Step 1: Define your unique value proposition

By being very clear in knowing what problem your product or online store is solving for a customer, it will be easier to promote the message to your audience. The two questions you want to ask before you bring a product to market are:

• Why is your product different to that of your competitors? In other words, what makes your product special? If your product is being sold on other online or physical stores, then the same question should be posed about your actual online store: Why should people buy from your store instead of another store?

  If you can’t answer this question for your products or your store, it means that to attract attention and visits to your site you will need to enter a bidding war with your competitors — and whoever spends the most money will win the customer, which is not a position most ecommerce start-ups want to be in. It’s also common to burn (lose) a lot of cash in the early days using this strategy.

• What do you stand for? More and more consumers want to know what a brand stands for as much as they want to know what it sells. Think about whether your product or store is doing anything that makes a stand on certain subjects — for example, are you donating a portion of your sales to charity, are you recycling your old products, are you carbon neutral?

After you fully understand your core offering, you will know exactly what your unique value proposition is, or unique selling points are (in other words, your answer to the question, ‘What problem does your product solve for your customers?’).

Run a strategy planning session where you and any business partners or co-founders think about the above questions to determine a list of value propositions. Aim to use keywords to represent them — for example:

• Value: ‘We aim to sell products cheaper than our competitors.’
• Quality: ‘We sell products that may be a little more expensive, but they use superior materials that our customers can clearly see.’
• Sustainable: ‘We only use recycled packaging, and all our products are ethically sourced.’

When you have your list of keywords, they can become part of your brand messaging that you take forward into your marketing communications (often shortened to ‘comms’). For example, your Facebook adverts may contain the keyword ‘sustainable’, which helps you target a particular audience that is drawn to sustainable products.

Keywords are the name of the game when it comes to SEO and SEM, as I explain in Chapter 16.

Step 2: Know your customer

When you’re launching a new business or product, it’s important to know exactly who your customer is and what problem you’re solving for them. It’s a very familiar story for online store owners to think they know who their customer is, without actually taking the time to get to know who they are — and getting it wrong can cause your business fail. In Chapter 8, I look at the analytics and reporting available from your Shopify admin, which is a good way to monitor user behavior — for example, how many of your sales are from repeat customers, and how much they spend on average (average order value, or AOV).

Google Analytics (also known as GA) is a popular platform that online retailers can use to monitor the behaviors of their customers. Find out more about Google Analytics at analytics.google.com/analytics.

Who you think your customer is — versus who they actually are — can often be two very different things. Take the time to survey your customers/potential customers to understand their motivation for buying from you (and to understand why they didn’t buy from you). This is one of the cheapest, most effective ways to grow your online business.

Part 3 of this book covers the customer’s experience in more detail to help you better understand your customer — the target audience for your marketing.

Step 3: Choose a marketing strategy

The next step is to choose a strategy for your marketing. A marketing strategy is a top-level plan to gain customers and sell your products. The goal here is to identify the tactics you can use in your marketing efforts and some of the channels that you can target.

If you’re selling pet toys, you might consider a grassroots marketing campaign that sponsors the local dog park’s Christmas party, or you might start a video series with a dog trainer to provide useful tips to your target market — both of these serve as tools to grow your brand presence and establish a community of your own.

If you’ve decided that your core offering is to provide a certain product at very competitive pricing, and you know that your customer is a bargain hunter, then your tactic may be to use discount codes and flash sales (a promotional strategy where you discount all or selected products for a short period of time, typically 24 to 48 hours, to build urgency) as part of your marketing strategy. I cover discounting in Chapter 14.

Some examples of marketing tactics you might use to improve your marketing include:

• Getting to know your customers: Conduct more user research to find out what your customers want from you, and who else they shop with. Part 3 is all about understanding your customers and their experiences on your site.
• Researching competitor pricing: Find out if your product is priced competitively. Refer to Chapter 14 for more information on how to price your products.
• Organizing your social media: Draw up a content plan that outlines how often you’ll send emails and post on social media, generally looking a month ahead, as well as outlining all the content you need to create to service your channels. I look more at social media marketing content in Chapter 17.
• Focusing on customer service: Consider how you can use customer service to build loyalty — could your business become known for going above and beyond for your customers? Chapter 7 goes deeper into customer service.
• Advertising: Not every business engages in paid advertising, but paid media or advertising is likely to form part of the tactics you use to acquire new customers. Chapter 16 dives deeper into paid advertising.

