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Learn 26 effective ecommerce marketing tactics to boost your online business. Gain insights to enhance visibility, drive traffic, and increase sales.
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Driving traffic and conversions is crucial to every online store’s success. But even with a basic strategy in place, choosing the right ecommerce marketing tactics can be challenging.
These powerful ecommerce marketing tactics and tools will help boost your online sales, attract new customers, and drive repeat purchases. Ready to take action? Implement one tactic daily for the next few weeks, then analyze your results to identify the most effective strategies for driving traffic and sales.
Ecommerce marketing is the practice of using promotional tactics to drive traffic to your online store, convert that traffic into paying customers, and retain those customers post-purchase. Tactical examples for driving ecommerce sales include search engine optimization (SEO) to improve visibility, email marketing to nurture leads, and social media engagement to maintain customer relationships.
A successful ecommerce marketing strategy leverages a mix of digital ecommerce marketing tools and offline tactics such as text messages to take advantage of all available marketing channels
Market your business with Shopify’s marketing automation tools
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SEO marketing connects you to potential customers who are actively seeking your products. By optimizing your website, you increase your chances of appearing first in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Key SEO tactics to cover in your ecommerce marketing strategy include:
Around 63% of the global population is active on social media. A social media marketing strategy defines the platforms and content your share of this audience likes and how you’ll leverage them to promote your products. Your plan should also include tactics for identifying relevant trending topics and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success.
Email marketing connects you to potential customers in the most sacred place of all: their inbox. Statistics show that 87% of marketers employ this tactic, and 14% say it has the strongest return on investment (ROI) of any ecommerce marketing strategy.
The most popular types of email marketing include:
💡Tip: Shopify offers native email marketing tools to connect with your audience. From signup forms to segmentation and customizable templates, use Shopify Messaging to do it all.
In the PPC advertising model, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. You can employ PPC advertising on platforms such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
This highly customizable tactic is even suitable for limited budgets. Define who you want to see your ads and pay for the campaign when you see results. Remember that you need a well-optimized website to convert leads after they click your ad.
Social media has enabled creators to earn a living through influencer marketing. More than half of marketers partner with influencers because consumers consider creators reliable sources of product recommendations.
Influencer marketing involves incentivizing creators with free products, commissions, or paid posts. Rates vary, but on average, nano-influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers charge $5 to $100 per post.
Affiliate marketing is similar to influencer marketing but doesn’t require your partners to have large social media followings (although they help). Instead, you pay affiliates—bloggers, creators, loyal customers—commissions for promoting your products.
Affiliate marketing tools like Shopify Collabs generate custom URLs for each affiliate, making it easy to track visitors sent and commissions owed.
Ecommerce SEO is search engine optimization for online stores. Its goal is to get your product pages to the top on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Doing this brings more organic (non-paid) traffic to your website since the first organic result is 10 times likelier to get clicked than the 10th.
Invest in SEO by:
Follow these best practices to show up for popular search terms related to your products. The screenshot below shows Everyday Yoga and Beyond Yoga ranking on page one in Google for the term “women’s yoga pants,” which receives more than 2,400 monthly searches.
Working with social media stars can help you reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and generate sales.
A recent report revealed that over 80% of marketers find influencer marketing highly effective. Instagram is the most popular channel, with 57% of brands using it. Other marketing channels include:
Influencer marketing is highly effective for identifying target customers. How often have you seen an influencer’s Instagram post, liked what they wore, and wanted to buy it? Promoting products via influencers shortens the sales cycle. With increasing social commerce features on Instagram and TikTok, shoppers can buy directly from platforms.
Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, which reach millions worldwide, help people discover your brand. Some customers are die-hard marketplace shoppers, and there is a higher chance they’ll buy from you on a channel they know.
However, with their hefty selling fees, most marketplaces are best considered supplementary sales channels to complement your branded store. Use marketplaces to showcase your brand and its bestsellers; add branded packaging inserts to marketplace orders that encourage buyers to shop directly from your website.
📚 Read more: 20 Online Selling Sites and Marketplaces to Sell Your Stuff
Businesses thrive on TikTok by publishing genuine content since raw and authentic videos generate more exposure and engagement than highly edited ones.
These helpful aspects differentiate TikTok:
TikTok is great for niche advertising, offering live shopping and TikTok ads to promote products.
Data-driven and easily scaled, Google estimates that its pay-per-click online advertising offers an ROI of $8 for every $1 spent. PPC ads target online ad space in search engines, social media platforms, or websites, letting ecommerce brands target ready-to-buy shoppers, which can generate higher sales than organic marketing. Facebook and Google are the most popular platforms for PPC ads.
For example, the Google search for “men’s boots” below generated detailed ads for relevant products. 
When you run ads on Facebook (and Instagram), you can target specific personas and leverage a variety of ad formats.
Detailed targeting is the biggest advantage PPC ads deliver. You choose your audience and ad type—for instance, retargeting ads to people who viewed specific landing pages and encouraging them to shop with you again.
