If you are just starting out a small Shopify store, you may not even have any idea of “marketing budget”. Of course, without any advertising dollar, it is harder to acquire new customers. However, it doesn’t mean you have to stay alone in the dark and hope that customers will find you. Don’t forget that we have many free tools and channels such as:
- Google: No charge for traffic from this biggest search engine.
- Social Channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube etc are free
- Many bloggers and publishers are free to featuring your products if you are interested in you.
- Mailchimp is also free for starters
In this post, we will give you some ideas of marketing tactics when you have no budget for marketing but you have time, creativity and determination. This post is written specially for Shopity stores.
Build email list
Unlike in physical stores where you have face to face communication with customers, in ecommerce industry, you can’t ignore the important of email in keeping customers and acquiring new business oppotunities. Getting started is not difficult as you think. Poping a subscription email box when customer enter your site is not a new idea but it still proves to be so efficient that many big brands are using it.
So what will you do if you have email list? Of course, you will send emails. But how? Sending email manually is not a good idea. With no dollar, you still can start with Mail Chimp app, which integerate with your stores, update subscribers and send emails automatically.
Give a Free Gift
Share the expertise that makes you so good at what you do. Be generous with your knowledge and your customers will love and respect you for it. If you sell cupcakes, you could teach a class on fun decorating techniques and allow customers to soak up your baking expertise. If you are a bookkeeper, you might write a tip sheet for keeping a handle on holiday spending and send it to your clients in your nifty, new email newsletter.
Free Gift app helps you to set up free gift campaign in your Shopify stores easily. Check our last post on How to use Free Gift to increase sales
Optimize your stores with free apps
Even though Shopify provides you with many wonderful features of online stores, it is never enough to automate activities and boost sales. App stores offer you a wide range of apps (+500 apps), which are awesome and many of them are free. There is nothing better than increase revenue without any cost.
There are too many apps out there so how can you select the most useful ones?
Find top 10 FREE shopify apps to rocket your Shopify store sales in our last post
Exploit Social Media
At the times of social networks dominating, you certainly can’t miss the channels of social media. They are great FREE tools for you to create brand awareness, build customers relationship, boost sales, etc. Let ‘s come into some popular channels for Shopify stores.
Online store on Facebook
First channel must be Facebook. It is indisspensable channels for acquiring clients. According to Hubspot, 70% of the asked company getting customers through this channel. Facebook doesn’t charge you any fee. You just have to pay when you run advertisement. The purpose of using facebook is to get closed to customers and promoting your products.
LinkedIn: professional content on a professional channel
Unlike facebook, the function of LinkedIn is completely different in case of a business.In essense, Linkedln is also a interface where people connect with each other. However, it is an interface where professionals contact each other, share professional content and it is primarily used for networking, for relationship building.
So forget about advertising your products with its help.
Use Linkedln to broaden your network instead such as searching for bloggers, publishers, who can help to promote products without any fee.
YouTube: capture customers attention by viral videos
You don’t have money but you have creativity, you can still create viral videos about your products. With the great deal of shares, your products will earn broad awareness without a penny.
In case, you can’t make something viral, a simple videos about your product can help a lot. It doesn’t only help increase awareness but it also boosts traffic.