3 Successful Shopify Marketing Strategies (That Actually Work)

Key Takeaways

shopify is a rocket ship with almost 20 e-commerce market share second only to wordpress and woocommerce and an estimated 1 million shopify sites out there in the world you cannot deny shopify's popularity in fact if we compare worldwide search volume for shopify versus wordpress we see actually the shopify is catching up and in fact in some territories like the us shopify search volume has actually increased ahead of wordpress in this video we're going to examine three shopify success stories and examine exactly what it's taken for them to enjoy such incredible growth before we do that though why do businesses choose shopify shopify is really easy to use because it only does e-commerce and it's been designed to be very easy to use so whilst a platform like wordpress with woocommerce might allow you to do a whole bunch of different non-ecommerce stuff and something like a magento might offer you loads more integration opportunities the limitations that shopify has actually are one of its greatest strengths because the trade-off with limitations is that you can make something very very simple and that's why a lot of people choose it okay so on to the success stories shopify success story number one fashion nova do you know i think they might have a sale on now considering that fashion nova was actually the us's number one most searched fashion brand in 2018. a significant portion of the viewers of this video are probably going to be wondering how come i haven't heard of this massive ecommerce success story well fashion nova is a brand that's been built almost entirely on instagram and in fact instagram is so native to fashion over shoppers that actually a lot of the images that fashionova uses on the site now of course there are model shots on the site but there's also these kind of lifestyle more real type shots as well now founded in 2006 fashion nova was actually started as physical stores remember those and the e-commerce side of things wasn't started until 2013. now the founder of the business said they started the e-commerce site because they noticed that people were selling a lot of products at higher prices and they were able to shift much larger volumes through e-commerce than they were through the physical stores now he also set up an instagram page as he noticed that visitors to their physical stores were taking photos of their clothing and the instagram page has 60 000 followers before they even set up the e-commerce store to sell products to these people well today there are 19 million followers now fashion nova's approach on instagram is extreme they can post up to 30 times a day one of the reasons that they can do this is because they have such a large instagram fan base and so many ambassadors on instagram creating fashion nova content using hashtags like novababes and hashtag nova family this means they have a huge amount of content to draw from and add into their feed you can see that not all of their posts are like highly curated professional photos they much prefer this type of shot which is someone from their community who's used the hashtag fashionnova and then they feature them on their instagram page so it's a great way of kind of crowdsourcing your instagram content and it means that you can post so much stuff obviously once you get to this level of traction now of course what does this do well this incentivizes people to use the fashion over hashtags even if they're not sponsor brand ambassadors because they want to be featured on the page because that is going to give them loads of reach and that's going to make them look famous and look like they are ambassadors influences so if you check out the hashtags using things like nova family and fashion over babes you'll find that actually there's a mixture of what looks to be like paid type influencers and actually just regular people who want to appear to be like paid type influencers in order to get that extra credibility it's fantastic for fashion over because they get the massive traction of all of these people posting using their hashtags without ever having to pay most of them now if we have a look at what they've done to promote the website on places like google they've got a pretty good approach going with seo now of course having four million branded searches per month it doesn't hurt at all but they're ranking pretty well for some fairly decent phrases here for things like biker shorts um lingerie thigh high boots these are all non-branded terms and a great way of getting people into the fashion over world even if they've never heard of fashion over before actually a lot of other stuff that they're doing isn't particularly great they've got some really poorly targeted google ads stuff that they've run advertising for terms like fashion which is really too broad to be of any use to anyone they don't seem to do any paid facebook or instagram advertising at all and never have and even their trust pilot reviews are pretty oh my god so how has fashion over become such a massive success well it really is all down to this influencer strategy they've had relationships with massive influences like cardi b and kylie jenner since 2016 and this article in vox explains how cardi b's collection for fashion over sold out in just minutes now if they're paying cardi b up to 20k a month they've been paying kylie jenner since 2016 they are clearly spending a lot of money on influencer marketing and have done for many many years even before it was such a mainstream route to market so who knows how much they're spending on that they keep their cards pretty close to their chest being privately owned but it's not going to be cheap clearly working though they know they mark it they know what message resonates and they know how to reach them and that's all you can ask for shopify success story number two is best self co now best self co sell journals and productivity tools to help people be their best and most productive now the co-founders originally launched best self co on kickstarter when it was a side project for them and they initially had a target of 20k while they blew through that and managed to raise 327k in just 28 hours giving them a massive proof of concept and showing them that there was a very clear market for these types of personal development style journals now the founder cat says the business is now an eight figure business so let's see exactly how they've generated that growth firstly can we take a moment to appreciate the design of this website this is a beautiful website very well organized great product imagery and it feels very calm which really it kind of needs to do if you're selling productivity and personal development it can't be a mess i'm a massive fan of best self co's user generated content particularly how they use