Promoting your Shopify store can be tough, but it doesn’t need to be. And no, it isn’t necessary for you to spend on running ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, and Instagram if you can’t afford them just yet. There are more affordable (and even free) ways to promote your Shopify store and get the world to know about it.
11 ways to promote your Shopify store
Go beyond the product itself and give your customers an emotional reason to buy from you. You’d want to support causes that your customers really care about. Show them that some part of the proceeds from your sales goes towards a charitable foundation or NGO that focuses on that cause.
When they see that their purchase will support a cause that they feel strongly about, they’ll almost consider it a moral obligation to make a purchase, or at the very least, share your store with someone else who would be likely to buy from you. Everybody wins: your store, your customers, and the charitable organization.
This makes you more human and gets your customers to feel like they’re part of your community. It makes them feel like they know you, they start considering them to be more like your friends than just your customers.
Authenticity matters a lot here. There are lots of faceless companies that customers don’t feel connected to, you need to show them that there are humans behind your company and establish a personal connection with them.
You could also consider sharing some behind-the-scenes footage or even go live to share exciting occasions and milestones with your customers.
Customers are always trying to find deals and discounts. Deals forums have highly engaged users with high buying intent. These forums allow their users to post about the best deals available on the internet, so they’re the perfect places for you to promote your Shopify store and lure customers in. A forum like SlickDeals could be a good place for you to get started.
An email list is an important asset for your Shopify store. But customers aren’t always too keen to sign up for email lists or even create an account on every store they buy from.
You need to tempt them in by giving them something valuable in exchange for sharing their email id with you. Offer them a freebie or an exclusive coupon that you’d share with them over email.
Now that you have them in your email list, you can also send them more coupons every once in a while.
Join Reddit forums and Facebook groups and other online communities that revolve around your niche. You want to participate and engage with other members, actually being part of the community instead of just pitching your offerings all the time.
Deliver value and share your expertise there, get the community to look at you as an authority on the subject. From there you could drive them to your blog or to product pages.
Alison Wilson says that through engaging in related online forums for their online store, they've increased their new customer acquisition rate by 20%.
Not everything is a competition, sometimes you need to collaborate as well. Look for cross-promotion opportunities with other eCommerce merchants that sell products that complement yours.
You can feature each other in blogs, social media posts, YouTube videos, and even run giveaway competitions together, exposing your audiences to each other’s stores.
The future is all about voice and podcasts are a big part of that. It allows people to multitask, listening to your podcast while doing something else because they don’t need to pay attention to your screen.
People are increasingly getting interested in podcasts, and it’s a great way for you to reach new audiences. Either you can make your own podcast or you can appear as a guest on other podcasts to tap into their audiences.
Whatever your niche, you can be sure that someone has created a listicle for the best products in that category. Reach out and ask them to include you. A lot of them will be happy to do that, some might ask for a link back to their website, and some might even ask you to send them a description of your product along with a sample (so that they don’t end up recommending a substandard product to their audience - they need to maintain their credibility).
Your customers have got questions around your product and are asking them on Quora. Consider this to be your cue to dive in and answer all the questions that you find about or related to your product and niche.
Look for questions that are highly followed, your answers to those will be shown to far more Quora users.
One thing to keep in mind is not to go overboard and flood your answers with links to your website. If you do that, you might find Quora limiting the reach of your answers.
A good idea would be to use no more than one link per answer and even write a few answers that don’t contain links. This isn’t a rule, some of your answers might get a good number of views even if you include more links, but in my experience, one link seems to be the sweet spot.
You’d also want to format your answer well and even include images.
You could consider selling wholesale to retailers who have a lot of customers of their own. You may have to sell at slightly lower prices than you would sell to the end customer, but you should be able to make up for that due to the sheer volume of products that you sell.
But these immediate sales are not the only benefit you get from selling via the wholesale route. It’s great for awareness because the retailers’ customers now get to know about you and experience your products. If you add the details about your store in your packaging, you might actually see these customers buying directly from your Shopify webstore in the future.
When you’re trying to grow your Shopify store, you definitely want to make some noise and get some media mentions. Instead of pitching stories to journalists who might not be interested in them, you should focus your energy on reaching out to journalists whom you know are looking for stories.
WIth HARO, you get emails listing out requirements from various reporters and all you have to do is reach out and give them the story or insights that they are looking for. It’s a far more effective way to get PR mentions for your Shopify store and drive traffic to it.
But what about conversions?
So you’ve done the work to get shoppers into your store, but if you don’t focus on converting them into customers, you’re essentially wasting your time and efforts.
Thankfully, we’ve got your back. Your Engati chatbot can be configured to send a promotional message along with a discount code to your store’s visitors whenever they land on your page, spend a certain amount of time on it, add a product to their cart, or perform another action that you want them to.
It gently nudges them to make the purchase immediately instead of putting it off for later.
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