Dropshipping Marketing Strategy: 12 Insanely Effective Tips to Boost Your Sales

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Want to boost your dropshipping marketing strategy and make more sales for your online store? Then you’ve come to the right place.

Ecommerce is massive, with an expected $4.8 trillion total this year. In such a booming industry, dropshipping is one of the most appealing ways for new businesses to get into eCommerce.

While there is loads of potential to build a successful dropshipping business, it’s also incredibly competitive. If you want to own a thriving online store, there’s so much more to it than just having a great product.

You need to have a strong dropshipping marketing plan in place.

In fact, because you’re not in charge of product fulfillment and production, dropshipping is pretty much entirely about marketing. 

Follow our guide below for everything you need to know about developing a winning dropshipping marketing strategy. Get these tactics right, and you’ll be able to reach more customers and outsell the competition.

What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping refers to a fulfillment method in eCommerce, where the online store doesn’t actually hold or own any products. Instead, a dropshipping store uses a third-party supplier for their products and has these delivered straight to the customer with each purchase.

This is an attractive business model for many because you don’t have to keep stock or buy any inventory upfront. Unlike traditional forms of retail, dropshipping businesses don’t own any of their inventory. Dropshipping also allows you to test products easily, and it’s relatively simple to start a dropshipping business without much capital.

Why is Dropshipping Marketing So Important?

You need to have a great marketing strategy for your dropshipping store to be successful. This is because you’re probably not the only person selling your products online, so you need to make your store stand out. Marketing will help customers trust your business, which can also be tricky for dropshipping stores that sell other people’s products.

If you get into dropshipping, you won’t be directly involved in the products or the fulfillment. This means marketing your business is the only thing that you have complete control over to help you grow your store.

 

12 Essential Dropshipping Marketing Strategies

Looking for ways to get more customers and sales for your dropshipping business? Here are 12 strategies that should make a big difference.

  1. Add Customer Reviews and Ratings to Your Site
  2. Focus On Retargeting Customers
  3. Focus On SEO Content Marketing
  4. Utilize Email Marketing
  5. Develop a Clear Social Media Marketing Strategy
  6. Run a Giveaway
  7. Find Your Relevant Communities Online and Join Them
  8. Consider Video Marketing
  9. Attract More Customers With Paid Advertising
  10. Use Upselling and Cross-Marketing to Increase Your Sales
  11. Know How to Recover Abandoned Carts
  12. Make Sure Your Customers Come Back for More

1. Add Customer Reviews and Ratings to Your Site

One of the biggest challenges that any dropshipping business faces is building trust with its audience. Customers are often skeptical when they find a new dropshipping store, and they need to be sure about the quality of the products before making a decision to buy. This is why clearly visible reviews and testimonials are so important.

Reviews help customers to build trust, and having positive reviews available makes it much easier for customers to quickly make the decision to buy.

If you’re just starting your dropshipping store, then you can always take snapshots of customer feedback from your supplier’s store, and post this on your website. This is something that many dropshipping store owners from Aliexpress do. Once you’ve been able to generate a few great reviews of your own, then you can replace this snapshot with your own review section.

Reviews

2. Focus on Retargeting Customers

98% of visitors to your dropshipping site won’t make a purchase on their first visit. Instead of just hoping for sales from the remaining 2%, and focusing your marketing efforts on gaining new traffic, you should be retargeting all of the visitors who have been on your site.

Retargeting is when you display relevant ads and marketing content to visitors who have been on your site but didn’t take any action. These ads appear on other websites after visitors have left your store. After visitors have been retargeted, they should have a 70% better chance of becoming customers on your site.

Successful dropshipping retargeting needs to use carefully created display ads. These display ads should have a clear retargeting headline/hook that draws the customer in. This could include something like “Still interested in buying me?” with an image of the product the visitor was looking at.

remarketing ad
Source

3. Focus on SEO Content Marketing

Blogging is one of the best marketing strategies for any dropshipping business to be worth it. Sure, it takes a bit of time and effort, but it also offers excellent ROI. Blogging is a low-cost marketing tactic, and when your blog posts start to rank, you will be able to send loads more traffic to your dropshipping store.

Besides being able to offer inspirational content to help your target audience make a purchase, blog content marketing helps your search engine optimization (SEO) results. This is essential because having good SEO results means more free traffic to your dropshipping business, which means more sales.

To get started with blogging, you’ll need to write helpful, insightful, and interesting posts that your target audience will want to read. Then you can use your posts to send more traffic to your dropshipping store.

Great blog content should include things like guides, roundup posts, and anything that your potential customers are interested in reading. For example, if you run a dropshipping business that sells surfing products, you could write a blog post on how to set up a surfboard or a guide to the coolest surfing tricks.

dropshipping blog

How Do You Optimize Your Dropshipping Blog for SEO?

To win the search results, you will need to know which keywords are most important for your dropshipping strategy. You need to make sure that you write each blog post targeting keywords that your target audience is searching in Google. You’re probably wondering how to do this, right?

There are plenty of great SEO tools out there to help you with keyword research. These include Ahrefs, Moz, Ubersuggest, and Google Keyword Planner to name a few.

Different tools each have their own keyword research processes, but they all follow the same general idea. You type in a keyword that relates to your business, such as “surfing equipment” or “surf gear”. You can then access a list of keywords related to this keyword. Choose keywords with a high search volume that match your dropshipping business, and incorporate these into your website.

A good strategy for dropshipping marketing is to use long-tail keywords. For example, instead of just focusing on “surf gear” you could include “best surf gear for beginners”. These keywords are more specific and are more likely to be what your target customers are typing.

Make sure that you choose keywords with the right user intent. This means, your keywords should be things that potential customers will be searching for (so don’t target “surf lessons” if you don’t offer them).

