrer and referral will get their share of rewards once the referral completes a purchase, it’s a win-win situation.
The referral program is one of the effective Shopify store promotion strategies; not only are you exposing your store and acquiring new customers, but you are also nurturing a beautiful relationship in the process.
Provide next order coupons
When your customer is about to complete a purchase, offer them a discount for their next purchase. This will give them a reason to return to your store, thus driving repeated sales on the go and also increase your Shopify promotion
Offering Next order coupons is one of the best ways to market your Shopify store. They can increase brand awareness, boosts word-of-mouth marketing, and attract more customers to your store.
Cart recovery emails
Customers show interest in purchasing a product by adding it to their cart, but they quit at checkout due to various reasons. It may lead to losing a potential customer as he/she might’ve felt that your store doesn’t suit them.
Send cart recovery emails to the customer who abandoned their cart to complete their purchase. This will make them feel that you care for their presence in your store and may return to your store to complete the purchase.
Abandoned cart recovery emails can help you convert your lost sales into revenue and increase the brand value of your store.
Create pre-launch curiosity
You’ve invested your time, money, effort to develop a product, and now you are ready to launch it. But, what if your product doesn’t get the intended response, it will not only impact your sales but also put a dent in your Shopify store promotion.
That is why you need to strategize your pre-launch activity. There are many ways on how to drive free traffic to your store,
- Targeting the right audience who can bring the change.
- Promoting your store through a celebrity to create hype.
- Initiate a press release and talk about the benefits and features of your store.
- Write blogs about the changes your store can bring.
- Tease your audience with short video promos etc.
Generally, people are curious, so don’t announce everything right away. Build hype using the strategies mentioned above and make them anticipate the launch to achieve massive sales on opening day.
Facebook groups
Facebook is a popular social media site with billions of users around the world. It also houses thousands of private Facebook groups serving many purposes.
Around 70% of users log in to Facebook per day, these groups can answer your question oh how to promote your eCommerce website.
Shopify can make this process even easier for you because you don’t need to create your page. You can promote Shopify stores on facebook directly from Shopify.
Do it regularly; you’ll see the traffic flocking to your site.
Instagram stories
Promote Shopify stores on Instagram stories are limited-time updates on the app which can be shared among the followers. Many influencers use Instagram stories to post sponsored ads as it offers more traction than Snapchat or Twitter.
You can use hashtag related ads to promote your products and boost your brand awareness through Instagram stories. On average, a user spends 24mins on the app every day, so it is an excellent opportunity to expose your store to new users.
Social media contests
Still wondering on how to promote your online store?
Social media contest is the quickest and most effective way to promote your online store to a wider audience simultaneously and increase your email list.
Contests can grab the attention of a customer like no other, imagine the excitement when a customer wins it.
This will surefire boost your brand value and make your store stand tall amongst your competitors when you engage in customer-related activities like these.
Here are a few reasons to run a social media contest ,
- Grow your customer/follower base.
- Boost your brand awareness.
- Improve customer engagement.
- You can increase your email list with contests.
Youtube
We can’t talk about Shopify promotion without bringing youtube into the argument, that’s how crucial it has been for a business’s marketing campaign.
Youtube is the second most visited site next to Google, with 2 billion and increasing users as of 2022. You can promote your online store by posting a product-related video or an advertisement through an influencer.
You can also create your own channel and live stream your behind the scenes to nurture a better engagement with customers.
Creating FOMO
People are impulsive to offers, so use them to your advantage. Offer a discount in your store and specify that it will be available only for a few minutes or hours.
This will create a Fear of missing out(FOMO) among your audience.
They will rush to your store to purchase before the end of the offer. E-commerce giants like Amazon, Flipkart have used FOMO to their advantage by announcing ‘Big billion sales’ to promote their store and also to clear out their inventory.
Offering discount coupons
Discount coupons and eCommerce stores are inseparable. Discount coupons are one of the finest Shopify promotion strategies which have been used since the inception of online stores.
