When it comes to promoting an e-commerce Shopify store, there are several promotion and marketing strategies that can help you achieve your goals.
Part of these ideas includes Google ads and social media ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on depending on where your target market lies.
These online marketing schemes amount to a cost that a Shopify store that is just starting out might not be able to fund. At the early stage of starting your online store, you might want to channel your marketing energy in the most effective and economical way.
With this in mind, you might need to consider implementing in-store marketing strategies. The key advantage of having in-store promotions in place is that it serves as a support pillar for your external ads as they drive traffic to your store and increase sales.
To help merchants build a seamless and profitable e-commerce store, Shopify provides store owners with many marketing apps that can be integrated with their stores for a smooth and easy marketing journey.
While there are ways to promote your products for a fee, this article is meant to guide you through the many ways you can create in-store promotions to boost sales and increase revenue.
Table Of Content
1. How To Promote Sales Using In-Store Promotions
– Push Notifications
– Pop-ups
– Social Proof By Adding Reviews To The Shopify Home Page
– Marketing Emails
– Capture Leads With Welcome Mats/Banners
– Use A Referral Program
– Free Shipping
– Product Bundling
2. Final Thoughts
How To Promote Sales Using In-Store Promotions
1. Push Notifications
Store owners can use push notifications to promote their stores by sending snippets of text to users’ browsers that appear as pop-ups on their devices. About 80% of online shoppers use their mobile devices for online shopping. This shows that push notifications for e-commerce stores are best effective when they are used for mobile devices.
This way promotional offers can be communicated with customers even when they are not currently browsing the store.
You can use push notifications to create promotional messages, communicate a sales offer or discount, remind customers about abandoned cart items, etc. There are many ways push notifications can help you keep your customers engaged.
Aliexpress-Push Notification
Compared to ads, push notifications are a much more personalized marketing strategy. Each customer receives a message based on their activities except for preset notifications that guide first-timers or for sales promotion. Usually, push notifications require that the customer gives their consent to receive them. It is, however, a highly effective way of capturing sales leads if the content is compelling enough to influence a customer to buy.
2. Pop-ups
When it comes to generating leads with in-store strategies, pop-ups are very effective. Just like push notifications that use a pop-up feature, it is a quick way to communicate with customers about your store.
Pop-ups need to be engaging, enticing, and attractive in order to drive the desired result. To make it more engaging, you can use activities like spinning a wheel to win a prize. This prize can come in the form of discounts, free shipping, coupon codes, or gift items. Customers are usually attracted to ideas like this.
To have a pop-up enabled for your store, integrate the StoreBundle app from the Shopify app store. Using StoreBundle’s Pop-up Bar, you can create pop-ups that capture leads, such as emails, and also promote sales or discounts.
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3. Social Proof By Adding Reviews To The Shopify Home Page
One way to build trust with customers is to provide them with authentic social proof that shows their previous or existing customers’ satisfaction. In view of the many e-commerce stores and the lack of satisfactory service, customers tend to read store reviews before purchasing from any e-commerce store.
Bright Local conducted a survey to determine that 87% of online shoppers check reviews before purchasing a product or buying from a store.
Homepage Review-Soledreams
This act of checking out product reviews helps customers make an informed decision about buying an item. To further influence your customers’ purchase decisions, you can add reviews from previous buyers to your home page or the product page.
Also, having a review page on your store or product pages is a feedback measure. Through customers’ comments, you get to know what marketing strategy is most effective and how you can improve your customer experience.
4. Marketing Emails
There is so much to benefit from having email campaigns for your Shopify store. Boosting sales is one thing, but you also get to strengthen customer relationships and loyalty. Using marketing emails to promote your products generates a $36 return on investment for every $1 spent.
This marketing strategy in a way increases the confidence of a potential customer to buy a product. It is also an in-store promotion strategy.
Emails can be tagged as a personal sales promotion channel. Customers will feel engaged especially when these emails are personalized based on their product preferences. Unlike other promotional ideas, email marketing can be done without much stress using automation.
This implies that each visitor to your store automatically gets engaged once they give their email addresses.
Considering that most online shoppers visit e-commerce stores more via mobile phones, this makes email marketing achievable. As a result, you will be able to reach a wider audience.
5. Capture Leads With Welcome Mats/Banners
The most appropriate time to give a good impression is the first time. Welcome mats are banners that open communication between your store and your customers. This is the first page a customer sees after visiting your store.
That is why it is expected that your welcome banners are attractive and if possible they should come with an offer, especially for first-time visitors.
Welcome mats and banners are known to be effective at capturing email leads for Shopify store owners looking to increase their marketing efforts. If a customer is engaged with content that includes a coupon or discount offer for the first time, it is easy for them to consent to your email list. This is because they are engaging with your Shopify store for the first time.
You can have your welcome mat fullscreen or in a proportional size depending on which works best for your store. To have a welcome mat for your Shopify store integrate the StoreBundle app into your store. StoreBundle offers you an all-in-one marketing tool to aid your e-commerce journey.
6. Use A Referral Program
To increase store visibility and sales, you can offer customers a reward for every referral that they make. This way you are using your customers to preach about your business. The marketing idea can be tagged as word-of-mouth marketing.
It also serves as a social proof channel. Some customers are easily influenced once they can hold on to recommendations from other people.
A referral program helps you reward loyal customers and also increases your sales when new customers are brought in through this marketing channel.
7. Free Shipping
When you have slow-moving items or you want to clear your shelf of certain products, you can create a free shipping campaign for such items. Some of the reasons for cart abandonment are shipping distance which also affects shipping cost.
Many online shoppers have abandoned their carts due to this factor. Having a free shipping offer running on your home page is a very effective way to promote your Shopify store.
A free shipping bar is a marketing strategy where your customers are notified that they get to buy an item without paying delivery charges. This works well for e-commerce stores as most online buyers find such deals enticing.
The Free Shipping Bar app on StoreBundle helps Shopify store owners create a bar that runs on all pages, including the homepage and product pages.
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8. Product Bundling
Creating a combo package for products in your store is a sure way to promote new products, sell dead stocks, and also increase sales incredibly.
Product bundling is an e-commerce game where retailers can combine similar products to be sold together as one unit. This is a popular sales tool that is quite effective for promoting new products or selling slow-moving items. Since bundles usually contain fast-moving or popular items.
Product bundling is one of the ways of promoting in-store sales. You do not need to go outside your store to make a promotion.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is what fuels every e-commerce store. Every online retailer wants to invest as much as possible in this area. In an effort to accomplish this, many promotional activities are engaged.
A few promotional activities might require that you go the extra mile to gain a large audience. Nonetheless, in-store promotions can help you achieve your goals more effectively.
Having in-store promotions as a complimenting strategy can accelerate your growth speedily. Some of these in-store promotional tools as outlined in this post can help you increase sales and boost customer loyalty.
