What Makes Us a Shopify Specialized Email Marketing Agency?

Online businesses already face plenty of challenges, but Shopify stores are a unique breed of ecommerce. Plenty of business owners are using this ecommerce platform, and there are plenty of reasons that Shopify remains the most popular website for ecommerce services.

Among its many services, Shopify provides businesses with the ability to maintain and monitor their own store. This digital storefront can then be bolstered with innate integrations, such as social media plugins and data tracking.

Now, all of this is great, but what about one of the most important services for a website to have? What about marketing?

Every business needs its own marketing strategy. That’s just a fact! A law firm will have a different approach to digital marketing than a candy store, and ecommerce businesses are the same way! That’s why, when you search for a new digital marketing agency, you’ll encounter so many different companies with a wide range of unique services.

Not all of them are created equal, however, and it’s up to you to find the right digital marketing agency for your company.

It’s a daunting task, but I’m here to help make the process a little easier.

Today, I’ll be discussing why Shopify store owners should be looking for specialized companies. I’ll also be talking a little bit about why it matters so much to me that The Email Marketers specializes in optimizing email marketing with Shopify.

So, let’s get started!

What Is a Shopify Online Store?

I want to make sure everyone is on the same page, so I’ll start out by defining what Shopify is!

At its core, Shopify is an ecommerce platform that’s optimized for sales. Using Shopify, businesses can sell various courses, goods, services, and digital products. If you’re super curious about what you do with a Shopify store, the website even has a handy blog post that talks all about the things you can and can’t sell on the platform.

Ultimately, a Shopify store is like any other ecommerce website. The big difference is that it’s hosted on the expansive Shopify ecommerce platform.

What Does Shopify Do?

When a business owner invests in a Shopify plan, they’re immediately entitled to a handy toolkit. Even the most basic plans come with all of the bells and whistles an ecommerce website needs to new more revenue. Some of the features are:

• A customizable website for sales
• Build-in email marketing tools
• Relevant data tracking
• Social media marketing integration
• The ability to sell services to any country or region
• The ability to store some contact information
• Tools to manage branded content

However, you may notice that Shopify doesn’t actually provide its users with a comprehensive marketing plan. That’s something that you, as a business owner, must find on your own.

What Makes Shopify Digital Marketing Unique?

Before I get into talking about finding a Shopify digital agency and how to grow your business, I need to clear something up… (Yes, I know you really want to learn all about how to spot the best Shopify digital marketing agency, and I’m getting there!)

The biggest misconception that I see as a marketing expert is that every company can have the same approach to marketing.

That’s not true!

Every company has its own audience, business goals, customers, services, and online marketing requirements. If you, as a business owner, fail to take these things into account as you craft your marketing strategy, you’re writing yourself a one-way ticket for Trouble — with a capital ‘T’!

Every Online Store Is at a Disadvantage

So, how do you avoid this promotional faux pas?

When you, a Shopify store owner, are creating your marketing plan, one of the first things you should think of is how you will maintain your customer relationships. As I’ve pointed out before, ecommerce businesses lack many of the benefits that brick-and-mortar companies have.

To understand why that is, I want you to take a moment to think about how you shop.

When you go out for groceries, you visit a physical location. There, you see a wide array of brands and products, all of which you can physically hold and feel in your hands. You can easily gauge the quality of these products. If you have questions, there are employees ready to offer their informational services. This is how larger businesses operate. They place their products in physical stores, and customers find their products through these brick-and-mortar outlets.

However, if you’re running a Shopify store, you don’t get all of these perks. Because your product isn’t on store shelves, you need to get creative. You need new ways to drive traffic to your website and different services to promote your business.

In the Olden Days, business owners did this by physically seeking out potential customers. They negotiated sales in person, and the door-to-door salesman stereotype was born.

These days, however, it’s a little more complicated…

The Social Media Marketing Sand Trap

I’ll kick off this little examination of how truly successful businesses market to their target audiences with a question…

Have you ever played golf before?

If you have, you probably know about sand traps. These areas are often easy to land in, and trying to get out of them is a whole process.

When you’re running an ecommerce business, — regardless of whether it’s a Shopify website or something entirely different — you’ll run into a few marketing sand traps. Of the many judgment errors ecommerce business owners encounter, one of the most common is what I like to call the social media marketing sand trap.

In this scenario, a brand — often one that is new and inexperienced, though large brands still fall victim to this logical fallacy — will assume that it needs to have a perfectly refined social media presence to succeed. It will invest all of its resources into driving more traffic to its social media pages instead of its website.

But! Here’s the secret: you don’t need to do any of that! In fact, if you want to see your business grow, then it’s far more important for you to cleverly allocate your resources across multiple channels.