reviews on their product pages so here we are on one of the product pages for the self journal which is their top product and you can see that not only do they have this massive review widget which shows a huge volume of user generator reviews but they also have images and videos that these users have submitted along with their reviews now obviously this adds massive credibility and huge social proof because it's one thing to see a whole bunch of reviews on someone's own website you feel like that could be faked whereas this when they've got the images and they've got the videos embedded as well it adds so much credibility so i'm a big fan of this and it also massively increases the amount of indexable content that you can have on these pages which of course helps with ranking another thing i love love love about this business is the fact that they put the subscription offer front and center you can see on their product pages if you're buying a journal it's going to last you a quarter so you're going to need four of them a year so they try to sell you the subscription with a price incentive just like amazon does right on these product pages it's brilliant and really important because the key for this business has been building up a really engaged customer base which repeat purchases and upsells and cross-sells into their other products and on that note they've then built out these supplementary products which they can also sell to that same audience maximizing the customer lifetime value now this is a really important point because as we'll see in just a second actually their digital marketing isn't really all that they've got a great looking website but they certainly could be pushing harder with both paid and organic approaches but clearly in order to get to eight figures they've learned how to monetize their existing customer base very effectively and no doubt having a wide product range of related stuff that people want to buy is an important component of that now aside from the kickstarter campaign which is of course very successful one of best self co's breakout success stories was winning a shopify contest in 2016 which gave them access to people like tony robbins and damon john and it's interesting to see that they're still using that relationship with damon john who is essentially a business influencer throughout their website this is really key because this is essentially influencer marketing to the target audience for best self co damon john who is a shark on the us version of shark tank is going to be a really strong influence the same with people like tony robbins who is a bit of an icon for people that are interested in productivity so they're essentially using influencer marketing even though it's not the kind of fashion nova gymshark type consumer influencer marketing that we might be used to so the instagram page has 132 000 followers and social blade tells us that they're adding around about a thousand new followers a month now on average they're posting every other day no engagement is reasonably strong mostly it's value adding kind of performance and productivity type content it's not overtly pitchy at all in fact they don't really talk about the products much at all now mostly it's helping the audience to be more productive and giving them the sort of things that they're buying the product for in the first place ie improve your productivity and how to be more effective with the time that you have available on facebook they actually have a larger audience of 200 000 but their organic engagement is very low join the club which is pretty typical on facebook they do have a highly engaged group on facebook though where they put their community and they've got around 40 000 people in that but elsewhere there's not really a huge amount going on it looks like they tried to run some facebook ads at some point in 2018 but it got shut down and they didn't kind of return to it they get a fairly modest amount of organic search traffic primarily for their own brand name and searches for their own products and they do run some google search ads although again these are primarily for their own brand name and for their own products so for me this actually looks like a business that's ready to take their digital marketing to the next step it's a great product i've used it and i've bought them for other people they've got a great website which is ready for more traffic so what else could they be doing to grow this even more well i think there's a huge opportunity with organic search traffic particularly writing content and producing stuff around productivity and time saving organizational type topics that people might be searching for by having a knowledge base all about productivity and being your best and being your best at work you can start to bring in organic traffic that's looking for those sorts of topics and then you can convert them into some kind of newsletter or facebook engagement group in order to be able to sell them in later on i'd also like to see them being a bit more aggressive targeting some of their competitor terms now i noticed in some of the organic research that a lot of people are comparing their best self journal versus alternatives like the full focus journal so one of the things that you can do if your business is targeting competitor terms is you can actually write blog posts or knowledge based content where you actually compare yourself against your competitor so in this example best self might write a detailed analysis of why some people choose best self journal and why some people choose full focus journal and the best thing about this is you can put that content on your site get it ranked on google when people are searching for those topics and also potentially run ads to people looking for those things as well because that is a really qualified potential customer and as long as you're very good at monetizing your audience which best self definitely seem to be then the customer lifetime value should mean that that is well worth the time it takes so i'd like to see them being a bit more aggressive about their digital marketing growth because i think that this business is definitely ready for it they have the product and the website to justify pushing a little bit harder shopify success story number three is gymshark now i've made a full one hour deconstruction of gymshark's digital marketing in another video gymshark gymshark yeah so i'm not going to go into loads and loads of detail here but if you don't have time for that and you just want the tldr here it is gymshark is a sportswear brand started in the uk by a guy called ben francis and it's a ridiculous success story they've grown from zero to 150 million plus valuation of over one billion pounds in about seven years mental and all done without any funding until very recently as well the site is also