Dropshipping is the only business that allows entrepreneurs to sell products without stock or inventory. Dropshipping can be a powerful and profitable marketing strategy that will help you grow your business and attract more customers.
Dropshipping has been a major part of e-commerce since 2011, when companies like Amazon and Walmart began using it. Their dropshipping marketing strategy is what separates them from other eCommerce sites.
After you have identified your niche and found suppliers, create your online store. The next step is the sales. This will allow you to attract more visitors and more customers. This is when you need a dropshipping marketing strategy that will be effective and powerful for your business.
Marketing strategies that are well-planned and based on research can help you store more and increase sales. This article is for beginners with limited budgets. We will be listing some low-cost and important marketing strategies that you can use to start a dropshipping business.
Day-to-day, the dropshipping market is becoming more competitive. It has low margins and carries higher risk. You need a marketing strategy to differentiate yourself from your competitors and help you acquire maximum customers to sustain in this highly competitive market.
This article will show you how to identify dropshipping marketing strategies you can use to grow your business.
I started my very first online drop shipping shop in late 2016. It was a massive learning curve that I had to get through quickly, but you’ll see results starting to roll in if you put in the effort like all things in life. My dropshipping tour, so far, has been fantastic.
Last Month, out of a total of 8,706 visitors, my drop shipping shop gained me a total of $2,177,04. (With an approximately 50 percent profit margin). Not bad.
It’s fantastic to see over 9,000 targeted visitors come into the store and making sales, but that’s just scratching the surface for me. I will have 900,000 visitors if I can get 9,000 visits, and then my sales can rise.
All of this comes down to more (target) traffic, so that’s what I want to talk about today:
How to Promote Your DropShipping Store
Currently, while I’ve only been doing drop shipping at this stage for a while, I’ve also been creating websites and making money from them for the past five years, so I understand a thing or two about traffic and how + where to get it from.
For someone trying to get more views and advertise their web properties, the following tips will apply; whether it could be a dropshipping shop, a blog, a sales page, a forum or whatever; these tips are what I know works.
I have to put in a little disclaimer here now, as usual, to tell you that this is what worked for me.
There may be hundreds (and there are) of other ways to market your dropshipping shop, and note that the tactics that work for me may not work for the business in which you function.
I’m going to demonstrate these marketing tactics, though, are what I’ve used across several various niches to support different shops and websites, and I’ve seen consistent outcomes across the board.
Ready to start?
Here are four strategies for promoting your dropshipping store:
Let’s start with the method that I know all of you have heard of:
Facebook Ads & Dropshipping
Facebook ads have been wonderful to me, and every marketer trying to drive more traffic is just a dream come true. With Facebook Ads, the things I’ve seen happening to me and many other drop shippers are truly magical, and this is something I recommend everybody (at least) tries to do.
You’re going to need a budget for this now because if you have $0, then this might not be for you, but once you see the results I get from Facebook, you’ll soon see why I think they’re such a big deal and why I first put them in these four ways to advertise your dropshipping shop. This is what I usually pay to advertise on Facebook in my store:
Now I’m not sure if and to be honest with those numbers and above or below industry standards; I don’t care as they are low enough for me to make a profit, which is essential at the need of the day; that’s all.
How To Learn Facebook Ads
As I have said, you will need a budget. As you can see above, last Month, I spent $753 in total, but that’s not all. If all of this is brand new to you, don’t go to Facebook Ads without knowing what you’re doing, as that’s a guaranteed failure right there. Get organized, get some data, learn the platform’s ins and outs and start testing.
With it, you don’t have to be an expert-I doubt anyone is given the immense depth and power it has, but you need to know the basics at least. One of my favorite Facebook Ads guru Franklin Hatchett (the man behind the infamous $5 method), is here.
Watch long videos of this hour and more from his YouTube channel, and that should be sufficient to give you at least an idea of what to do next:
FYI: Franklin also has a unique dropshipping course that goes far beyond just Facebook Ads; here are some of my Franklin Hatchett & his techniques reviews:
SEO and Blogging
This is probably the slowest way to promote and market your online store, but when you see it through and have patience with the results, it’s deadly. If you are looking for e-commerce to make a quick buck, then this is not for you.
But, if you want to build an extended, sustainable business model, you should start thinking about how to optimize your SEO dropshipping store.
How to Do SEO for Dropshipping?
Because the system is built against them, dropshippers (and eCommerce stores in general) struggle a lot with SEO. Amazon dominates the search results for any product you can type into Google, for instance, so good luck trying to compete with such a massive brand with billions of dollars in advertising capital and an army of employees.
What solution is there?
Anyway, could you do it?
Learn some basics of SEO and start using Shopify as a blogging tool, it will take you some time to figure out what works best because for each niche it’s different, but I’ll share the strategy I’ve used here:
Do some research on keywords:
For example, if “yoga mats” are sold in your dropshipping shop, your blog content should look something like this:
“x Yoga Benefits.”
“the best beginner yoga mats.”
“thick mats for yoga.”
“Beginners’ Yoga Mats”
“brown mats for yoga.”
It’s a long shot, but you’re going to start getting picked up for some keywords like this in time and with patience, and it’s going to get the ball rolling for you. Start redirecting those readers to specific product pages in your store once you start getting traffic to those posts. For example, 20 different yoga mats you can link to in your store can be featured in the post “The best yoga mats for beginners.”
This is already a good step forward, and you’re going to get traffic and sales and don’t forget; you can create such posts over and over again. There’s a lot more to it, but for the moment, for the foreseeable future, doing the above will help you get started.