Step 4: Consider how to measure the success of your marketing

A question I ask myself often when reviewing projects I need to work on in an online store is: ‘How will I measure it?’ When I work with online businesses, we often meet for a planning session every three months to determine the projects that we believe will result in profitable growth, and I encourage business owners to put a definitive measurement on each project.

Another way of framing the question is: ‘What does success look like for this project?’

By putting a definitive measurement on the project or marketing effort, it does two things:

• It forces you to analyze the project’s impact. This helps you choose the right projects or marketing efforts to focus on.
• It forces you to review the project or marketing effort, and evaluate its success. This helps you confirm whether the project was a worthwhile use of your time and money, which informs future marketing efforts.

Some examples of measuring success in marketing include:

• One hundred new email subscribers within the first three months of trading
• A new website design targeting a conversion rate uplift from 2–2.2 per cent
• Social media followers growing by 20 new followers each week

• Facebook Ads generating a ROAS (return on ad spend) of four times the initial investment

  Most marketing platforms, such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads, will report on their platform’s ROAS — in other words, how much you spend on your ads in relation to how much you make from your ads. It’s also a good idea to track your blended ROAS, which is how much you’ve spent across all advertising platforms, over a certain period, versus how much you’ve made in your online store, in total, during this time.

Google Analytics can be used to track and measure certain website metrics, such as conversions (transactions) and web traffic (people visiting your site). It uses UTM codes (UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module) to track the performance of ad campaigns. UTM codes are snippets of code that are added to the URL of your campaigns, such as email or Facebook marketing campaigns, which then show up in Google Analytics, so you can see how much traffic or revenue has come from the URL associated with the marketing campaign. Although it may be too early in your ecommerce journey for you to be thinking about Google Analytics and UTM codes right now, I recommend you look into using Google Analytics as your business grows because its insights will become increasingly valuable as your revenue increases.

Step 5: Create a marketing channel plan

You can use many different marketing channels to bring customers to your store, from outdoor billboards and bus ads through to paid digital media via Facebook and Google Ads, so developing the right channel mix is important. If your strategy is to only use one marketing channel, you’re probably putting too many eggs in one basket, so think about diversifying a little (just as with any investment!).

When you develop your marketing channel mix, it’s also a good time to think about a budget for each channel (by now you may have already started to think about how much you’re comfortable spending on marketing as part of developing an overall marketing strategy).

A profitable online business with a gross margin of over 50 per cent (or a product margin of over 70 per cent) would be wise to invest 15–20 per cent of its net online revenue back into marketing. In your first 6–12 months, you may elect to spend more to gain traction in the market, as you’re unlikely to have any organic revenue (revenue derived from free marketing channels, which I talk about in Chapter 17). However, remember that you may break even (or even make a loss) at first, so try and build a plan to gradually improve your marketing efficiency, allowing you to reduce marketing spend and build profit.

Some marketing channels you may consider helpful include:

• Social media marketing, primarily through Facebook and Instagram (see chapters 16 and 17)
• Google Ads (see Chapter 16)
• SEO (see Chapter 16)
• Email marketing and SMS marketing (see Chapter 16)

Step 6: Review performance

Analyzing the performance of your marketing efforts is essential if you want to understand if, how and why you’ve achieved your desired outcomes (and if you haven’t achieved them, what went wrong?).

I suggest checking in on your marketing metrics once a week (Monday may be a good day for this) so that you can pull back if you need to, or hopefully increase spend as you see your performance outrunning your projections. Log the performance in a spreadsheet so you can monitor the trend over time. Trending is very important in marketing, and in ecommerce, as it tells you the trajectory that you’re on — which can be encouraging when you’re just starting out — and identifies if sales, or visits to your site, are quite low, which you can aim to improve.

A common mistake I see in online businesses is for store owners to leave paid marketing channels that are not performing switched on, draining the company of marketing funds because they haven’t properly thought about the outcome they need for the marketing to be considered a success, and they haven’t bothered to close the loop by evaluating its performance.

