How to Implement Your Marketing Correctly with Shopify

In recent decades, online shopping has evolved from a nonexistent sector to a billion-dollar business.

Especially during the Corona pandemic, the number of people buying goods and services online has seen a stronger rise than ever before.

Today, platforms like Shopify with its intuitive usability and simple setup, give everyone the opportunity to create their own shop and participate in this global e-commerce growth.

This offers a great opportunity for many businesses to be present online without much effort. But this also brings disadvantages. The large number of online stores makes it increasingly difficult to stand out with one's own shop and to be successful.

So, how can you make your Shopify store stand out from the crowd and take advantage of the global e-commerce trend?

It’s this exact question that our guest author, Christoph Dahn, aims to answer in this article, demonstrating how you can be successful with the right Shopify marketing approach.

In doing so, he draws on many years of experience as a certified Shopify agency. In working with various companies, he and his team have developed a framework that breaks down the seemingly infinite options into a simple and effective system. He will present this concept in more detail here.

By the end of this article, you should not only know what opportunities Shopify marketing offers you, but also what measures you should implement in your shop and when, and which tools are best suited for this.

What is Shopify marketing?

The term “marketing” essentially describes all of a company's activities that are undertaken to increase sales and act customer-oriented. There is a wide range of different approaches that range from advertising campaigns to price changes to the creation of new product lines.

Shopify marketing more accurately refers to all those marketing activities that take place in and around a Shopify system. More often than not, it involves a Shopify online shop or connecting an online store to local branches via Shopify POS.

Being an expert in Shopify marketing not only requires familiarity with classic marketing tools like Google Analytics or advertising platforms. More importantly, it’s necessary to understand the Shopify system as a whole and to have a good overview of all apps and integrations.

Moreover, you have to be able to use this knowledge in such a way that the right measures are identified and implemented at the right time.

Successful Shopify marketing therefore means fully exploiting the special opportunities and options of the platform in order to thus offer your customers a good experience and achieve business goals.

Why is Shopify marketing useful?

“Build it and they will come” no longer counts. Now that seemingly every bakery runs an online shop and the number of shops is in the millions, a solid marketing concept is essential for you to stand out from the large online offer and remain competitive.

Why should you, however, specifically invest in Shopify marketing measures, instead of simply following generic approaches for online shops?

The main reason lies in the development of Shopify since its founding in 2006.

Many apps are now so well integrated into the Shopify App Store that they feel like an extension of the system.

Apps like Klaviyo are perfectly connected to Shopify and allow you to use all customer data directly for a better user experience and a more personalized approach.

Apps like Klaviyo are perfectly integrated into the Shopify system.

An entire ecosystem has evolved around Shopify in recent years.

It's important to be familiar with and utilize the full potential of Shopify, rather than just running an “online shop”.

Today there are numerous examples of e-commerce giants like Allbirds or Gymshark, which have grown based on Shopify.

Although Shopify has a low entry barrier, it is a platform that can seamlessly facilitate growth from a startup to a global market leader.

Due to the plethora of options, the question most shop operators today are concerned with is no longer “Can X be implemented with Shopify?” but much more often: “What should I implement when and with which tool?”

In our work with numerous clients, we’ve repeatedly noticed how much time and energy you can save with the right measures.

This not only leads to significantly more growth, but also enables you to invest your time and energy into your company's core business, instead of getting stuck in the execution.

In order to find the right measures at the right time, we have developed a Shopify marketing methodology, which we will introduce below.

How can you ideally implement Shopify marketing?

To effectively use Shopify marketing, a well-thought-out system is essential.

Over time, we have tried and tested a wide variety of approaches, measures, and methods with many shops. From our experience, a well-proven, easily manageable, 3-stage framework has emerged.

The framework consists of 3 fundamental stages:

1. Foundation
2. Conversion
3. Scale

These 3 phases help to classify where a shop currently stands and what measures are most effective. We have assigned clear steps and tools to each of the three stages.