Check out this excellent video for a bit more of a technical approach to e-commerce SEO:
Promoting Your Store on Social Media
Right, it is an excellent way for you to promote your dropshipping store to move on to social media, which yes;
As of today, my social media includes three platforms for my drop shipping store; Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, and these three combined get me about 40 percent of my total traffic.
This is also 100 percent free traffic, just like SEO. All I have to do is keep the updates on these channels flowing, and I’m good. For that, I use a handy tool called Buffer.
Buffer enables you to schedule social media posts in advance, so I never share products and content. I have updates to go through for the next three months at the time of writing this. Not to spread you too thin is one tip I’d like to give here.
Focusing on one social media and doing it will be much better than half-assing it across four platforms. Choose one; I’d say Pinterest if I had to recommend one and concentrate on increasing that to the moon.
Pro tip: Remember, you can start creating look-alike-audiences for your Facebook Ads once you start getting traffic from social media and SEO, which will reduce costs and (should) increase your conversions as well.
Using DropShipping for Email Marketing?
I have to mention another great way to promote your store, last but not least, and that is the highly talked about and discussed the method of;
Email marketing
Yes, email still works incredibly well, and it contributes to a lot of online sales, not just for me but for anyone who knows how to use it well. I also schedule my emails in advance, like social media, so at this point, I have updates worth one Month that are already scheduled to go out + an automated sequence for every subscriber that joins with a healthy mix of both helpful content and straight hard-selling emails.
The thing about email is that it takes time to grow a list that makes you money, but you can increase email subscribers in plenty of ways. The best thing that has worked for me so far is to offer anyone who joins my list through a pop-up as soon as they land in my shop a 20 percent discount.
These are the analytics of my life for this app. It has around a signup rate of 4 percent, and 117 sales been also accounted for. If you’re wondering, the app I’m using right now is a free version of the Privy app.
In Closing
Thank you very much for reading this post and I hope I have provided you with a few thoughts on how to promote your online dropshipping store best.
“I know this dragged on a bit, but this “drop shipping hustle” is something I’ve just begun to explore and have seen many advantages come out of it, so I’m excited to share this information with all of you “as I get it.
Create strong relationships with your customers and win their trust (reviews, testimonials)
The best way to convince customers to buy from your online store is to include reviews and testimonials. This helps you build strong, long-lasting relationships with both your existing and new customers. Reviews and testimonials can be used to convert existing customers or new ones into loyal customers.
Dropshipping is a business where most customers are skeptical about both the quality of your products and the store. This is a common expectation today with an increase in online frauds. We recommend that you include reviews and testimonials in your online shop.
The testimonials and reviews allow the customer to see how they felt about the product. This helps to motivate new customers to purchase the product. You need to ask product buyers to review the product and share their experience.
You can capture the feedback from the customers on the supplier’s website and put it on your site. This will allow your customers to see the quality of your product. After your online store has grown, you can start collecting testimonials and reviews.
Influencers in Marketing
Reaching out to influencers to promote your dropshipping business, a.k.a. influencers marketing, is another revenue-generating strategy you could consider. Reaching out to influencers increases your dropshipping business’ reach because they already have a large audience.
These marketing strategies require a large budget and are more expensive than other dropshipping strategies. Partnering with an influencer who has a large audience can provide you with more effective and quicker results than other marketing methods.
Influencers can shout about your products and business to their followers, which can lead to high traffic and conversion. Influencer marketing will be one of the most popular marketing strategies over the next few years. Many businesses are trying to elevate influencer marketing. We recommend that you include influencer marketing into your dropshipping marketing strategies if your business has solid backing.
Promoting Contests, giveaways and promotions
For all kinds of businesses, content, giveaways and promotions are always effective and convert well. It is obvious that businesses who offer coupons and discounts will see a significant increase in traffic and conversion.
We recommend that you create and run seasonal sales, yearly sales, contests, giveaways, and other special occasions to increase your dropshipping business’ sales. When running a contest or giveaway, consider using contest templates to streamline the process and engage your audience effectively. Many businesses have found new customers through these sales, content, giveaways and other activities.
These strategies can be more expensive than other channels, but they offer a great return on investment.
Optimize your service
The internet is undoubtedly a tool for online shopping, but it also allows transparency about the business’s operations. While social media is full of negative reviews about businesses, there are also many people who praise the exceptional service provided by brands.
Your online reputation can have a direct impact on your business’s revenue and brand. If you don’t provide the services users require, then it is likely that your company will be unable to satisfy their needs. Customers today are not afraid to write long paragraphs about how bad your company’s service has ruined their purchasing experience. It is important to offer exceptional service to customers.
Dropshipping can sometimes get messy. You have to pay the costs to fix those issues like fulfillment problems, pre-order products and more. Drop shippers make the common mistake of not paying extra charges to customers. This makes drop shippers unhappy and leads to bad reviews.
It should be your priority to make your customer happy and satisfied with your services. You don’t have to pass those costs on to your customer. Instead, you can make sales without any profit to keep your customer satisfied. Your customer service should be your priority. This will help you outperform your competition.
Conclusion
You might have a few marketing ideas in mind that you could include into your dropshipping marketing plan. Dropshipping marketing strategies play an important role in growing your business and attracting more customers to your site.
Testing is key. While all of the strategies mentioned above can provide you with impactful results, they are not the only thing that will make your business successful. Analytics and testing are the keys to success. To determine the most profitable and effective market strategy for you business, you can analyze the performance of each strategy.
A conversation-centric marketing strategy is not enough. You also need to offer a website design that appeals to your audience and makes it easy to find and buy the product. Dropshipping is a business that requires you to be focused on both your website design as well as your marketing strategy.
You can always work with an website design and marketing company to get the results you want.
