Shopify Digital Marketing Strategies: How to Grow Your Online Store
Learn how to stand out and grow your eCommerce business with a long-term digital marketing strategy
Contents
- Introduction
- Effective Marketing for eCommerce Stores
- A Shopify Specialist Digital Marketing Agency
- What Makes a Good eCommerce Marketing Strategy?
- Essential Digital Marketing Channels
- Shopify Case Studies
Introduction: The Power of Shopify
It’s now over 20 years since it first entered the market and Shopify has emerged as the world’s leading eCommerce platform. The stats are impressive. Globally, among the top 1 million eCommerce sites, Shopify powers a 30% share. Big hitters take astounding amounts on the platform, with GymShark alone raking in $500 million each year and new success stories start their journey every day, joining the 5.23 million businesses using the platform.
Shopify’s market share and growth are impressive, but the reality is that 90% to 95% of individual stores fail within their first year. No platform is a panacea; growing a Shopify eCommerce store means facing the same digital marketing challenges your competitors are up against. With an increasingly easy point of entry, the market is more competitive. The 10% to 5% of stores that succeed undoubtedly do so by drawing on Shopify’s advantage; as its user base has grown, the platform has developed a broad ecosystem of dedicated plugins, developers, and Shopify marketing agencies.
If you’ve found your way here, you’re probably already running a successful online business with a good grasp on digital marketing strategies. You’ve probably, also, hit a bit of a wall with your digital marketing. Perhaps sales have slumped or flatlined. Or perhaps you’re at a stage where you want to grow, to reach new goals for your business.
“The downside to more accessible eCommerce sites is that there are more and more online businesses launching every day.”
There are myriad ways to market an eCommerce business. Not all of them will be right for your business. To achieve long-term, sustainable growth, you need to take the time to develop a considered marketing strategy, identifying the right problems and investing in the right partners and channels to help you solve them. While it’s impossible to provide a complete guide to digital marketing and digital marketing channels over a few thousand words, this article should provide you with the information you need to decide on the next steps.
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Effective Marketing for eCommerce Stores
Shopify’s story began in 2004 when three friends – Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake – set out to launch an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil. Frustrated by existing eCommerce solutions, Lütke, a programmer, decided to build his own platform.
What started as their own solution evolved into something bigger. They realised other entrepreneurs were facing the same problems and moved from selling snowboards to offering their eCommerce platform.
Shopify levelled the playing field. Now, non-technical entrepreneurs could build professional online stores without coding knowledge or significant capital investment. For online brands, this strength presented a challenge. The downside to more accessible eCommerce sites is that there are more and more online businesses launching every day. For online business managers, the key to success is distinguishing the business from the dozens of other offerings in each niche. You need a well-defined brand that speaks to the needs of its customers. You need a digital marketing strategy that is technical best practices.
A Shopify Specialist Digital Marketing Agency
Since 2014, nativve’s worked with some of the biggest names in outdoor, lifestyle and apparel, including Patagonia, Universal Works, Stanley PMI, and Outsiders Store. Not all our clients use Shopify, but the majority of them do. As these brands have moved to develop their D2C efforts, we’ve worked with them, learning as they’ve learned. We continually feed this experience into the strategies across our client portfolio, moving with the shifting sands of digital marketing best practices.
We’ve worked at every stage of a Shopify store’s lifecycle. At the inception, we act as conduit between brand and developer, project managing the website build and then refining and implementing processes for product uploads, merchandising, and creative asset management, processes which will go on to be undertaken by the internal team as we focus on other elements of the strategy.
More often, we come to a brand when they already have an established online channel and want to achieve improved, sustainable growth. Depending on the specifics of the problem, that could mean optimising conversion rate and producing SEO strategies, consulting on email and organic social, auditing pixels, and implementing a robust paid social strategy. Often it’s a combination of all of them. For the kinds of clients we work with, quick fixes don’t last; they often do more harm than good. The brands we work with are selling higher value products and they need to communicate quality and value at every stage of their marketing.
What makes a good eCommerce marketing strategy?
That’s by no means a straightforward question. A good eCommerce marketing strategy will change from business to business. Before diving into the first strategy or idea you come across, take time to pause, reassess your business and your existing activity.
A good place to start is gaining as complete an idea as possible of your target and existing customers. Who are they? What do they want? What digital channels will they use to find you? How can you best talk to them on those digital channels? You should consider why they would prefer your product or brand over your competitors. How are you communicating that with your current marketing output? How could you do it better?
Alongside this, audit your pixels and analytics platforms so you can perform a thorough and accurate channel audit. Tightening privacy laws have prevented performance data being as reliable as it was even a couple of years ago. Now, it’s more important than ever that the data you do get is as close to accurate as it can be. This isn’t just to measure effectively; for algorhythmic digital advertising, better data drives better performance and a combination of first and third-party data is a must, using pixels on-platform and installed server-side.
“Maintaining diversity across digital advertising platforms as well as across channels is key to a successful, long-term marketing strategy.”
