You’re so excited to start your ecommerce business, but you’re worried about the horror stories you’ve heard about marketing costs, you’ve seen comments on YouTube that quote numbers as high as five thousand dollars to get started.
I’m going to set the record straight you do not need five thousand dollars to get started in this article in fact I’ll show you five low-budget to no budget marketing strategies that help you drive traffic to your online store without eating your profit margins and the best part is that you can start implementing all of these strategies today. One of the most prominent of such strategies is shopify product research.
These marketing strategies can be applied to almost all e-commerce stores and they’re sure to increase your conversions so whether you’re someone who’s selling their own print-on-demand t-shirts a drop shipper or someone selling a product that you’ve created keep reading.
The first low to no budget strategy you’ll want to look into is to advertise less expensive products. Why? Well, the more a product costs, the more expensive it is to advertise so if you’ve got a product in your store that costs $100 it could cost as much as three hundred dollars to advertise it before you start getting sales, that said if you have a product in your store that costs much less it will cost much less to advertise it
The reason this is true is because customers need more convincing to buy more expensive products; on the other hand, customers are more likely to buy less expensive products on impulse they don’t need a lot of convincing before they clicked buy, with the help of dropshipping product research tool.
We talked to a multimillionaire ecommerce entrepreneur who takes the price of a product and multiplies it by three to determine how much he’s willing to spend on a products’ marketing costs before he determines whether it’s a winner so for example of something in your store cost 15 dollars give yourself about 45 dollars to test that product with Facebook Ads to see if you can gain traction by advertising that product.
Another bonus of this strategy is that if you use your less expensive products to drive traffic to your store you can always upsell them and get them to shop for your more expensive products once they’re at your online store if your drop shipping and you’re picking products from another supplier to sell in your Shopify store then you can apply this strategy by choosing less expensive products to sell in the first place.
The next strategy to consider – use email to drive qualified traffic to your store I know when you’re just starting out you’re not that psyched to get someone to sign up for your email list after all what you’re after is sales, however the thing to remember about emails is once someone gives you their email address first they’ve communicated to you that they’re really interested in your store and second you can get in touch with them whenever you want with more reasons to come back to your store and buy.
You can email these people about sales special offers discounts and so on and best of all emailing these interested customers is absolutely free so as you’re building your store make sure you’re paying attention to ways to capture people’s email addresses.
There’s a couple apps that you can use to do this, some of these do cost money however a lot of them have free trial periods so you can see if they work for your customers and if they’re capturing emails consider installing them on a permanent basis.
There’s actually another way that you can use email lists that’s a bit more advanced but you should know about it as you’re getting started once you have a list of customer emails you can actually use that list in Facebook to build a custom audience. This is important due to the fact that how to drive traffic to your shopify store is one of the most important aspects of dropshipping that you need to master.
This is great because what you’re essentially telling Facebook to do is to find people who are similar to the people who are interested in your store because they gave their email addresses Facebook will find those similar audiences and it will be more effective for you to advertise to those audiences.
The next strategy is definitely free but it does take some work this strategy involves building a community with content so often when people think about advertising their products they think about creating Facebook Ads however we’ve talked to entrepreneurs who’ve done a great job of building communities on social media platforms like Instagram not by advertising to those communities but by creating great content.
For example, entrepreneurs Cory and Rodney tested out a few different niches that they could sell in on Instagram, here’s a quote from them:
“We kind of started a bunch of organic Instagram accounts and we wanted to test a bunch of different niches and we went with one that was getting very high levels of engagement and we kind of went with that and we started to develop that account a lot more and once we started to get feedback from our community that we had built we started to realize okay this would be the niche that we could we could sell to, so we developed that and go from there”
They started to grow communities on Instagram by finding content that those community members would love think memes or helpful infographics and inspiring tips and things like that when they figured out which Instagram community was growing the fastest that went all that community and they watched it grow, once they learned more about that niche they were able to launch a store that spoke exactly to the needs of that niche and they drove free traffic to that store with the content and the community that they created on Instagram.
The bottom line here is if you’re willing to put in the work and spend hours a day creating an Instagram community (without asking the question what shopify theme is that) with great content interacting with the people who are leaving comments and finding other Instagram accounts to interact with you too can drive a lot of free traffic to your store on an ongoing basis without spending a penny.