As a general rule, it’s recommended to tackle the stages one after the other. Once the foundation is in place, you can focus on conversion and subsequently on scaling. However, it's very important not to lose sight of the previous stages.

It’s worth regularly checking the technical status of the shop and evaluating the tracking. The same goes for optimizing the conversion. It's not a measure that you implement once and then retain. Instead, it's about dynamically reacting to data and continuously improving the customer experience through feedback and constant adjustments.

The Pareto Principle in Shopify Marketing

Here’s another key tip before we continue:

Adhering to the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) could be very beneficial for you! This principle states that in dynamic systems 20% of the measures are responsible for 80% of the results.

In our client projects we therefore always recommend taking the time for a detailed 80/20 analysis. Whenever possible, find so-called “best of breed” software that is easy to integrate and provides good support and performance. Focus on the reviews of entrepreneurs who operate in a similar customer segment.

If you’re not quite sure, you can find out, with the help of experts, which measures are advisable in your case.

It's important to be aware of the Pareto Principle, keep it in mind at all times and internalize it!

This helps you focus on what’s essential and resist the temptations of the gigantic marketing tech industry. Otherwise, you risk losing sight of the forest for the trees.

In Shopify marketing circles, there’s a well-known saying: “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

1. Stage: Foundation

We always start with the foundation, the absolutely necessary basic framework.

Here we check whether the shop is set up correctly and free of any major technical errors. In addition, goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are established to make the subsequent measures clearly measurable and goal-oriented.

It's very important, from the start, to clearly define what you want to achieve. Often, the natural goal is to increase sales. Nevertheless, it usually makes more sense to measure in a highly specific manner how, when and if you reach the goal.

More sales could, for example, be a direct result of an increase in the email rate of subscribers if measures have been implemented in this area. Measuring sales alone would not be purposeful.

The connection between business goal, KPIs, and measures is of the utmost importance here. You should always ask yourselves:

“If X is the goal, which KPIs must I measure to find out if measures Y and Z have helped me reach the goal?”

To be able to track these KPIs, the first analytics and tracking tools are already used in the foundation stage.

Goals

When setting goals, it depends on whether you already have customers, or whether you want to lead a still unknown startup to success.

For existing businesses, it's about optimizing channels, scaling and opening up new ones, while for a newly founded business, it initially depends on finding the right customers for your product and establishing a product-market fit.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

After you’ve defined a series of goals with the corresponding measures, the next step follows.

When you set a goal, you obviously also need to know whether you’ve achieved it. A big part of your task as online marketer involves regularly checking and measuring whether you have reached your set goals.

In the business world, and thus also in e-commerce, one of the best ways to define and measure success is by establishing key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a measure that quantifies exactly what you want to achieve with your plan.

The right measuring points/KPIs are a crucial factor.

If your goal is, for example, to increase the conversion rate by 50%, you would measure how your conversion rates are developing for different traffic sources.

Tracking and Analytics

With the help of analysis & tracking software, you can keep an overview of all data and understand the use and performance of your store.

You can, for example, find out where and via what search terms your visitors come from, how many visits your online shop records daily, and what the individual dwell time is.

The appropriate analysis tools & software give you a deep insight into visitors' interactions with your website. Over time, you will get better understanding of how your customers “tick” and how you can better cater to their needs to bind them in the long term.

You can also make better decisions about further measures because you can include many essential current information.

What’s important is that through the best possible view of your data and along with perfect insight, you develop a deep understanding of the interactions of your e-commerce.

Google Analytics

The free basic version of the analysis tool allows you to centrally analyze company data and measure the performance of marketing activities, content, and products. With Google Analytics you can easily identify the pages, topics, and authors that score best in your content strategy. This way, you find out which of your contents are particularly popular with your target groups. Moreover, you can see at a glance where the users come from (e.g., via search engines, display ads, or social media) and how long they stay on your website. As a website operator, you can therefore derive relevant insights from the usage data of the Google Tag Manager (GTM) and thus make better decisions for your company.