Automating your marketing with Shopify

By default, your store has one marketing automation already turned on — Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify (see Figure 15-1). You can find this automation by going to your Shopify admin → Marketing → Automations. This is a great automation that enables you to send emails to customers who commence a checkout in your online store but fail to complete their purchase (it may seem surprising, but this is very common). I show you how you can set up this automation to remind customers to come back and complete their purchase in the upcoming section, ‘Creating your first automation: Abandoned Checkout Emails’.

Aside from this existing automation, you need to install an app to create another marketing automation, such as Google Channel to create automated Google Ads, or SMSBump (SMS Marketing by Yotpo) to send automated marketing messages, including sending abandoned checkout notifications via SMS (see Chapter 16 for more on SMS marketing).

You may notice that Google Smart Shopping is offered as a suggested app when you set up your automations (see the next section for the steps to do this). Google Smart Shopping is a great addition to your Abandoned Checkout Email automation, and I look more at Google Smart Shopping and Google Ads in Chapter 16.

Otherwise, there’s plenty of good automations to choose from that work well within Shopify’s marketing offering. You can browse the Shopify App Store, but also look out for suggestions for suitable apps when you are on the Marketing Automations page (see Figure 15-2).

Creating your first automation: Abandoned Checkout Emails

To get started with marketing automations, I suggest setting up the automation that’s ready by default — Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify.

Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify is probably the most popular of all ecommerce automations. You’re targeting customers who have initiated a checkout in your online store but who failed to complete their purchase; by setting up this automation, you’re sending out an automatic email reminder to try and get the customer to come back and finish their purchase.

To set up the Abandoned Checkout Emails automation:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Marketing.

   Three options appear: Overview, Campaigns and Automations.

2. Click on Automations.

   The Marketing Automations page appears (refer to Figure 15-2).

3. Scroll down the Marketing Automations page to the Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify automation, and click on it.

   You’re taken to the Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify page, where you see a summary of sales generated through the Abandoned Checkout Emails automation (you won’t have any results here yet as you haven’t sent any emails yet).

4. To set up your Abandoned Checkout Email automation, click on Edit Settings in the top-right corner of the Abandoned Checkout Emails by Shopify page.

   You’re then taken to a new page called Checkout, so don’t be alarmed if you see a whole bunch of options that don’t seem to relate to marketing.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the Checkout page, where the third to last section is titled Abandoned Checkouts (see Figure 15-3).

   By default, Automatically Send Abandoned Checkout Emails will be checked, meaning every customer who abandoned their checkout (as per the parameters you select from in the next step) will receive an email from your store, reminding them to complete their purchase.

   

6. Select between sending to Anyone Who Abandons Checkout or Email Subscribers Who Abandon Checkout.

   I generally opt for the ‘anyone’ option as it increases the likelihood of generating sales.

7. In the Send After section, choose the time that you want to elapse between the checkout being abandoned and your email being sent to the customer.

   You can choose between 1 hour, 6 hours, 10 hours (which is recommended by Shopify) and 24 hours.

8. Click on the Customize Email button to the left and the Preview page appears, written in developer code (see Figure 15-4).

9. Click on Preview in the top-right corner (see Figure 15-4) to preview the email that will be sent to your customer. If you’re happy with the email’s content, close the Preview box.

   You don’t need to click on Save (unless you have changed the code — which I don’t recommend doing unless you know your way around developer code).

   

   You can customize these emails, but I suggest that you hire a Shopify Expert to do this (the Shopify Experts marketplace is a good place to find an expert) as you can see the code isn’t for beginners. The Preview option is useful to check, but save the coding for the experts unless you’re a coding whizz!

10. Click on the left-facing arrow next to Abandoned Checkout, which indicates a ‘back’ button.

    You’re taken to a Notifications page — which is a useful page for looking at all the customer emails and notifications you can send.

    Browse the notifications page to see what sort of emails you can send your customers automatically after they place an order — also known as post-purchase emails.