Say you run a shoe store and want to promote a new line of rain boots. You can create a group of ads targeting keywords like “best rain boots” to get your ads in front of people who want to buy what you’re advertising.
Drive up to 2x more retargeting conversions with Shopify Audiences
Find more customers and increase your orders. Audiences uses commerce insights only available on Shopify to help you maximize your ad performance on top platforms.
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Most of us have heard some variation of the famous “Would you like to Super Size that?” It’s an example of upselling, selling a bigger or more premium product than the customer initially wanted.
For many ecommerce businesses, upselling and cross-selling are more effective than acquiring net new customers. Sometimes, customers don’t know a premium product is available or simply need evidence to understand how an upgrade fits their needs.
For example, is one of your product models made of slightly better leather than the others? Does one include a handmade component? Be sure to emphasize the differences and ask at checkout if the customer wants to upgrade.
💡 Use the ReConvert Shopify App to upsell and cross-sell products in your store.
If you take compelling photos, make engaging reels and videos, and have a strategy, you’re well on your way to building a large Instagram following. Your next job is to engage with those followers.
Try running contests or going behind the scenes to showcase your product development process. You can also pay to play on Instagram. For business marketing, adding products to Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels provides a direct path to purchase, which is key for increasing online sales.
💡Integrate your Instagram Shop with Shopifyto sync your product catalog and manage orders within your Shopify admin.
You lose money every time a visitor abandons their cart without purchasing, which happens just over 70% of the time.
One simple and effective tactic to reduce cart abandonments is running an email recovery campaign to encourage visitors to return and complete their purchases. Craft an email enticing visitors to return to their carts by reminding them what they considered purchasing and why.
Clothing brand Alex Mill, for example, uses a 15%-off discount to encourage cart abandoners to return and finish the purchase.
Sending promotional SMS messages to existing and prospective customers is called SMS marketing. Messages can inform shoppers about special offers, promotions, updates, alerts, and product information.
If you run an ecommerce store, you can use SMS marketing for:
Bushbalm, for example, relies on SMS marketing to build relationships with its audience. Its automated welcome series, which introduces new subscribers to the brand and its bestselling products, regularly sees click-through rates of more than 50%.
💡Start SMS marketing today with Shopify apps like Attentive and Klaviyo.
Dollar for dollar, email marketing is one of the most effective channels at your disposal.
To get started, actively promote your newsletter, blog, and any other email capture efforts to get as many subscribers as possible. Children’s clothing brand Mori makes email signups the central focus for site visitors. It also gathers first-party data on its subscribers by asking which persona they reflect. 
It’s not enough to capture email addresses—you must send regular, valuable emails for an effective ecommerce marketing activity.
There are many occasions suited to emails your subscribers will actually appreciate:
Well-designed sites attract more customers. To build customer trust, make it easy for visitors to understand your value proposition, read your (clear and legible) fonts, and navigate your site.
Are you properly segmenting your products, or are you putting too many on a single page? Have you figured out the balance between text and visuals?
These are just a few of the many considerations. If your page isn’t converting well, consider some of the great themes available on Shopify.
See how Outdoor Voices’ beautiful ecommerce website facilitates easy shopping—customers can browse by product category or use the search function to find what they need.
Live chat is another opportunity to engage with shoppers on your site.
Many live chat tools let you target people who arrived through an email newsletter or spent a certain amount of time browsing particular pages. Live chat enables direct conversations so your team can answer questions and address concerns when customers are planning to buy.
If you can expand your product line, you should evaluate market demand to determine whether adding a new product is worth the cost. You can do that through various approaches, such as keyword research, geographic validation, social media trends research, etc.
Another creative way to test your market is to pre-sell items to see how many people place orders. Suppose you’re deciding which of three potential products to sell. Create quality pages for all three, then list them as “out of stock.” See which page gets the most back-in-stock notification requests and sell that product.
💡Use the Back in Stock Shopify appto avoid losing sales on out-of-stock products.
Regular blogging can connect you to customers and improve your search engine results page rankings. If you’re already creating content, consider featuring your blog on your online store.
Some other content marketing tactics for improving reach and engagement include:
Using behavioral data lets you serve visitors personalized experiences based on their online actions and preferences.
Location is an aspect of personalization that lets you cater to customers’ current needs: Someone in southern California may be looking for bathing suits in October, while your Maine customers probably need coats, for example.
💡Tip: Shopify automatically creates a customer profile whenever someone shares their email address or phone number with your business. Use this data to segment your audience for further personalization—like rewarding loyal customers after their fifth purchase or incentivizing people to place another order if they haven’t shopped with you in more than 60 days.
Put your customer data to work with Shopify’s customer segmentation
Shopify’s built-in segmentation tools help you discover insights about your customers, build segments as targeted as your marketing plans with filters based on your customers’ demographic and behavioral data, and drive sales with timely and personalized emails.
User-generated content (UGC) is excellent for generating social proof. When prospective customers see people like them buying your products, they’ll feel more confident doing the same.