Hotjar
Hotjar, which was founded in 2014, describes itself as “the leading solution for companies selling online, and their marketing, analysis, UX, and CRO teams who want to better understand user behavior and then collect their feedback”. Its offer includes, among other things, heat maps, on-page polls (pop-ups), and surveys. Currently, the solution is said to be used by more than 550,000 websites in over 180 countries worldwide. The prices for the use vary depending on private or business use (Business / Agency).

2. Stage: Conversion

Once the foundation is in place, we focus on conversion. Here, it's about taking a very close look and analyzing where customers drop off. At what point are they prevented from purchasing? Can they subscribe to a newsletter?

The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) offers a broad palette of proven and tested marketing techniques. These are aimed at optimizing all areas of your e-commerce that influence the conversion rate.

Focus areas include:

• Optimizing product communication
• Improving the buying process by setting up ideal user-friendly functions and perfected onboarding processes
• Setting up product recommendations as part of cross-selling measures
• Implementing loyalty programs, gamification, etc., to motivate your customers to make repeated purchases

But shouldn’t traffic be prioritized in e-commerce marketing?

NO, it’s important and sensible to prioritize CRO first.

You should only tackle traffic measures and advertising afterwards.

The reason for this can be easily illustrated with an example:

If out of 100 visitors, only 1 visitor buys something, then your shop loses 99% of visitors. If you now place an ad and thus get 10,000 visitors to your shop, then 1% of them, only 100 visitors, are buyers.

If you work on the conversion first and increase it to 2 buyers and then place an ad, you can in this case win 200 buyers with the same 10,000 visitors from the ad.

Here again, the Pareto principle applies. If the conversion in your shop is relatively bad, then it’s likely that you could achieve an increase of, for instance, 20% with relatively little effort.

To achieve the same sales solely through more traffic, you would have to increase this by 20% at the same conversion rate. This is especially difficult in the beginning, often more so than working on conversion.

Due to exponential growth, you also benefit from improving various adjustment screws. Instead of increasing traffic by 30%, you could, as shown in the graphic above, increase traffic, the average shopping cart, and the number of orders per customer by 10% each, and thus make not just 30% more sales, but 33% more.

In CRO, the “law of diminishing returns” is also extremely important. Especially if you've been successful with your Shopify shop for a while, you will notice that further growth in one area is becoming more and more tedious.

Whenever you notice that it’s slowly becoming very difficult and costly to achieve even a small improvement in one area, you should ask yourself:

“Do I perhaps have more potential with another adjustment screw, or is my time really being used optimally right now?”

It’s important not to get stuck on a detail and leave chances in other areas unused because you absolutely have to get the shopping cart to X or the conversion rate isn’t quite right. Very helpful here are conversion-rate benchmarks, which are available on numerous websites and blogs.

We’ve placed blocks within the “Conversion” stage for SEO, Shopify email marketing and lead generation. These measures helped us create significant revenue growth for most of our clients.

In these areas, you can develop many automations that then run in the background during the scaling phase and hugely positively influence the added value of advertising campaigns.

Just when it comes to competitive niches and platforms like Facebook, acquisition costs for young companies are often a hurdle. So, it’s more than worthwhile to cover these areas first.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Solutions

SEO for online shops is a method that entices search engines to place your website in priority positions in the search results.

With the right SEO expertise, you ensure potential interested parties and customers who are searching the depth of the internet for related topics and keywords, find their way to your site.

You can have a agency take over the complete SEO for your company. As a rule, the agency will document the growth rate for you in a monthly report.

Alternatively, you can decide to undertake the SEO yourself and only get instruction and support as needed. There is a very large selection of tools in this field. The following recommendations are particularly relevant for successful Shopify content marketing:

Seobility
Seobility is probably one of the best tools you can use to improve your search engine ranking. The tool has a comprehensive dashboard that gives you various options for checking your website, keywords, and backlinks. Many other SEO tools offer similar functions for much more money; this is one of the reasons why Seobility is our first choice.

