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How to Grow Your Shopify Store [2024]: Growth Marketing Playbook
Updated 4 Jan 2024
Looking to grow your Shopify store’s revenue? Look no further! Our complete Shopify growth playbook contains all the proven strategies that we use to grow our client’s Shopify stores.
Table of Contents
Paid Social (Social Media Advertising)
Most websites & experts tell you to do social media advertising. Rarely do they tell you HOW to do it.
Below is our playbook for paid social.
Here are some helpful articles to guide you through the process:
Foundation
There is one thing that absolutely needs to be done before you even launch you campaign – that is installing your Pixel/Conversion Tag. DO NOT launch your campaign before having this fully set up. We’ll go so far as to say that this is the most important part of our entire paid social playbook.
Campaign Structure
At the top-most level (usually Campaign level on Meta, TikTok, Google Ads), we will have 2 types of campaigns.
- Prospecting Campaign
- Retargeting Campaign
The objective of the Prospecting Campaign is to find & attract new potential customers. While the objective of Retargeting Campaign is to convert potential into actual customers.
The reason for splitting up the campaign structure this way is so that we can tailor our messaging for each type of customer depending on their awareness level.
Within the Prospecting & Retargeting Campaigns, we segment the ad sets/ad groups based on our experiment (more on that later).
Campaign Set up: Custom Audience Layer
To set up a prospecting or retargeting campaign, apply these custom audience layers to all the ad sets/ad groups in your campaign. Always apply these layers regardless of your intended targeting.
For any adsets/adgroups within a Prospecting Campaign, always EXCLUDE the following audiences:
- Customers
- Website visitors
- Followers
- Engaged with your content or profile
The purpose of excluding these audiences is to limit the algorithm to reaching only people that do not know your brand.
For adsets/adgroups within a Retargeting Campaign, INCLUDE at least one of the following audiences:
- Customers
- Website visitors
- Followers
- Engaged with your content or profile
The purpose of including these audiences is to limit the algorithm to reaching only people that knows your brand. You can experiment to figure out the best custom audience. More on that in the Experiment section.
Targeting
On top of the custom audience layers, you can also further narrow your audience with interest/demographic/behavioral targeting. You will have to experiment to figure out the best audience targeting combination.
How To Determine Ad Budget
One of the most common questions we get is how to determine the appropriate advertising budget to set. While there is no right way to calculate, we’ve crafted 3 methods you can use as a starting point.
1: Percentage of Revenue Method
Take a percentage of last month/quarter revenue. Typically 10-15% for smaller businesses, and 5-8% for larger businesses.
2: Multiple of CAC Method
Take your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and multiply it by 5-10 times. That’s your ideal daily ad spend. If you find that too high, reel it back a little.
3: The “Wing it” Method
Just pick a number, any number. And start from there. Don’t overthink it – you can always adjust in the future.
Parameters Best Practice
These are our best practices when setting up your paid social campaign.
Campaign Objective: Always set to Sales so that the algorithm will seek out people that is likely to buy.
Audience Expansion/Advantage Plus: Always disable. This gives us greater control over our targeting.
Audience Network: Always disable
How to Experiment
In this section, we explain the experiment process & rules to ensure that you get the right insights.
Basic Rules
- Only run one experiment at a time, so that the results does not get mixed up
- Compare up to 3 different variants, any more than that and you might not get enough data for each to conduct a proper analysis
- Run each experiment for at least 7 full days, and up to 30 full days
At the end of each experiment, follow the analysis rules to evaluate and identify the winning variant.
Analysis Rules
- The winning version will perform better on ALL our target metrics
- If you encounter mixed results, lengthen the experiment by 3-5 days at a time or until 30 days is up
- If you still get mixed result at the end of 30 days, move on to another experiment as the current experiment is inconclusive and we do not want to incur further opportunity cost
Target Metrics
Prospecting Campaign: Cost Per Content View (alternatively Cost Per Landing Page View) & Cost Per Add To Cart
Retargeting Campaign: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) & Cost Per Purchase
Experiment Ideas
These are some of the typical experiments to run which has the highest potential to move the needle. We’ve included some examples for each experiment.
