How to Promote a Shopify Store: 5 Traffic-Driving Methods You Can Try

Learn how to promote a Shopify store. Apply the techniques we discuss in this post to increase traffic to your site and attract more leads.

In this post, we talk about some effective ways to promote your Shopify store. From social media presence and leveraging the power of influencers to email and affiliate marketing — you can try every method to drive traffic to your e-commerce site and capture new leads.

So you’ve picked Shopify as the basis for your Internet store. This is a wise decision. We’ve explained why in this post, for example. The platform has tons of useful features and lots of supplementary tools like these to contribute to the success of every online seller. Shopify is a decent contender among other e-commerce systems in the United States (around 12% of the market share) and worldwide, where it’s currently placed just above its closest rival Amazon.

That said, hitting the bull’s eye with the right platform, building a visually attractive and functional store, giving it a killer name, and stocking it with fantastic products are only the starting phase of a Shopify entrepreneur’s roadmap. If the store has no customers, there will be no revenue.

Under a brick-and-mortar scenario, you can set up your retail outlet in a busy place with a constant stream of people coming and going. Thus, you can reasonably expect some of these passers-by to open the door to your shop and ultimately convert.

The Internet setting is completely different. With millions of e-commerce sites vying for potential customers’ clicks, making your store visible to the target audience becomes a task from hell. It’s particularly tough for online merchants who have only just set foot on the arduous e-retail path and started walking it.

This puts advertising in the foreground. Shopify merchants have to go the extra mile to promote their stores. If they fail to drive enough traffic to their sites, they have to quit. Selling products on marketplaces such as Amazon requires almost no marketing efforts on the part of merchants. Shopify, in contrast, shifts the entire advertising burden onto the store owner’s shoulders.

Are you an entrepreneur in search of tried-and-tested ways to promote your Shopify store? Check out the ones we’ve described below first. They should help you increase the number of visitors to your site.

1. How to Promote Your Shopify Store — Method #1: Get the Support of Prominent Internet Personas

“How to promote my Shopify store so that a large number of Internet users can learn about it at once?” That’s a question that new online merchants without a lavish budget often ask. The best answer is to seek the help of prominent online personas with sizable fan bases.

These include social media stars, bloggers, vloggers, and other popular people in the vast space of the Internet. Why are they so valuable from a commercial standpoint? They can boast audiences of their own — people who trust their favorites, whatever the messages they want to send across.

Just one mention of your store in a blog post or podcast has the potential to bring you a little army of leads. Chances are you follow someone popular on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, too. How will you react if they promote a product to you? You will most likely trust them, right? Even if you don’t rush to purchase the stuff, you will have a positive image of the brand as it’s been endorsed by someone you respect.

Of course, most of these influential personalities or “influencers” will only agree to aid you in your advertising efforts for some sort of compensation. This can take the monetary form, with the exact amount based on the number of followers. Alternatively, you can send your endorsers one of your products gratis.

How can you find influencers to promote your Shopify store? There are two main ways:

1. Search for them on social media or YouTube by looking at the total number of their followers or subscribers. Then, send them an email with an invitation to discuss your mutually beneficial cooperation.
2. Visit specialized platforms where interested entrepreneurs can connect with influencers. There are lots of them on the Internet. Here are some examples:

• Fourstarzz Media
• Heepsy
• Influencity 
• Neoreach

2. How to Promote Your Shopify Store — Method #2: Leverage the Power of Facebook & Co.

Another viable option to promote a Shopify store to a large number of consumers at once is social media. The number of regular users of platforms like Facebook or Instagram keeps growing from year to year. By 2025, it’s expected to hit the 4.4 billion mark globally.

Thus, it only makes sense to leverage the power of social media to promote a Shopify store. There are two paths you can take, depending on your budget, available time, and marketing goals: free and paid. You can also combine both, which is certainly the most effective way to drive traffic to your site.

The key platforms we recommend targeting are Facebook and Instagram, although others like WhatsApp are also worth trying. While you can work with all of them, pinpointing one that your potential customers prefer is the first thing to do. This will save you time and money. Use tools like Google Analytics for this purpose.

Once you’ve done that, start publishing original posts, quality photos, product reviews, and the latest updates in your business niche on a regular basis. Remember that your primary goal as far as social media is concerned is to establish a good rapport with your focus consumer group rather than simply to promote products at your store.

If you’re in a highly visual type of business such as selling clothes, consider Instagram as your top promotional tool. Not only does it allow you to reach a larger audience than Facebook, but you can also showcase your products through visually appealing Instagram feeds on your website, with direct links to your product pages. The latter has some paid options in place that restrict your e-commerce marketing efforts.

Instagram, on the other hand, lets you engage with a wider audience of very active users. Perhaps the most important feature of this social media platform from an e-commerce viewpoint is a call-to-action button that goes with every post.