As important as having a strong online presence is, it pales in comparison to making sure you’re taking full advantage of your existing fanbase. Even if your first sale was recent, you need to remember that you have loyal customers. There are people out there who are looking for your product, and they need help finding it.

Now, the most traditional way to approach this conundrum is to invest in Google Ads. You may even pour some money into your web development by investing in an outsourced web design agency. Both of these are respectable approaches, but they aren’t the most efficient.

In fact, there are plenty of ways to really amplify the reach of your website. Social media is just one of many paths a business can take to success, and it should never be the only route it follows! New customers are everywhere, and one of your business goals should be to find your where your target audience is hanging out.

How Do You Reach New Customers?

Sure, you can still pull on your comfiest sneakers and go door to door, but that’s not exactly practical!

Today, if you want your business to thrive, you need to invest in a wide array of marketing efforts. In addition to classic channels, you’re looking at a funky grab-bag of strategies, including:

• Content marketing
• Conversion rate optimization
• Email marketing
• SEO to remain relevant on search engines
• SMS advertising
• Social media platforms
• Web development
• Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM)

That’s a lot of different channels, and not all of them will work for every business. It also sounds expensive! How can you, as a business owner, possibly have enough funds to provide all of these services without stifling your growth?

Understanding which strategy to pick for your ecommerce business takes up way too many resources, and all of the time you spend trying to drive sales can ultimately rebound on you. That’s why many Shopify store owners are enlisting the help of a full-service agency or specialized Shopify marketing agencies.

What Does a Shopify Digital Marketing Agency Do for My Ecommerce Business?

I’ve talked about why brands need to enlist the help of a digital marketing agency before, but there’s still plenty of ground to cover! For an ecommerce business owner, a marketing agency is a lifeline. The Shopify experts behind a truly amazing digital marketing agency will be able to provide you with plenty of services.

This is my blog, after all, so you'd better believe I'm going to really emphasize the abilities of the amazing TEM team. Should an ecommerce store enlist the help of The Email Marketers, it can expect:

• A dedicated group of Shopify experts at its disposal
• A fantastic Shopify marketing agency
• Comprehensive marketing plans that align with the brand story
• Every bit of relevant, actionable data
• Multifaceted approaches to driving more traffic to its ecommerce website
• Plenty of resources and tips for maintaining a great online presence
• SMS marketing options to help the business grow and make more revenue
• Targeted email campaigns that rival the most effective social media advertising
• The ability to manage a sizeable contact list and reach even more potential customers
• Unique ways to reach and connect with its target audience

Five Ways That Experience Impacts Our Digital Marketing

So, I’ve shown you what a good Shopify marketing agency can do, but it’s not enough to provide a service. A truly amazing marketing agency will have the experience needed to run campaigns that actually yield results.

Sure, every agency will have plenty of experience running campaigns for a bunch of different industries! That’s great! But let me tell you a little secret that many of those larger agencies don’t want you to know…

If you’re running a Shopify store, then you need an agency that knows about the Shopify platform.

1. We Know What Data to Use

Let me be perfectly blunt: if a digital marketing agency has never worked with ecommerce businesses, it will not know what metrics it needs to be tracking. By the time it figures out how to actually turn visits into sales, you may be in the red!

A Shopify marketing agency is different.

Ecommerce-centric agencies are staffed by Shopify experts. This insight is immediately available in the form of reduced consultation times, as the marketing agency already knows how ecommerce brands operate. Benefits continue to come in once you’ve teamed up with the marketing agency of your choice, and one of the biggest differences you’ll see is in your data collection department.

In an under-experienced digital marketing agency, it’s pretty common to see marketers sending out entire Google Analytics reports. This is…

… well…

It’s not great!

As amazing as Google Analytics can be, it’s admittedly overwhelming. Even experts can be confused by the data they find in an Analytics report. There’s a lot of information in a full report, and not all of it is relevant. In fact, for Shopify stores, most of the data you’ll see in a complete analytics report is irrelevant to you! That information won’t increase your sales, but it will bog you down.

I’ve said all of this to say something that can honestly be summed up pretty quickly…

When a marketing agency sends you something like this, it’s a red flag. It’s a sign that the marketers don’t actually understand what they’re doing and have no idea what data points they actually need to keep an eye on.

2. We Know the Importance of Customer Engagement

One of the first things that a good Shopify marketing agency will look for is customer engagement. Every ecommerce business needs to have a deep understanding of its customers and fans because those consumers will be your biggest source of marketing material.

Sure, there are plenty of ways that ecommerce brands can utilize other marketing channels, — such as social media platforms and Google Ads — but these approaches aren’t as effective as old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing.

Let me put it this way…

Assume that there’s a Shopify website selling customized phone cases. It’s a small brand, and none of its products are available in stores. You cannot physically interact with the cases, but you can read plenty of customer feedback, reviews, and testimonials.