Prospecting Campaign
- Age group
- E.g 18-24 vs 25-34, Under 45 vs Over 45
- Gender
- Male vs Female
- Placements
- Facebook vs Instagram, Feeds vs Stories or Reels
- Product
- Product A vs B, Product Colour Black vs White, Product Category A vs Category B
- Geography
- City A vs City B
- Country A vs Country B
- Interest
- Ad creatives & copywriting
Retargeting Campaign
- Placements
- Facebook vs Instagram, Feeds vs Stories or Reels
- Offer
- 10% off vs free shipping
- Product
- Product A vs B, Product Colour Black vs White, Product Category A vs Category B
- Ad creatives & copywriting
Ad Creatives
For an effective social media advertising campaign, you’ll need to design your ad creatives with a purpose, here are some general rules to follow when designing your ad creatives.
One caveat here is that once you get more experienced in creating social media ads, you can break/work around these rules.
Ad Creative Design Rules
- Show your product(s) in your creative
- If it’s a video, ensure that your product(s) appear in the first 5 second
- Only have one key message per ad. Some key message ideas:
- Audience pain point/problem
- Benefit of product
- Feature of product
- Social proof
- Price (useful if you’re lower priced than your competitors)
- Promo/sale
- Focus on communicating your key message instead of making a fancy ad
- Make your titles BIG – smartphone screens are generally small so we need to compensate that with bigger titles
Email Marketing
For nearly all Shopify brands, email marketing is a MUST if you want to be profitable.
In this section, we share our playbook for email marketing.
Platform
We recommend using email platforms that can integrate with Shopify and has email automation functions. These are necessary to be successful in email marketing.
Our recommended email platform is Klaviyo. (Sign up for Klaviyo here).
Email Capture Forms
The first step to any successful email marketing campaign is to have a mechanism to capture the emails of potential customers. For most Shopify brands, a popup form offering discount in exchange for users emails works best (usually 3-15%).
Apart from that, here are some other ways you can capture the emails of your potential customers:
- Website Footer: you won’t collect much emails using this as not many people will scroll all the way to the bottom of your website. But it’s a good way to supplement other forms of email collection.
- At Checkout: Collecting email and marketing consents at checkout is the most basic source of email addresses that every Ecommerce business has. You are collecting emails of your customers simply to provide necessary personal information in order to place an order with your store.
- Quizzes: Harder to set up but it works well. Let users go through a multi-step quiz with an option to get the results delivered to their email. This is a much more engaging way of collecting email addresses.
Email Automations/Flows
Email automations or flows as they are otherwise called are simply emails that are automatically sent based on certain trigger events. They are a very powerful tool to convert browsers into customers.
Below are the core email automations that we deploy as it drives the biggest impact. For most email platforms, using the in-built sequence should suffice.
- Welcome Series: A series of emails sent to new subscribers. You can drop offers such as first-time purchase discount, introduce them to your best sellers, ask them to follow you on social media and more.
- Abandoned Cart Flow (moneymaker): We call this the moneymaker for a reason – it’s the automation that will extract the most value from potential customers.
- Customer Winback Flow: This flow is sent to customers that haven’t bought for a certain period of time. It’s useful to provide some incentive such as a small discount or a freebie to get them back.
- Birthday/Anniversary Flow: Make your customers feel special with this email automation. Give them an extra perk and they will be loyal for life.
Email Campaigns
Email campaigns are one-time emails sent to your contacts. They are another powerful way to increase your sales.
Below are some of the usual email campaigns which we run for Shopify brands.
New Arrival Campaign
Send To: All contacts
People love new stuff. Send out an email to showcase your new arrivals, we find that it’s a powerful way to drive more sales.
Back In Stock Campaign
Send To: Browsers of the target product page that was out of stock, exclude contacts that have bought target product.
Some of your customers may have been on the fence about buying your product so long that you’re out of stock. And they end up not checking out. A back in stock campaign is a good way to get them back, and it can reduce cart abandonment too.
Sale/Promotion
Send To: All contacts
No explainer needed for this. Sales, promotions, and discounts are one of the easiest way to drive sales. Just be careful not to run them too often!
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Process
We follow a simple process to optimize the conversion rates of Shopify stores:
Audit > Fix > Evaluate
Audit
In the audit step, our objective is to identify the stage of the customer journey with the biggest drop-off.
Fix
After identifying the weak spots, we will try to fix them by implementing some changes to the website.
Evaluate
After deploying the changes to the website, we will measure the associated metrics over time to evaluate whether the changes has indeed improved conversion rates.
Learn more about GRYT Marketing at https://gryt.global. Connect with us on Instagram, LinkedIn.
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