When your audience gets to know that they purchase two products for the price of one or similar discounts, they will flock to your stores.
Discount coupons can increase word-of-mouth marketing and attract new customers to your store, which increases your sales and also helps you to easily promte your online store.
There is an ecosystem of plugins in the Shopify store that can be used to create coupons to send it to your customers.
Facilitate free shipping
Just like discount coupons, you can also make your customer shopping experience memorable by taking the shipping fees out of the equation.
Many customers quit or abandon their cart due to expensive shipping prices, remove it, you can see customers herd to your store from every corner of the world. Free shipping can amplify your Shopify store promotion.
Reward referrals
As mentioned earlier, the referral program can help you attract new customers by using your existing customers. Offer rewards to the referrals when they complete a purchase, this will boost your brand awareness.
Rewarding referrals will increase word-of-mouth marketing, which is the fastest strategy to promote your online store.
Advertise on Facebook
Facebook is the widest used social site in the world; running ad campaigns on Facebook is the best way to market your Shopify store.
Around 51% of Facebook users are teenagers who prefer eCommerce shopping, so targeting your ads on these audiences will attract more traffic to your store.
You need not create an individual ad campaign; it is all in-built in your Shopify store. You can run customized ads to promote your online store on Facebook in just a few clicks.
Make use of Google ads
Google isn’t just a search engine, when used in the right way it can be used as a marketing medium using google ads.
You can run ads with custom targeting options; you can choose people of which demographic, location, or interests should your ad target.
Google is a great place to advertise your product/store, even though people prefer social media, they always come to google when they want to know about something.
You’ve to make sure that when your audience looks for something, your product should be the one they land on.
Optimize your website for SEO
You might be wondering, How do customers find your Shopify store? When your audience starts to look for a store/product on google, your website should be on the top of the results. The only way you can achieve this is by optimizing for SEO.
Optimize your headlines and content in a way that reflects your target market. An excellent SEO optimization tool can help you with this process.
The more your store reflects your market, the higher the chance of ranking on top of the search results, thus amplifying your Shopify store promotion.
Pinterest boards
Pinterest is an excellent platform for posting attractive pictures. If you put much effort into it, you’ll know that this platform is very much capable of driving new leads to your Shopify store.
All you have to do is create the right board and post enticing pictures of your products or e-banners to grab the attention of your customers.
Instagram ads
Instagram is similar to Pinterest, explicitly designed for pictures. But it has amplified into a popular social medium on par with Facebook.
You may have noticed Instagram ads when you were sliding through your newsfeed, it will be a post but tagged as sponsored.
These sponsored updates are Instagram ads that businesses paid to show up on the timeline at regular intervals.
You can promote your online store using Instagram ads, with 200 million users visiting every day your store has a higher chance of generating new leads through ads.
Promote on Twitter
Unlike Facebook & Instagram, Twitter is a professional social media platform that yields 300 million logins every month.
You can tweet about your product on twitter and pay for it to be promoted among people of similar interests.
Promoted tweets will be labeled as promoted, and it will be on the top of the search results.
Twitter has a perfect targeting mechanism, it will publish your promoted tweets on the user profiles of people with similar interests as you, thus increasing your conversions
Have a customized blog
Blogging has become crucial for businesses to drive free traffic to Shopify stores and boost conversion rates.
Contents are the driving force of the internet, optimize your blog content to rank higher in the search engine which exposes the store to a new audience organically.
Blogs increase your online visibility and have proven to be vital for marketing campaigns.
A significant aspect of blogging is it has minimized the worries of tedious manual marketing as blogs yield better conversions with minimal effort.
Special coupons
We discussed coupons earlier, but special coupons are something you can offer to your customers during festive occasions.
Customers will be actively looking for a store to purchase for themselves or for their loved ones during festival seasons, which increases the demand.
Offering exclusive coupons during these times will act as a customer magnet as people will be rushing to your store to make use of the coupon.