With a clearer picture of existing activity, you’ll be in a much better place to make decisions about your marketing. Now it’s time to delve into each channel individually. Your digital marketing strategy should cover a range of channels, including digital advertising/PPC, search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, and organic social. The ideal strategy for each of these depends on your budget, your timeline and your customers.
Digital Advertising
We’re digital advertising specialists. We started implementing paid social campaigns for eCommerce brands not long after they were first launched. We know, more than most, how powerful they can be. Ads on Meta, Google, Snap, Reddit, X/Twitter, and Pinterest have been central to countless campaigns for our clients, helping them to achieve incredible things for their business, even for the planet. For our work with Patagonia Europe, we’ve used digital advertising to drive awareness of sustainable product initiatives, to save a wild river in the Balkans, and to drive a 300% increase in email sign-ups.
A good strategy for digital advertising strikes a balance between brand and performance. Staying informed across trends, new feature updates, new placements — that’s all essential. Equally, knowing what’s right and what works for your business and brand, taking the time to be considered in your approach, allows you to pick a course that really works.
We love working with brands like Patagonia, Stanley Europe, and Universal Works, who do this so well. For Patagonia’s GORE-TEX ePE membrane focus in Autumn/Winter 2023, we supported a multi-channel campaign covering in-person and streamed events and a multi-phase campaign across 8 digital channels with digital advertising, delivering more than double the attributed revenue target. For Stanley Europe, we sit more on the brand side, producing creative assets and branded films for use across their marketing and then using digital advertising to get them in front of the right people. For Universal Works, we maintain the integrity of their brand, taking their high-quality assets and using them as part of a considered multi-channel campaign.
There are so many benefits to using digital advertising, but it isn’t without its pitfalls. One platform might be profitable now. It might even warrant sucking up all your aloted marketing time and budget. But what will you do when the competition grows and the CPA or CPM jumps up? Maintaining diversity across digital advertising platforms as well as across channels is key to a successful, long-term marketing strategy.
SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, helps e-commerce businesses improve visibility in search engines and AI interfaces, driving organic – unpaid for – traffic to your Shopify store. A common misconception is that SEO is a one-time task; in reality, it’s ongoing and involves the consideration of everything from site speed to user experience to content quality, all of which can impact rankings and, ultimately, sales.
Compared with digital advertising, SEO is a slower burn. It requires more foresight, more time, more patience. You need an excellent understanding of your customer and you need the proper resources to put together content that will speak to them.
Done right, a well-implemented search-optimised content strategy will deliver an impressive ROI for your eCommerce store, attracting targeted traffic for years. Over time, those results will compound, with more content exploring more niches attracting more traffic. Doing it right is the tricky part. Miss the mark, and you’ll have wasted a lot of time and resources.
For a retailers like Seen Opticians, SEO is the key to success. Competing against larger retailers with much larger budgets meant relying on PPC alone wasn’t sufficient. Concocting an SEO strategy with deep brand alignment served a dual purpose. It attracted the right traffic at a much lower cost and, as it did so, introduced them to Seen’s USP: its personal-feeling brand and curated collection.
Email Marketing
Email marketing should be a hugely profitable marketing channel for your Shopify store. Regular, blast emails are a good place to start, but as your audience grows, a more sophisticated email strategy will be required that consists of workflows that are triggered automatically based on your customers’ behaviour. Like SEO, the effect is compounding; the more you learn from and improve workflows, and the more workflows you add, the higher it pushes up your customer lifetime value.
The real benefit of email marketing is that, unlike paid channels and organic social, you own the data. Yes, there are costs involved with platform usage and time spent, but these are comparatively low, especially if you have an effective subscriber growth strategy in place that’s generating signups. The comparative ROI can be massive.
So, how do you grow your email database? Email audience growth should be baked into your strategies across digital marketing, from your organic social calendar to your site design. Obviously, forms and incentives work well, especially when placed within search-optimised content. And so do specialised organic campaigns, like competitions and gated content pieces.
We’ve had the most success driving email signups within a wider digital advertising strategy. As Patagonia Europe’s digital marketing agency, we’ve been managing their paid since 2018. In three years alone, we grew their email audience by 300% using a combination of always-on digital ad forms and UX consultation.
For Outsiders Store, we focused on lead forms, increasing the retailer’s mailing list by 31% add maintaining a 64% retention over three years. The AOV (average order value) was 60% higher than conventional ads.
Organic Social
Out of all eCommerce digital marketing channels, Social Media is the most widely used and, probably, the most widely misused. While a lot of business owners do naturally just ‘get it’, a lot of them still don’t and they continue pushing square pegs into round holes without appreciating the time, budget, and expertise necessary to make it more than just somewhere they are showing up.
Excelling at organic social means, again, having that understanding of your customers. How are they using Social Media? What content do they want to see and what accounts are they following? Are there platforms they’re using that your competitors aren’t clued up to? Are there collaboration opportunities that would push your brand in front of new customers?