Exploring other automations

Shopify offers four default email marketing automations with prebuilt templates for you to use (the fifth option here — 3^rd Party Automations — is an overview of the third-party automations your store is running, such as Google Smart Shopping). Figure 15-5 shows all these automations:

• Welcome New Subscriber: This is also known as a Welcome Series, and is a chance to email your new subscribers, telling them a bit about your online store and its story. Use this email to be as engaging and authentic as possible, and remember to try and let the subscriber into your journey, perhaps by showing them a brand video or photos of your team behind the scenes.

  With this email automation, you could include a discount code to incentivize new subscribers to make a purchase.

• First-purchase Upsell: This automation sends an email to a customer after their first purchase. Statistically, if a customer is likely to purchase a second time, it’s likely to be shortly after the first (depending on the products you sell, of course). For example, you could use this email automation to showcase your other products to new customers and drive future sales by offering a 15 per cent discount if customers shop again within 30 days. Bringing customers back to your store and increasing purchase frequency are two of the core drivers when it comes to increasing each customer’s lifetime value (the CLTV, or LTV — for more on this, refer to Chapter 8).

• Customer Winback: When a customer no longer shops with you, don’t wave at them nostalgically as they sail off into the sunset — use this Customer Winback email automation (and perhaps also an SMS automation) to remind them that you miss them and encourage them to shop again.

  Given lost customers are probably ignoring your email campaigns, you may want to use discounts to lure them back — a strategy I approve of because they’re already lost, so they aren’t coming back of their own accord.

• Custom Email Automation: Shopify provides you with lots of other opportunities to send automated emails, such as when a customer creates an account, receives a refund or receives an order. These aren’t really marketing automations, but they’re important touch points for communication nonetheless.

  Communication is an important part of the overall customer experience, so it’s helpful to use email automations for events such as order confirmation, courier or shipping tracking, any refund or return actions, or other key events, such as when a customer signs up to your newsletter or creates an account. Go through the list of automations carefully, selecting the ones you think may be useful when you’re dealing with your customers.

• 3^rd Party Automations: This is where you see any other automations that have been connected to your Shopify, such as Google Smart Shopping (you can also commence Google Smart Shopping ads by clicking on this section — I cover Google Ads in Chapter 16). Essentially, any marketing app from the Shopify App Store that connects with Shopify will display here (or can be connected here).

  When you click on this section, you see a dialogue box pop up, with a Visit the Shopify App Store link — clicking on this link takes you to a section of the Shopify App Store that shows you third-party apps that can be used to create marketing automations. One of my favorites is SMSBump by Yotpo, which can be used to create automations that are delivered by SMS (see Chapter 16 for more on SMS marketing).

The first three options in this list are must-have email automations — they’re guaranteed money-makers, so I suggest you turn them on.

To view these Create Automation options you can access through Shopify:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Marketing.

   Three options appear: Overview, Campaigns and Automations.

2. Click on Automations.

   The Marketing Automations page appears (refer to Figure 15-2).

3. Click on the green Create Automation button in the top right.

   The Create Automation dialogue box appears (see Figure 15-5).

   You see five sections that you can click on: Welcome New Subscriber, First-purchase Upsell, Customer Winback, Custom Email Automation and 3^rd Party Automations.

To activate these email automations:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Marketing → Automations → Create Automation.

2. Click on the tile image of the automation you want to enable (refer to Figure 15-5).

   A dialogue box appears that asks if you want to use the template you have clicked on — for example, the default template for the Customer Winback automation.

3. Click on Use Workflow to begin setting up the automation you want to enable, or Close to go back to the list of available automations.

   A dialogue box appears showing an automation workflow (see Figure 15-6).

   

   

4. In the image of the workflow, click on the icon that reads Send Marketing Email.

   A dialogue box appears that previews the email marketing template, which you’re able to edit.

5. Click on the green Edit Email Content button at the bottom of the dialogue box.

   A new page appears, where you can edit the email’s design, copy and general style.

6. Edit your email as required and click on Save in the top-right corner.

   You can also click on the white Send Test button next to the Save button if you want to preview your new email template.

   When you click on Save, you’re taken back to the automation workflow dialogue box.

7. Click on the green Turn On Workflow button in the top-right corner of the dialogue box to enable your first email automation.
8. Repeat the process for each of the four email automations you wish to turn on.