Pay-per-click advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a dynamic marketing channel. It poses a phenomenal opportunity for marketers to boost their traffic and conversion rates. PPC advertisements will be labeled as an ad.
Pay-per-click advertising puts your store/website on the top of the search engine resulting in higher traffic to the store. You can perform PPC advertising using Adwords.
Instagram influencers
The rise of social media has given birth to a lot of influencers. Instagram is no exception; influencers are users who have a massive following because of their credibility.
They can motivate their followers to perform and customers listen to them because of their authenticity.
Businesses have been involved in using Instagram influencers to promote their products over the past few years.
This is because of the vast following these influencers have, if you hire the right influencer to promote your online store, Instagram can be a very effective channel. So if your product is Insta-worthy, you can reach out to influencers.
YouTube influencers
YouTube marketing may fall slightly behind Instagram, but if your question is how to advertise your Shopify store visually, then YouTube has the answers for you. With events like Ted talks, influencers have gained popularity among the masses.
These influencers own a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers, where they talk about general or tech-related stuff.
You can reach out to these influencers and request them to advertise your online store/product in their video.
These videos draw around a million views in a week, and your traffic will skyrocket if at least 50% of users decide to visit your store.
Cross-promotion with Shopify stores
This strategy has become efficient in the past few years; another Shopify store would be a distinct place to promote your own Shopify store.
If your products are not in direct competition with each other, you can share your markets and earn lots of revenue together.
Cross-promotion with other stores
Don’t limit yourselves to only Shopify stores; you can promote your online store in other eCommerce platforms too.
One thing you have to be sure of is that your stores are not in direct competition with each other. Then you can cross-promote your online stores on each platform and attract traffic to the respective stores.
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Be known for your credibility
Real Shopify promotion lies in how people perceive your brand. When your store is only known for your products, you will lose your market sooner than you think.
Getting recognized for your products is good, but the real challenge is getting known for your service, quality, and credibility.
When people are delighted with your service, they’ll remember your brand. They will pass on that memory to their friends, thus exposing your store to new frontiers.
This is the benchmark Shopify stores must tend to achieve, getting known for your products is good, but getting recognized for your credibility is excellent.
Employ split testing
Split testing or A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of similar webpages to see which one performs to the expectation. Split testing can help you find what customers do in your store and why they do it.
This process will help you to devise a marketing strategy to drive free traffic to your Shopify store. You may wonder how it works? Well, design two versions of your webpage version A and version B.
Show Version A, which is the control version to 50% of customers, and show version B (variant version) to the other 50% of customers. Select the version which yielded higher conversion rates at the end of a business cycle and push that version to 100% of customers.
Optimize your headline
As we said earlier, content is the driving force of any website. If you’re wondering how to drive free traffic to your Shopify store, you’ve to optimize your headlines of the contents to make it enticing.
Headlines are the first thing people see when they enter your store, so optimize them in a way it convinces them to read it.
You can make use of a few copywriting techniques to optimize your headline and drive more conversions to your store.
Optimize your content
Now that you’ve optimized your headline turn your focus on content. Optimizing your content doesn’t pertain to SEO alone, it also relates to creating content that reflects your market and your customer needs.
You need to know what your customers are looking for and what the latest trends are. Create content relating to the latest trends. This will increase the traffic to your store because people are always curious to clear doubts about the present market.
Your content should serve as a source for research, so when customers search for a solution in google, your content should be the one providing a solution, now that’s optimized content.
Giveaways
Giveaways are one of the best ways to answers the unforgiving ‘How to advertise your Shopify store’ question. You can make use of social media to announce the giveaways in your store. This will entice the customers to rush to your store to claim their prize.
There were few stores in the past that amplified their market by organizing just one giveaway.
Many Instagram, Youtube influencers gained their popularity through giveaways, so we think this might answer your how to promote my online store question.
This is a giveaway announced by the world’s famous Youtuber Pewdiepie to amplify his presence among the masses. There is a pool of apps in your Shopify store that can help you with this process.