The real key to effectively using organic social to promote your store is to focus on the social aspect. Use it genuinely to engage with your customers. Ask for their feedback with polls and other inbuilt features. Dare to create the aspirational content that they’ll want to share, comment on, and watch.
We’ve provided Social Media services for many of our clients, from consultation to creative production to hands-on calendar management. Having managed the social media calendar for the brand behind the viral Quencher water tumbler, Stanley Europe, we learnt first-hand how impactful a considered and well-oiled organic social strategy can be. By producing assets and managing a European-wide network of creators, we developed content that resonated and engaged with the exact people Stanley wanted to reach.
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Shopify Case Studies
With Shopify’s scalability, functionality, and marketing integration capabilities, it’s no surprise that for many of our clients – some of the biggest outdoor and lifestyle brands in the world – Shopify is their preferred eCommerce platform.
Gain an insight into the kind of impact a well-implemented digital marketing strategy can have. Here are case studies from across our client portfolio, which cover the strategies and techniques we implemented to improve the marketing of menswear and apparel brands’ Shopify stores.
Universal Works Shopify Case Study
Universal Works is easily one of the most well-respected names in British menswear. Started in 2009, they’re known for making reliable, modern clothing that’s influenced by classic shapes. As well as consistently strong seasons, they put out a batch of high-profile collabs each year, including with the likes of Yogi, Flower Mountain, adidas, and Birkenstock.
We’ve been Universal Works’ digital marketing partner since 2018. They wanted a digital marketing strategy that would attract more customers to their Shopify store and build awareness of their brand internationally. But they didn’t want to compromise their reputation for integrity or damage their relationship with their wholesale accounts.
Over the last few years, we’ve implemented strategies for various projects across multiple digital marketing channels, including helping them to optimise their Shopify store, launch each new collection and retailer collaborations across paid, and enhance their email marketing.
Our efforts have led to significant results and helped grow the business to what it is today. Find out more about the approach, what worked, and how our work impacted each channel. Read the Universal Works Shopify Case Study.
KAVU Shopify Case Study
KAVU makes fun and functional outdoor clothing and gear that’s good for both picnics and serious excursions. Based in Seattle, the brand was first set up by a young commercial fisherman in the 90s but has since gone on to conquer the world.
We partnered with KAVU to grow their European Shopify store, which had been struggling despite the brand’s potential in the market. We implemented a comprehensive strategy that covered everything from digital advertising to Shopify store optimisation to email marketing to consulting on their strategy for producing localised content.
In the first six months, we oversaw a significant increase in traffic and orders, and the results have only continued to improve. Take a look at the full KAVU case study to learn more about our approach.
IRIS Shopify Case Study
IRIS is a women-led cycling brand founded by former pro Iris Slappendel in 2021. They create high-quality, women-centric cyclewear, designed by women for women.
Needing to improve their Shopify Store in 2022, we implemented a dynamic digital advertising strategy across Meta and Google, repackaging existing lookbooks and maximising efficiency with limited resources. We consulted on website management and email marketing, overall making their digital marketing efforts more streamlined and efficient.
By working closely with their small team, we were able to push their average ROAS up significantly, making their limited budget work harder. Learn how we did it and explore the results in this case study.
Gramicci Shopify Case Study
Gramicci is a legendary brand founded in California in 1983 by climber Mike Graham. They’ve made a name for themselves creating hard-wearing outdoor gear designed for movement — their famous G-Pants and G-Shorts are now considered design classics.
We first partnered with Gramicci in early 2021. Already familiar with our work with other outdoor brands like Patagonia and Mammut, they trusted us to increase brand awareness in Europe and drive sales on their new European Shopify site.
We decided on a comprehensive digital strategy that covered paid advertising on Google and Meta, coordinating European-wide collaboration with retail partners, and massively improving their email marketing.
Find out more about how we helped this iconic outdoor brand establish and grow its European online presence so effectively. Read the complete case study.
Seen Opticians Shopify Case Study
We transformed Manchester’s favourite eyewear store, Seen Opticians, from a brick-and-mortar speciality store into an eCommerce powerhouse.
First teaming up with us in 2016, we started with a complete Shopify website redesign that captured Seen’s personality. We then implemented a comprehensive digital strategy focusing on SEO, content marketing, email automation, and targeted advertising..
The results have been remarkable. Almost a decade later, Seen’s Shopify store has gone from strength to strength. Take a look under the hood of our strategy and find out how we did. Read Seen Opticians’ Shopify case study.
The Digital Marketing Agency for Shopify Stores
Shopify’s popular for a reason. But if you want to take your Shopify store to the next level, implementing an effective digital marketing plan and improving the profitability of your site is no mean feat. Digital marketing is a broad church covering multiple channels, each with its own ever-evolving technical specifications and best practices.
We’re a specialist Shopify digital marketing agency. We’ve worked with multiple profitable lifestyle brands, providing digital marketing strategies that have grown the brands, driven more traffic to the site, and transformed the conversion rate of their eCommerce stores.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our services, get in touch and we’ll organise a chat.
Want to grow your Shopify store?
Let us know a few more details and we’ll get in touch.