Promoting your Shopify store via social media for free can drive organic traffic to it. However, this is normally a matter of months. If you’re intent on boosting your sales as soon as possible, go down the paid path by using Facebook ads.

This platform represents the most varied audience regarding occupations and demographics. As such, you can fine-tune your advertising campaigns, only targeting FB users who might be interested in your products. Trying to sell trekking gear to a female user in her 60s is likely just a waste of time. Focusing on a male in his 20s with the same offer has a much higher chance of success.

You can also use a wide array of Shopify apps to facilitate working with social media.

3. How to Promote Your Shopify Store — Method #3: Use Old Faithful Email Marketing

Email marketing is probably the best way to promote a Shopify store without spending much or even nothing at all. With the number of emails sent and received daily projected to reach a whopping 376 billion by 2025, this tool is still as effective as it was at the beginning of the digital marketing era.

You can send emails to your current or prospective customers for a variety of purposes, including:

• A “Thank you” message to someone who has just purchased an item at your store
• A newsletter with the information about new products in your stock
• A letter with a free gift such as an ebook or a discount code to regular customers to keep them returning to your store

To leverage the power of email marketing, it’s crucial to build and keep expanding an email list. There are several ways to approach this task:

• Gather the addresses of people who are active on your social media accounts
• Create a popup on your site for visitors to enter their email addresses in return for something like a promo code
• Collect the email addresses of the customers who have bought something at your store

The next step is to automate your email marketing efforts. Shopify is a great platform in this respect. Apart from the default Shopify Email Marketing functionality, you can also install a wide range of apps to organize your campaigns or send emails triggered by various events such as making a purchase or registering at your site. You can also integrate Shopify with multiple email marketing automation tools, including SendGrid, MailChimp, and ActiveCampaign.

The content of your marketing emails is extremely important, no doubt about that. However, their visual appeal can also greatly contribute to the success of your campaigns. This is when the GetDevDone email developers can bring you real value. We craft beautiful email templates that seamlessly integrate with the most popular email service providers and email marketing automation platforms.

4. How to Promote Your Shopify Store — Method #4: Start a Blog with Interesting and Authentic Content Optimized for Search Engines

Another effective way to promote a Shopify store is creating a blog and filling it with content that your target audience may find engaging. The posts you will publish there should be original and interesting to read. Try to find topics that are particularly relevant to your niche.

The best way to come up with a list of subjects for blog posts is to collect questions that your customers tend to ask. For example, if you sell pet supplies, you can write a series of posts about products that are most suitable for a specific animal as an answer to the question, “What food is good for a dog?” or something similar.

A blog will help you establish a closer connection with your buyers. Besides, you can present yourself as an expert in the area. Consumers will trust you and, thus, will be more likely to purchase your goods.

Regularly posting content on the blog is also valuable from a search engine optimization perspective. Find out the key search terms that users normally type in when looking for the products at your store and integrate them into your texts. One of the best tools for this purpose is Google Keyword Planner. You can access it via a Google Ads account.

A keyword-saturated text has a higher chance of showing up on the first search results page. After reading the content, visitors may wish to explore your site further and, hopefully, convert. Make sure to include high-quality visuals in the posts, such as photos, diagrams, infographics, and so on. You can also add banners to your blog to attract readers’ attention.

A blog is certainly a long-term affair. You can hardly expect to drive a lot of traffic to your store overnight. Consistency is key. Keep updating your blog at regular intervals. If your content is truly engaging and SEO-friendly, you should soon see an increase in the number of visitors.

5. How to Promote Your Shopify Store — Method #5: Launch an Affiliate Program

Finally, you can consider affiliate marketing as one of the ways to promote your Shopify store. We’ve discussed this advertising method in one of our previous posts. In a nutshell, this is a free and simple traffic-driving technique that assumes finding Internet users who will agree to place a link to your store on their resources, be it a site, blog, video, and so on.

Once a visitor clicks on that link, lands on your site, and makes a purchase, you pay the affiliate the amount of money that you’ve declared in the program. Affiliate marketing has several important benefits for Shopify merchants:

• There are no upfront fees. You only pay an affiliate a commission after actually selling your products.
• You extend your reach to a wide audience without any special effort on your part.
• You increase brand awareness and trust since affiliate marketers are often influential Internet users.

Note that affiliate marketing is not suitable for all stores. If the difference between your selling and purchasing prices is negligible, you will hardly be able to pay a large commission. Thus, your program won’t be popular.

Final Thoughts

There’s no “best way to promote a Shopify store.” You should use a combination of methods to drive traffic to your e-commerce site. In this post, we have described only five of these. There are many more, both paid and free. However, if you start a blog with engaging content, launch an affiliate program, strike deals with influencers, leverage the power of social media, and run email marketing campaigns, you can surely count on more visits.

Do you want to customize your Shopify store to meet all your business needs? The GetDevDone Shopify development team is always happy to help you with your mission-critical projects. Let’s get in touch!

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