This little scenario may feel familiar and may be where you are in your Shopify ecommerce journey. If so, I want you to take a step back.

Assume you’re a new customer. Will you be more willing to buy the product after seeing a few generic Google ads? Probably not! After all, you can’t feel or hold the product. You don’t know how the case will fare if it’s dropped.

Now, what if you saw videos and photos from existing customers? Now, you have a reference point. You have a direct connection to the product. You have physical evidence of the product, and you can see how it works. You’re probably a little closer to this imaginary store’s point of sale, aren’t you?

3. Our Email Marketing Experts Know How to Reach and Manage Your Target Audience

Hopefully, that little example was a good way for me to illustrate how user generated content marketing efforts can boost your sales.

“But Melanie!” you may be saying. “How can my brand reach eager customers and obtain useful content!?”

That’s where we come in. As a team of ecommerce marketing experts, The Email Marketers comes together to craft unique email campaigns for your brand. In addition to utilizing a fair bit of expert wordplay, we’ll also work alongside your company to create customer segments. These segmentations will then be used to personalize and automate emails, ensuring that they successfully reach the target audience.

Now, we won’t just use these market segmentations and automations for testimonial collection. With your help, we’ll also be able to drive sales! That’s a post for a different day, though. For now, let’s dig into…

4. We Target High ROI Tactics

Shopify customers are a tricky bunch.

You can increase the appeal of your website and optimize your web design all you want, but none of that will matter if you can’t turn those visits into sales! At the end of the day, you — the aspiring ecommerce mogul — need to have an amazing conversion rate. You want more potential customers to visit your website, see your product, and realize that they simply cannot live without it.

With Shopify ecommerce, earning those sales relies on a skilled balance of content marketing, email marketing, and savvy business practices. It takes a lot of work to handle it, and making that first sale is just the beginning of your ecommerce journey.

Fortunately, The Email Marketers knows how to precisely target both existing and potential customers. As our name implies, our biggest focus is email marketing, which I’ll talk about in a second. First, I wanted to briefly mention some of our other services, namely…

• Brand campaign management
• Creative copywriting services
• List optimization for new subscribers
• SMS marketing
• Unique site improvement services

All of these, particularly SMS marketing, are proven ways to truly optimize your ROI. In addition to the ability to drive traffic to your site, these services are an amazing way to boost your business's customer relationships and profitability.

5. Our Email Marketing Is Created Just for You and Your Ecommerce Store

Time for me to round back to my favorite thing to talk about: email marketing! Even better, I’m talking about The Email Marketer’s email marketing. (Try saying that a few times!)

Let me start by pointing out the sheer effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. There are a lot of strange folks trying to convince online store owners that email marketing is dead, but that’s far from the truth! In fact, businesses that utilize email marketing frequently see more revenue gains than their email-less counterparts.

The TL;DR here is that email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to boost your business’ sales and drive traffic to your site.

Aside from the widespread ubiquity of email, there are few marketing channels as flexible as email marketing. With the right email templates and tools, marketers can bend their emails to perform a wide array of functions and services. Now, I obviously don’t have time to go over every way that an online store can use emails, but I can provide a few examples.

With the help of The Email Marketers, your business can:

• Announce website changes
• Create and maintain comprehensive contact lists, which saves on resources
• Direct attention to social media marketing campaigns
• Direct traffic to its website, which improves its rank with search engines
• Directly engage with customers
• Encourage users to visit and follow relevant social media accounts
• Engage customers in referral campaigns to find even more potential customers
• Gather feedback on its website
• Keep customers informed of promos, deals, and outages due to web development through drip campaigns
• Monitor relevant KPI data
• Provide targeted advertising based on purchase history
• Re-engage customers by promoting unique products in its Shopify store
• Spread its brand story to a wide target audience
• Target specific customers to promote relevant store sales

How Can I Get Help From The Email Marketers?

Now, that’s a lot of benefits, right?

I truly believe that The Email Marketers is the best Shopify digital agency out there!

In fact, that’s why I founded this brand. After spending so much time being burned out at traditional agencies, I wanted to create a marketing agency that could help every business grow!

To create this dream, I enlisted some of the best ecommerce experts that I could find. Everyone at The Email Marketers is an ecommerce business pro, and we’re always ready to help. We have all of the resources your online store needs to thrive, and we want you to benefit from those services!

So, take the plunge!

Join us! You can get in touch with us easily, and we’ll do a full dive into your online store and its needs. We’ll use what we find to craft a fully customized marketing plan, and we’ll continue to work alongside you as your business grows.

What are you waiting for? We’re ready to help you make your online store the best Shopify site the world has ever seen!