Google Search Console

With the webmaster tool Google Search Console you can easily monitor your website. You receive targeted information to check whether everything on your website is alright. Perhaps errors have occurred or Google dislikes a certain element of the site. Maybe your content is criticized and you have to take measures. The tool also allows you to check for navigation issues (e.g. broken links) on your website, so you can fix them as soon as possible.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Finding the right keywords for your website can be a daunting task. Even more difficult is finding the keywords that bring enough visitors to your site. But we have good news: Yoast SEO, a well-known tool, is now available for Shopify. You can conveniently load the app over the Shopify App Store to then find the best keyword combinations for your website.Shopify Email Marketing / Marketing AutomationThe right email marketing is crucial when it comes to continuously increasing your conversion rate and the sales completion rate.

With targeted or automated email campaigns, you can turn interested visitors of your online shop into paying regular customers and win back lost customers and sales.

A significant role is played in setting up tailored email campaigns and ensuring that they run well and precisely show the content that is relevant for your visitors and customers.

So, Shopify marketing is not just about technology and the tools, but also about how you can get in touch with your potential customers in a unique way.

When it comes to suitable tools for sending newsletters, there are a number of great services. Each of them offers a range of pros and cons.

To decide which service is right for you and your business, it always helps to take a step back and look at the opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses of each provider.

The respective links to the reviews of the tools on OMR Reviews give you additional insight into the experiences and assessments of other users.

Klaviyo

Emails are an effective way to stay in contact with your potential customers on a large scale. However, creating and sending them manually is not ideal: it can be expensive and very time-consuming.

Klaviyo is a U.S.-based marketing automation tool that specifically targets e-commerce companies. However, automation is not enough on its own. You need a software that integrates into your shop system and helps you create e-commerce customer profiles. According to our experience, Klaviyo provides the best solution for this.

It’s compatible with common shop systems like Shopify, Woo Commerce and Magento. Klaviyo allows users to segment their customer data and automatically send emails and text messages from the customer database to increase per-customer sales.

Users can also build multi-tier “email flows” with welcome emails, discounts, or review requests. In addition, the database can be linked to social ads to address custom or lookalike audiences on Facebook.

Especially in combination with Shopify, Klaviyo can fully unleash its strengths. The integration is extremely easy to set up and the learning curve is very manageable despite the functionality.Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

The Berlin-based startup Newsletter2Go, founded in 2008, convinces with its good value for money, office-like, simple and intuitive design, high user-friendliness, and extensive functionality.

Now, the service and the brand are part of the French start-up

. is a modern email marketing tool for rather smaller companies that provides these companies with everything they need to be successful with email marketing campaigns.Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue)MailchimpBrevo (ehemals Sendinblue)MailChimp

is an email marketing service that is probably the most used newsletter tool for small businesses.

Besides email marketing, the platform is now present in almost all marketing disciplines and offers products in the areas of customer analysis, social media, content creation, and CRM.
Lead GenerationSome of the visitors to your shop will not be immediately ready to buy. Maybe they just wanted to read a blog post on a specific topic or simply browse.

Nevertheless, these visitors are very valuable and you can often still persuade them to make a purchase by perhaps first asking them to just leave their email address in exchange for a freebie.

3. Stage: Scale

In the third stage, it's about scaling the shop. After building a solid basis from goals, tracking, and conversion in the first two stages, it's now time to get the shop going.

Due to the preliminary work in the first two stages, the perfect basis for success is created. Because you’ve already taken care of topics like the conversion rate and the technical side of the shop, you can now concentrate fully on campaigns.

You can now assume that the campaign performance depends on the campaigns themselves and not as much on difficult-to-measure factors like the shop and technical errors.

In the “Scale” stage, we mainly have paid traffic, content marketing, and specific growth hacks.

Paid traffic, i.e., ad campaigns on various platforms, is the perfect test for the conversion work done in the second stage. As long as the conversion rate stays stable with the additional traffic and does not decrease, you can focus on the campaigns.