on shopify they've tried various different platforms before coming back to shopify now a few key things to note about jim shark's website it is very very extremely mobile first now that means that the design of this site has been prioritized for mobile devices because that's where their audience is to the extent where if you view it on a larger high resolution screen it actually feels a little bit weird so this is definitely a mobile first sight a bit like fashion nova gymshark has built its visibility on the back of influencers their breakthrough came from an expo that they did where they invited a whole bunch of fitness influencers to come onto their stand wearing gymshark products now these fitness influencers have been talking about gymshark and the fact that they were going to be at this expo for long before the expo happened and then of course the doors open it turns out that there's loads and loads of people flooding to the gym shark stand because of all the hype created by these influencers they sell out all the products and jim shark is off to the races they've kind of been rinsing and repeating that formula ever since signing up prominent fitness influencers predominantly on instagram and youtube and making them long-term brand ambassadors so this isn't necessarily the sort of thing a bit like fashion over where you have a very informal relationship with the influencers and there's maybe one off post every so often gymshark ambassadors tend to be predominantly seen wearing gym shark clothing and it tends to be a longer-term relationship but gymshark is not just a social media driven business ben francis the founder is very digital marketing savvy and seo from the beginning of gymshark has been a strong priority for the business and we can see the results of that with some of their rankings non-branded highly relevant terms like workout clothes for women workout crop top workout clothes enjoy good visibility not because jim shark has engaged in any kind of savvy link building but really because the visibility and the growth story of jim shark has meant it's picked up a lot of coverage and has a lot of different sites talking about it and that's really one of the things that you'll see about these kind of viral success stories is that they tend to self-perpetuate so you get some great growth which brings a lot of attention which brings more growth which brings attention and you get this kind of positive snowball thing it's what i like to call the feedback loop of awesomeness but not content to just restrict to organic traffic jim shark also invest quite heavily in google ads both text ads and also these google shopping ads which is great to see so there you have it three shopify success stories so here's what i'd be asking great three shopify success stories what about mine what can i learn what lessons are there from these success stories that i can apply to my ecommerce store well there are some very clear commonalities between these three and in fact all successful e-commerce growth stories firstly great product if you're drop shipping crap it ain't happening if your product is weak and unappealing driving more traffic to it won't help all of these three have relied heavily on repeat purchases to get the growth that they've enjoyed because the reality is that if you're relying on customers making a one-off purchase particularly if you're selling something lower value it can be very difficult to generate significant growth the cost that you can incur to get that customer in the first place and to get someone to make their first order can be a really significant portion of that first order value what you don't want to do is spend all of the profit from the first order on getting the customer only for there to be no more orders so you need to be confident that you're good at monetizing that customer over a lifetime rather than just for a single purchase and in order to do that of course you need a great product that people love so they actually want to come back the second commonality between any successful fast-growing e-commerce store is a sick website great website for those that don't talk tim now all of these three are on shopify but really your ecommerce platform doesn't matter at all people who think that one particular e-commerce platform is gonna get them the success that they want are really looking at the wrong thing these businesses would have succeeded on any platform they would have succeeded on wordpress woocommerce they would have succeeded on magento they would have succeeded on bigcommerce they would have succeeded on some kind of custom thing as well the thing that has generated the success is not the fact that they're on shopify it's the design and functionality of the website not the platform despite what shopify might tell you and success factor at number three is that all of these sites are high traffic for their target audience of course a pretty website that has great functionality and is easy to purchase from on any device is nothing if you don't have a steady stream of people going to that site ready to make a purchase and all three of these websites have a way of getting their target audience to the site whether it's influencer marketing social media organic search paid search facebook groups email marketing direct mail tv ads whatever it is knowing where your audience is hanging out what sort of message is most going to resonate with them and how to get in front of them with that message to make them come to your site and purchase is really what digital marketing is about these three have nailed it and i hope that you nail it as well and that's really the secret to digital marketing simple now of course at exposure ninja we help brands to scale this is exactly what we do so if you want some help with your digital marketing you're ready to take your e-commerce store to the next level what you need to do is request a free website and digital marketing review from exposureninja.com what happens when you do this is one of our team will analyze your site they'll have a look at all of the ways that you could be improving your conversion rate which is the percentage of people that buy and also your traffic and they'll look at sources like search social media and paid ads and they'll put together a prioritized action plan that's specific for your business based on what you should be doing to grow it's a really awesome service and it's completely free of charge so go to exposureninja.com click the button to request your free review you'll have to fill in a short questionnaire with a bit of information about your business and your marketing goals and then usually we'll get your review to you within a few working days if you enjoyed this video please leave us a comment we need the validation and please subscribe it's an ego boost and i'll see you in the next one