Reddit marketing
When we hear social media, the first thing that comes to our mind is Facebook or Instagram, we forget Reddit. Reddit is the most popular and underutilized social media platform that can benefit you in many ways.
Reddit is the 17th most viewed website, it may fall behind Facebook in terms of site traffic, but it is way ahead of LinkedIn and Twitter.
These metrics prove that how Reddit can help you to promote your online store. There are subreddits about various interests and topics on how to promote my online store in those subreddits relative to your business.
Quora Shopify promotions
Quora is a popular question and answers website where a user posts a question and if the question is related to your business you can answer it. It is a professional way of promoting your store.
Quora has a stringent moderation policy that doesn’t allow self-promotional answers. So you have to be very cautious when you’re answering a question and keep it a little promotional and more informative.
In addition to answering questions, you can also advertise your products via quora ads. You can create an ad account and run any number of ads as per the guidelines.
Creating flyers and billboards
Distributing flyers was one of the traditional and effective methods that businesses used to do before the internet, and social media took over.
Instead of struggling with internet metrics, you can just print flyers and distribute them to the public to amplify your Shopify store promotion in real-time.
Billboards might be an expensive option, but imagine the visibility it gets and the crowd it can attract. Design your billboards and place them in a busy street, it can generate more conversions than online ads and can effectively answer your ‘how to promote my online store’ question.
Instagram tv
Even though Instagram has been live for many years, Instagram tv is relatively new. Unlike Instagram stories or videos, you can post a much longer video on Instagram tv.
Being a relatively new feature, you can take full advantage of it by posting your ad or how-to tutorial on Instagram and market your Shopify store to a wider audience.
Guest posts
If you feel like your store/website isn’t enough to achieve Shopify store promotion, you can always seek the help of other business websites.
A recent study showed that guest posting on other people’s websites is 5x times effective than posting the same content on your website.
With a guest post, you are exposing your store to an already established audience; this will help you to connect with new leads and boost your conversions.
Send demos to bloggers and influencers
Bloggers and influencers have a massive following on their respective social media websites. You would’ve seen YouTubers reviewing smartphones in their channels; this is similar to that.
Send your product demo to bloggers and influencers along with the benefits it offers and features it is loaded with. Ask them to use it for a few days and review it through their content or in a video.
This is a very efficient way to market your online store to millions of audience with minimal effort.
Youtube channel
If you are wondering how to promote my online store then starting your own YouTube channel is a simple and best way to market your Shopify store to a wider audience.
Creating a channel is easy, and you can also monetize your channel to earn money for every milestone your channels reach.
If your product is worthy of a video and if YouTube doesn’t have many
videos related to your product, you can use that to your advantage. With some basic editing software, you can create effective YouTube videos that can attract a large audience.
Create videos related to current Shopify trends and also you can upload an instructional video for your product and promote your online store.
Shopify Promotion with vloggers
Vloggers are predominantly found on YouTube, the number of vloggers has been growing for a decade. It is similar to a lifestyle blog, but here the interaction is through a video.
You can request a Shopify promotion from the top tech vloggers like Marques Brownlee and ask them to speak about your product in their videos. They can persuade their subscribers into following your store which can drive free traffic to your Shopify store and boosts your sales.
Organize an event
One of the old-school and yet effective ways to promote your product/store is by organizing an event. It can be your product launch event or a general tech event; it doesn’t matter.
These events pave as a great platform to showcase your product.
These events can’t draw millions of people, it gives you an opportunity to convert all the event visitors into your customers.
That is the best aspect of organizing an event because you can persuade and entice the crowd by talking about your product’s features and amplify your customer base.
Sponsoring an event
You can also get a similar response when you sponsor a tech event. It doesn’t matter what event it is as long as your product name is on the sponsor’s list, instant exposure.
A sassy way to make use of this opportunity is by selling your merchandise to the event visitors.
So, even after these visitors go home, they will have a physical impression of your product in their hands, it may be conventional, but it is an effective Shopify promotional strategy.
