When it comes to marketing your business, there's a lot of work you have to do. You need to make a few ads, figure out where you're going to put them and try to gain as much traction as possible.
If you're a digital marketer, then you probably already know that digital marketing is getting more and more expensive. It's also becoming increasingly complex as well. Competition, whether it be companies or individuals, is rising by the day.
So how do you cut through the noise, get noticed, and still be heard?
Luckily for us, Shopify has created a tool that will help us reach our audiences without having to do any of the work - Shopify Audiences.
Okay, what is Shopify Audiences?
Shopify Audiences is a Shopify Plus exclusive advertising platform that allows you to reach potential customers based on browsing behavior and purchasing habits. It is essentially a marketing tool that lets you target people who are likely to be interested in your products.
You can create audiences for any portion of your store's customer base. For example, you could build an audience for customers who have bought specific products, those who have visited specific pages, those who live in specific regions, or for any other criteria that you choose.
How does Shopify Audiences work
The key to its effectiveness is the unique view of order attribution that only Shopify can provide.
Shopify Audiences uses data from your store to identify customers who have purchased products from you in the past. These customers are then categorized into groups based on the products they've bought, what they've browsed and where they're from.
You can then use these groups to create audiences for your email marketing campaigns, which deliver personalized emails and push notifications to your customers. This allows you to target relevant content to each individual customer based on their past behavior on your site.
This is a tool that ensures that all your customer acquisition efforts are spent in the right direction so you get the best results for your business.
When creating a new audience, you can either choose from Shopify’s pre-built audiences or select Customize to create your own. Pre-built audiences are based on common customer segments (for example, people who have made at least three purchases) or specific products that customers have purchased (for example, people who have purchased all of these products).
You can also create an audience in just a few clicks using the new Audience Builder tool. Just log in with your Shopify store and select your criteria; then it’ll automatically create an audience of qualified buyers who fit those parameters. You can filter by gender, age range, location, and behavior such as purchasing or browsing sessions.
You can also create custom audiences based on lists from your own data warehouse (like Mailchimp or Constant Contact), or from third-party data providers like Salesforce Pardot, HubSpot, and Datorama.
How does Shopify Audiences help your business?
1. Better channel attribution
Shopify has set up a new attribution model that is resilient to the changes in the user-tracking regulations set by the privacy laws. This will help businesses understand which of the sources in their multichannel and omnichannel sales strategies are helping drive traffic as well as conversions to the store.
Shopify Audiences has transparency and trust as its fundamentals. So, when an order is placed, if the order email matches any customer in your audience, the order will be attributed to Shopify Audiences. These orders are only counted as long as you’re actively running ads using an audience.
It also helps you recognize unrelated orders; when a customer purchases a product due to other paid or organic marketing unrelated to Shopify Audiences.
It is very important to understand the effectiveness of any marketing effort put in by your business to determine what should be done next to reap the best results; this could either show you’re in the right direction or the need to pivot immediately.
2. Uncover new audience segments
Shopify Audiences uses artificial intelligence to uncover new audience segments based on your existing customers, products, and traffic sources. You can then target them with relevant content in the Shopify store, email marketing campaigns, and more. These segments depend on demographics like age and gender, location, and interests.
This can be done by leveraging Shopify Plus data, or by using a combination of your own and third-party data sources.
Let's say you assumed your ideal demographics to be adults of the age group 24-35 years. With better attribution, you get a better insight into the actual demographics of your store and realize that most sales were done by women of the age group 30-40 years. Using this data you can now make required changes to your targeted ads that are relevant to the actual age group of your customers.
You can also combine this data with information from third-party sources like Google Analytics (GA) or Facebook Ads (FA) to find people who recently visited your site but didn’t convert during the initial visit.
3. Identify new opportunities - new markets, locations, and/or co-categories
The ability to identify new markets is one of the most powerful capabilities of Shopify Audiences. This can be done by using a combination of product attributes, customer attributes, and even location data. When you combine all three, you can identify new markets with very high confidence.
For example, if you have a clothing brand that sells dresses, but doesn’t sell swimwear, you can use Shopify Audiences to identify people who have bought dresses but not swimwear as potential customers for your soon-to-launch swimwear line.
And if you expand your search to include people who have bought both dresses and swimsuits in the past, then you’ll see a much larger audience that could be relevant to your business.
4. Re-engage high purchase intent consumers
Audiences allows you to create custom audiences based on whether a user visited your store or browsed products similar to yours and took specific actions on other competitor websites (e.g., clothing for teenage girls). This can help you reach new audiences that are likely to buy from you now or in the future.
For example, if someone has added an item from another website into their cart but didn't check out, then they could be considered as having "high purchase intent".
By targeting this audience with an ad for your own online store (or products similar), you could reach new customers who may not know about your business yet!
This allows you to show ads only to people who are most likely to convert into buyers. This is also particularly important because reaching the right people at the right time plays a huge role in conversion rates.
5. Reduce your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
When you're running a business, every penny counts. That's why it's so important to get the most bang for your buck.
The more qualified leads you receive, the less money you will spend on attracting new customers. By targeting your ideal customers with highly-tailored ads, you'll be able to reach more people who are likely to become customers, reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA), and increase your bottom line.
And with more visibility into what is really for you, you can double down on that channel primarily and optimize costs.
6. Boost customer retention
In eCommerce, it’s not just about getting new customers. You also need to keep the ones you have. And customer retention is always more cost-effective than customer acquisition.
Did you know that eCommerce revenue can be increased by 25 - 95% when your customer retention rate increases by a mere 5%?
Shopify Audiences helps you identify customers who might be at risk of churning and target them with personalized campaigns that encourage them to come back and shop again.
For example, if a customer hasn’t made a purchase in three months, they may be at risk of leaving your store without ever returning. With Shopify Audiences, you can create a list of people who haven’t purchased in the last three months and segment them into an audience called “Recent Churners” to target with a discount code or other incentive to return and try again.
Re-engaging with your existing base or high-intent buyers with the right strategy can get you closer to them, and build better relationships by understanding their channels of preference, thus improving your chances of better conversions.
Conclusion
Note that while this is an extensive algorithm backed by quality data, it still ensures buyer privacy and treats it as a priority. This means that merchants cannot simply download a list of the hashed emails exported from Shopify to target a competitor's list of customers. That’s not how it works. We’ll explore more about how Shopify Audiences works in the next section.
At present, Shopify Audiences only support Facebook and Instagram ads. However, Shopify has announced that they have plans to support all major ad platforms in the coming year.
Shopify's Audiences tool is an incredibly effective solution for online businesses that want to boost their sales. Usually, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of targeting potential customers and cuts down on wasted marketing efforts.
Shopify Audiences is a useful tool that helps your website cut through the noise, providing you with information about your prospective customers' interests and other details that you can use to tailor your marketing efforts.
You can reach out to us to help you get started with Shopify Audiences.
We help you bring your ideas to life with Shopify web design, development, marketing, and support services from experts. Our team of Shopify experts works with Shopify merchants like you to design the store that reflects the personality of your brand and caters to the functionalities you require.
Whether you want to revamp your existing design or build a new one from scratch, we will help you create a positive shopping experience on your Shopify store design.
Reach out to us at info@xgentech.net and we’ll help you build an effective Shopify store!