If the conversion rate starts to decrease again, it could be time to go through the second stage again and further improve the shop. With paid traffic, you also collect a lot more data here, which you can then use for further analyses and CRO measures.

Content marketing gives you the chance to build a relationship with customers and help them with their problem.

Creating content is cumbersome, but if you use the right content directly on multiple platforms, it can create enormous value for the business.

The growth hacks are special measures and tricks that, through creative combinations of tools and new approaches, can provide a unique customer experience. Here we present some of our favorite hacks:

Paid Traffic

Traffic is often considered the most important marketing measure. Many Shopify store owners tend to immediately focus on measures to increase visitor numbers. Contrary to common belief, however, it’s recommended to implement Shopify traffic measures only after the conversion rate has reached a certain level.

With the targeted placement of ads on various channels, you can gain new customers for your shop. Many different platforms are available for this, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, to Google or Pinterest ads.

Shopify simplifies this by directly integrating with the most renowned platforms. As a result, no complicated installation of a pixel is needed anymore but you can directly begin. Additionally, the products from the Shopify shop can be automatically inserted into the systems of the partners, which saves a lot of work in the long run.

Shopify extremely simplifies the whole process and helps avoid tracking errors. This is a huge plus, especially for technically less skilled users. It enables you to entirely focus on the campaigns instead of having to fix bugs.

Which platform is best for reaching your target group depends on the shop. However, there are some indications that can help you choose.

Image-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are especially suitable for visual campaigns, Facebook Ads are a good all-rounder, and Google Ads allows you to appeal to customers who are actively searching for your product. Newer platforms like TikTok offer the chance to stand out from the crowd with a creative approach.

In Shopify marketing, it’s essential to really understand the customer and the business model. Only then can you make proper use of the existing tools, integrations, and apps within the framework of a good strategy and effectively and successfully implement them.

Facebook & Instagram Ads

Facebook and Instagram share a common advertising platform: Facebook Ads. Due to the enormous reach of the two networks, you can reach a suitable target group for almost every Shopify store here. The setup of the campaigns is very intuitive, and you can already achieve success with relatively small budgets.

Google Ads

Google Ads

is the advertising platform of Google. Here, you can place ads directly in Google results or on partner pages. This is interesting for Shopify shops because you can reach customers at various points in their customer journey. Google Ads also ensures that your shop is actually displayed with relevant searches, thus significantly increasing sales.

TikTok AdsTikTok has established itself in the social media playing field in recent years and is now one of the largest networks worldwide. For some time now, there has also been an advertising platform for TikTok where businesses can plan and play their campaigns. This is particularly a chance for creative and video-skilled individuals to stand out from the crowd and be successful with TikTok marketing.

Content Marketing

You might be asking yourself if it’s worth investing time and money into content management?

We’re convinced – yes, it pays off!

Fact is, more and more consumers are deciding to purchase a product or service without having previously contacted the company directly. For this reason, content marketing plays a particularly important role in corporate communication.

With the right know-how, you can gain the attention of a clearly defined audience, generate it as a customer, and finally aim for long-term customer loyalty.

At the forefront is always the creation of attractive, valuable, relevant, and helpful content for your target group, which is conveyed in an entertaining and exciting way.

Whether it’s stories, videos, blogs, or other formats, everything has to be geared towards the maximum benefit and ideal problem solution of your target group.

Everyone who has ever tried to implement a content marketing strategy in a business knows what we mean. Because the creation of content is just the tip of the iceberg.

The greater challenge is in choosing a coherent format, publishing it at the right time and via the right channel, and then following success.

No wonder that more and more businesses are using content marketing software as support.

The following software helps you not only create better content but also optimize your processes and improve your overall results.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite

is a software that centralizes the management of all social media channels on one platform. Whether text contributions, images, videos, or stories – with Hootsuite, you can create and easily plan content for all networks. Additionally, Hootsuite offers customizable boards that allow you to easily keep an eye on the content of competitors or other channels.