Create tutorials
Now your store is online, and you have a YouTube channel, how will you promote your eCommerce website through YouTube?
You can create tutorials on your products to make it easier for your customers to get familiar with the product. Providing tutorials will also increase the brand value of your store and will convert a visitor to regular customers.
Uploading how-to tutorials on other tech-related platforms will increase your exposure to a newer audience.
Expose you’re behind the scenes
We live in a digital era; people expect proof of authenticity to develop trust over a product.
With the advent of live stream options on Instagram and Facebook, you can stream you’re behind the scenes or show your customers how it’s done.
This will show how transparent you are and how much you trust your customers, so they will build trust and loyalty in your store.
Activities like these will always grab attention and live streaming can help you generate more leads than a post or story.
Press release
A press release is an excellent way of promoting your business; they are great if your product is newsworthy. You can promote your Shopify store through newspapers, and they can reach many subscribers.
Providing a call to action button at the end of a press release will help you achieve intended conversions.
Many businesses exclude press releases as they are traditional; this gives you less competition, and you can confidently advertise your online store.
Social proof
People tend to trust a product that has been vouched for by another customer. Having reviews of your product in your store or your social media serve as social proof that helps customers build trust in your product.
It is similar to asking reviews from influencers, but here you are requesting reviews from the people who purchased your product.
A useful review makes the difference between a completed purchase and an abandoned cart. Social proof increases your credibility and shows how authentic you are.
Send promotional emails
Emails are the easiest and effective medium to promote your Shopify store. Customers will enter their email when visiting your store or when they complete a purchase.
Capture these emails and build an email list to send updates about your store to your customers. Don’t send an email just for the sake of it, you can add some exciting items and send them.
Instead of informing them about a product, You can send exclusive coupons through email, this motivates your customers to visit your store and purchase.
Offer free gift cards
You can sell gift cards and vouchers to your store so that your customers can purchase them to send them to their loved ones. Gift cards provide a great opportunity to promote your business and increase your brand value.
Around 60% of customers prefer gift cards than actual gifts, so offering them on your store during special occasions will draw significant traffic to your store.
Remember, for every gift card you sell, you get two customers, the receiver and the sender. Gift cards are an effective way to boost your sales during festivals.
Create influential contents
Contents keep your store alive in this digital era, contents shouldn’t just represent your products it should represent your store.
You need to create influential and informative content to make your store stand out from the cluster.
Long-form contents are the type that people expect these days because there is plenty of information in it. Long-form contents allow you to share it online and achieve Shopify promotion.
Linkedin network
Linkedin is more of a B2B marketing medium, if your product is corporate by nature; you can promote it using LinkedIn.
Since experts and professionals mostly use LinkedIn, you can use it to build your social proof for your store. Ask them personally to visit your site and post a review of their experience. To be honest, this is one of smartest way to increase your Shopify store promotion.
Run offline advertisements
Even though half of the world has been taken over by online streaming platforms, there are still a significant amount of people again watching tv and listening to the radio.
Hire a good ad director and shoot an advertisement for your product and broadcast it on the television.
Ask radio stations to play your ads at intervals; you can even advertise your online store in cinema theatres with offline advertisements.
Offline advertisements are still a primary marketing medium for businesses around the world; they can increase your brand awareness and boost your conversions.
Tell your friends and family
Are you still wondering ‘how to promote my online store’ when you have your Friends and families.
Asking your friends and family to support your store is a great strategy to gain early customers. Nothing can be compared to confidence when you get support from the very people you love.
Your friends will not only spread the word, but they will be your first customers by purchasing your product early.
You can ask honest reviews from them and make changes to your store accordingly.
Having customers like these in the early stages of your store will increase the reputation of your store
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Summary
If you want to drive free traffic to your Shopify store you need a dynamic Shopify promotional strategy. Even though Shopify has its own marketing options you still need some conventional techniques to promote your online store to the masses.
To help you achieve Shopify promotion we have compiled a list of 50 proven ways to promote your Shopify store and achieve conversions.
