I’m going to use a Spokane based client I have been working with for a while now as an example of effective marketing of a Shopify Store for a small business. When I first began working with this client, they were doing around $100 in monthly sales on their Shopify store. Their main source of revenue was from wholesale, largely selling into regional retail boutiques. When my conversations first began with the client, their goal was to increase the B2C sales for the business and apply my digital growth marketing strategies to do so.
My first step was to identify the best selling product. I then utilized Pinterest to introduce people to the brand and combined this with Facebook and Instagram Ads to remarket the products to these clients.
Seven months later, the business is doing about $1K a month in MRR on their Shopify site, their wholesale has grown by 50% and they’re on a trajectory to 4x their YOY revenue. Below is a screenshot of their revenue growth.
We have a revenue share relationship where I am compensated for the growth I create. By establishing this kind of relationship, business incentives are aligned for the client and me. Further, the client only pays me for the value I provide to their small business.
If you would like to hire me to grow your Shopify store, fill out the form below to connect.
How to Identify Your Winning Product
The Pareto Principle is a business strategy adopted from biology. The principle is simple; 80% of your results come from 20% of your inputs. When we’re trying to rapidly grow a business, what we’re trying to do is identify the product that produces 80% of the revenue for the company.
To do this effectively, you’ll need to mine your sales data. Data mining is a process involving the observation of historical sales data and identifying trends within that data. The easiest way to do this is to export your sales data into a spreadsheet and use a count function to see what items attract the most purchases.
For this client, we identified her deodorant as the winning item. It had the highest conversion rate, a healthy margin, and great customer reviews. We took her entire marketing budget which was $60 a month and placed all marketing focus on this single product.
The best part of this strategy? All other products on the site saw a sales lift. When you focus on a single product, you see growth in all product sales. The tide saw all the boats rise.
If you read to any article on growing a Shopify store revenue, they tend to present endless lists of different tactics to use to market your products. I strongly advise you don’t do this and spread yourself thin. Rather, just do what is needed.
Growing a small business is all about garnering trust with customers until they’re comfortable enough to buy your products. The best way to do this is to place yourself in the customer experience, or in the shoes of your customer. Then focus on continuing to engage with them via the social media channels the customer is active on.
Our next task was to find the right channels to introduce potential customers to the product.
How to Promote Shopify Store on Pinterest
Pinterest was the most effective search ads channel to utilize for this product because we could obtain traffic super cost-effectively. Even better, Pinterest users are generally more open to brand introductions than any other platform.
We then ran Pinterest search ads to our product landing page and to our long-form content blog posts. The blog posts have an integrated popup that offers the user a $5 gift card if they provide us with their email.
These emails are then put into an email nurture plan that sends the potential customers more information on the deodorant. This process allows for these people who have just been introduced to the business to become more familiar with it over a longer period of time.
We found that about 80% of the people who get the $5 gift card make a purchase of $30 or more over the next 3 months.
How to Promote Shopify Store on Facebook
Our main focus was to remarket to every person who went to the website, engaged with our Facebook page, or with our Instagram profile. The aim of doing this is to get the potential customers who first engaged with us on pinterest to re-engage with the brand.
Purchasing decisions happen over a long period of time. Think about the last time you bought something after the first time hearing about it. I can’t remember ever doing this myself, actually. That is why we create remarketing ad campaigns to the same product we’re promoting with both search ads and our email nurture campaign.
What we found from our data is that a majority of people who purchased the deodorant came from the Facebook remarketing ads, even though these people had first visited the site from Pinterest ads. People build trust over time – cultivate that trust with remarketing ads.
How do I get reviews on Shopify?
Ask for them. It is that simple.
At the end of the email month, we send the following email to the people who bought the deodorant from engagement with our ads.
Hi,
Thanks again for purchasing our natural deodorant cream. We are reaching out to ask how it has been suiting you?
If you’re enjoying it we would appreciate your review, it takes about 3 clicks – https://example.com/deodorant/
Thank you again for choosing to shop with us. We know you have a lot of options.
– Company Name
From this simple email, we get about 4 – 7 reviews a month.
Conclusion
With any small eCommerce business, the most important thing to focus on is consistency. If you have a budget of $100 a month which you spend on digital marketing for 12 months consistently, you will see growth. Period.
However, if you only run ads for 2 months – nothing will happen. It takes about 90 days to build momentum, and 12 months to grow consistently. Be patient, it will pay off.