Technically, even product reviews are UGC. Another effective UGC tactic is displaying pictures of customers using your products. Colourpop Cosmetics, for example, features TikTok tutorials of happy customers using its makeup.
Brick-and-mortar businesses aren’t the only local businesses. Online retailers can also take a regional approach to increase online sales.
Identify areas with large concentrations of customers and run promotions there. Review which products those customers buy and consider local events or seasons to time promotions appropriately.
If you have a warehouse or multiple warehouses, consider a promotion with free, discounted, or expedited shipping to customers nearby.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) means optimizing your website for on-site conversions and increased sales. CRO helps you identify problem areas on your site.
Where are you losing sales? Who’s dropping off and why? What can you do to capture those missed opportunities? Qualitative and quantitative research come together for a holistic and unbiased view of how conversion-oriented your site is.
Once you’ve identified the challenges and opportunities, you can develop hypotheses and tests to see which approaches generate the most sales.
Customer loyalty programs generate multiple benefits: They incentivize customers to buy your products and refer their friends, and they keep your brand top-of-mind through automated reminders.
You choose how to reward customers, how often, and for what actions. For instance, you might have a point-based program with a point-based currency members can redeem for discounts, free shipping, or gifts.
Beauty brand Mirenesse has a robust customer loyalty program. Members can access secret sales, free shipping, and the “Love Rewards” boutique. Customers also earn points on purchases that they can convert to store credit and redeem on future orders.
You can use Shopify’s Smile app to easily implement a customer loyalty program.
Optimizing your store for mobile is more than having a responsive design. It means designing your site with mobile visitors in mind from start to finish.
Perhaps that requires a bigger Add to Cart button on all mobile product pages so visitors can add items to carts without zooming in. Or, you might present your images in a quick-loading format so mobile visitors can easily see and magnify product photos.
A product bundle is a set of two or more related products offered at a discount. You can sell bundles through your store or Shop channel to increase average order value, clear out old inventory, and create more product visibility.
Wild One, for example, sells a harness walk kit at discounted prices. Customers receive a leash, harness, and set of poop bags, which they can customize by color and size.
💡Get the Bundler app on the Shopify App Store.
Interactive experiences like 360-degree views or zoom-in features help customers get a good look at products.
Take it a step further and go 3D like high-fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff. After adding 3D modeling and augmented reality to its product pages, the company found that customers were 65% more likely to purchase after viewing products interactively.
“At a time when the savvy fashion shopper wants to be able to connect with a brand’s persona, understand the texture and structure of every bag, and envision how they’d feel wearing each piece in a collection, we’re excited to host video and 3D within our Shopify ecommerce site to bring shoppers that much closer to Rebecca Minkoff designs,” says co-founder and CEO Uri Minkoff.
📚 Read: In going 3D, Rebecca Minkoff’s customers became nearly 30% more likely to buy.
A 2025 survey from Wyzowl found that 89% of businesses use video marketing, with 93% saying the tactic has given them a positive ROI.
Ecommerce brands can post many different types of videos:
For example, Friday Pattern Company creates popular YouTube sewing videos. They publish “sew along” sessions that teach viewers how to sew, videos about sewing techniques and hacks, and even a vlog-style series. These videos drive organic traffic to the brand’s ecommerce store and keep it top of mind when followers need sewing patterns.
Webinars and workshops are great for engaging customers and educating them about your products. You could run in-person product demonstrations to show how your products work. Or, host online webinars, inviting industry experts to speak on topics related to your brand.
Affiliate programs are rewards-based systems where partners promote your products in exchange for commissions. A customer or creator may advertise your products on their profile, referring their followers to your store. Then, they receive a commission on any sales made through their unique link.
Affiliate marketing helps companies like ramen brand immi launch products, build brand awareness, and sell stuff. The company used Shopify Collabs to recruit over 400 ambassadors to its affiliate program, generating more than $200,000 in sales.
💡 Learn more: The Pre-Launch Strategies of a Million-Dollar Brand
The right marketing strategy can introduce you to customers, improve average order value, and increase sales—all good things for your business! By following the ecommerce marketing tips above, you can build a successful store with a good customer experience for shoppers.
Ecommerce is a way to sell and deliver products and services. Digital marketing is how you reach potential and current customers to encourage purchases. When someone goes to your website to buy new shoes, the act of buying and receiving the shoes is ecommerce.
Some tactics for marketing an ecommerce business include:
You can use social media for ecommerce marketing in many ways:
How you measure success depends on your ecommerce marketing strategies—each will have different metrics. In general, look at conversion rates, website traffic by channel, and sales. Tools like Shopify Analytics can track user behavior and sales, giving insight into which of your ecommerce marketing strategies are most effective.
The 5 Cs of ecommerce marketing are company, collaborators, customers, context, and competition. Cover all five components in your marketing strategy.
Shopify is the best platform for starting an ecommerce business. It’s incredibly user-friendly and has a ton of out-of-the-box features—including prebuilt themes, checkout, social media integrations, and extended sales channels—so you can start selling quickly.
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