With the social inbox, you can monitor and respond to messages from all your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.

The social listening tool helps you find relevant conversations on any topic by searching for specific keywords or hashtags.

You can also add filters to quickly only display the most important conversations.

Plan your contributions in advance and Hootsuite publishes them automatically at the time you specified.
Shogun Landing Page Builder

If you as a merchant are looking for a way to customize your shop without a developer’s help, perhaps one of the most popular apps on the Shopify platform, a drag-and-drop page builder, and editor named Shogun is what you’re looking for.

The app is advertised as a “drag-and-drop tool for creating beautiful custom pages in Shopify” and has a five-star rating, along with many good reviews.

Shogun works with all Shopify themes and has a page importer for editing existing pages. It works for all marketing pages in a Shopify shop: homepage, FAQ, About Us, Contact, other landing pages, promo pages, etc. and Shopify blog pages.

Growth HacksLet’s be honest... we all love hacks. Hacks are shortcuts that lead us directly to the goal with little effort. That’s why we want to introduce some tools at the end that will allow you to achieve amazing results with little time investment.

Outgrow

With Outgrow you can create interactive content that is not only entertaining and engaging, but also helps you capture valuable customer data.

The platform for creating interactive content offers a variety of interactive tools like calculators, quizzes, and assessments to support your sales funnels and content strategies. Consider enriching your content pages and blogs with interactive tools.

Optimonk

With OptiMonk you can create the ideal popup, with the perfect message, at exactly the right time – without annoying your visitors. With the user-friendly interface and customizable templates, you create exactly the popup you need to generate sales with your traffic – without frightening your customers with an unpleasant sales pitch or slow-loading ads.

The user-friendly editor and advanced targeting features make creating custom popups a breeze.

Simply adapt your popup to the look of your website (or create something completely new). Then use the built-in A/B testing tools to find out which versions of your popup convert best for different visitor segments!

OptiMonk helps you get more leads without annoying your visitors or testing every possible combination of text, image, or call-to-action button color for hours.

SummaryShopify marketing is an exciting field where there are new apps and features to discover every week.

This flood brings many benefits, as the increased competition among app developers continues to improve the quality of the offer. If you manage to keep track, you can always stay one step ahead of the crowd.

Here's a brief overview of the key insights from the article:

Shopify is now a serious system with which businesses of all sizes can be successful

To stand out in Shopify marketing, deep knowledge about integrations, apps, and features is helpful

• Especially smaller businesses and start-ups can benefit from thoughtful planning and application of the Pareto principle. There are thousands of measures that would probably be quite good (SEO, content, A/B tests, influencer marketing, social media marketing, email marketing ...). The question is always how to best set your priorities. Think carefully about what your goals are and into which measures you should invest your time now in order to achieve them.
• Start with the basics, then improve the conversion and put the work into more traffic only then. It's worth plugging some holes in the bucket before pouring more water into it.
• Gerade kleineren Unternehmen und Start-Ups können von einer durchdachten Planung und Anwendung des Pareto-Prinzips profitieren . Es gibt tausende Maßnahmen, die wahrscheinlich ganz gut wären (SEO, Content, A/B-Tests, Influencer-Marketing, Social-Media-Marketing, E-Mail-Marketing…). Es stellt sich immer die Frage, wie Ihr am besten die Prioritäten setzt. Überlegt Euch genau, was Eure Ziele sind und in welche Maßnahmen Ihr jetzt eure Zeit stecken solltet, um diese zu erreichen.
• Fangt mit den Basics an, verbessert dann die Conversion und steckt erst dann die Arbeit in mehr Traffic. Es lohnt sich, erst einige Löcher im Eimer zu stopfen, bevor man mehr Wasser hinein gießt.

Nun hoffen wir, dass Euch unser Artikel und Framework gute Dienste leistet und Ihr Euch damit etwas sicherer in der Marketingplanung Eures Shops fühlt.