Some other important SEO strategies to boost your dropshipping store include getting backlinks, optimizing your meta titles and descriptions), and ensuring your dropshipping website is fast and offers a good user experience. You also need to make sure that your product descriptions are optimized for the right keywords.

 

4. Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is another highly effective dropshipping marketing strategy that offers a great return on investment. Email marketing should form a major part of any online shop marketing strategy because it can be used to:

  • Retain customers
  • Inspire new customers to make a purchase
  • Highlight special offers and promotions
  • Turn abandoned carts into sales (more on this later)
  • And more!

Start by sending out a regular email newsletter. You can set up forms, popups, and other lead generation tactics to attract subscribers. These email subscribers will now enter the first stages of your purchasing funnel.

You can use your newsletter to send out your regular blog content, news updates, as well as any special offers and promotions that you’re running.

A good tactic is to send out a welcome offer to new subscribers straight away. This is one of the fastest ways to get them to become customers. With the right email marketing tool, you can also create custom email lists based on your customers’ past actions. This allows you to send relevant updates and special offers to the right customers.

newsletter signup

For example, if you sold swimwear to customers in summer, you can send them a special offer for relevant winter clothes when the seasons change. If someone bought a surfboard from your dropshipping store, you can follow up with a promotion on surfboard accessories that you sell.

These email communications can all be automated. This helps you run successful dropshipping marketing strategies on autopilot, saving you loads of time.

eCommerce email

5. Develop a Clear Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing can be one of the most effective ways to promote your dropshipping store. However, social media is also a highly competitive space and you need to create your social media marketing strategy wisely.

Start by choosing the best channels for your dropshipping business, and focus on these. It’s best to start small, focus on two or three channels, and give these channels the attention they deserve. For dropshipping, visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram work well to highlight your products.

Pinterest eCommerce

Create clear social media goals, and choose the platforms that best support this. Posting short video content on social media, like Instagram Reels or TikTok videos, is an excellent way to show your products in action. You should also try to gather as much user-generated content and social proof as possible. This will help your dropshipping brand to build up more credibility and trust. Working with brand ambassadors or influencers can be a good way to get this rolling.

@vessi

If only it were this easy to get to the beach. Thank you @joshschorle for this epic unboxing! ? #vessi #unboxing #waterproofshoes #beach #fyp

? original sound – Vessi

6. Run a Giveaway

Because of the dropshipping business model of not having any stock on hand, many sellers don’t consider giveaways. However, a well-organized giveaway can help you to attract way more potential customers and traffic to your store.

There are many different types of social promotions that you can run. These include things like photo contests, hashtag contests, sweepstakes, and more. With the right type of contest, you could boost traffic to your store, increase social engagement or followers, promote a specific product, generate a bigger email marketing list, boost brand awareness, and more.

To run a successful giveaway, you will need to choose a suitable prize. This should be one of the best-selling products that you offer to help you attract enough of the right participants. Once the contest is over, you can send all of your entrants a discount code. This will probably result in a lot of conversions.

To achieve a successful dropshipping giveaway, you will need to make sure that you use the right social promotions tool.

Giveaway

7. Find Your Relevant Communities Online and Join Them

If you want to reach your customers, then you need to know where they are. One of the best ways to do this is to join online communities where your customers exist and connect with them. Dropshipping stores usually focus on a specific niche, so joining relevant communities will help you to find your exact customers.

Some great places to look would be Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, or regular networking events. These are excellent spaces to answer your audience’s questions, get your brand out there, and build up authority within your niche.

To market your dropshipping store on these platforms, reach out to your target audience and answer any questions they might have that relate to your dropshipping niche. You can use your answer to strategically link to your site. Just remember not to be overly promotional here. These platforms are most effective when you offer genuine value to your audience. Try to build trust, and establish authority within your niche.

Why Does Your Online Store Need a Niche?

Pretty much any dropshipping online store is focused on a niche. Having a very clear niche helps you build an audience, and find your exact customers. If you aim too wide, it will be tricky to develop a clear marketing strategy that appeals to the right potential customers. Having a well-defined niche also makes it easier to develop better products that your audience will be interested in.

When putting together your dropshipping store and marketing plan, try to make your niche as specific as possible. This will make it much easier for your business to target and attract customers. Even if it’s a small niche, you’d rather have a larger share of a small market, than no share of a massive market.

 

8. Consider Video Marketing

84% of consumers are convinced to buy a product after watching a brand’s video. Video marketing is one of the most powerful ways to attract your audience’s attention and get more people interested in what you sell. This is particularly relevant when it comes to physical products.

You can use video to show how your dropshipping products can be used in real life. Post videos of the products in use, create how-to videos, and use video to offer a more realistic impression of what the product actually looks like. This will help to engage your audience and build trust.

Your video can be shared on your social media channels, posted to your YouTube account, or used in ad campaigns. You can even get other content creators to unbox or review your products through videos. This will help you generate some important social proof.

9. Attract More Customers With Paid Advertising

Getting a lot of organic traffic is hard. Paid advertising can make a huge difference to your dropshipping marketing and sales. Not only do ads make your products more visible, but they allow you to target a very specific audience of potential customers.

Paid advertising on social media offers some of the best possibilities for reaching your exact target audience. You can run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads that are perfectly customized to your audience, goals, and budget. You can choose your audience’s interests, location, age, and more to make sure that your ads are seen by the right people.

A great ad strategy for dropshipping is to run ads with a discount code. This gives your audience more of a reason to visit your store and make a purchase. Targeting ads to your contact list is also a good strategy because it’s easier to sell to your subscribers who have already shown an interest in your business.

discount code

10. Use Upselling and Cross-Marketing to Increase Your Sales

The cost of acquiring new customers and generating new sales is a lot higher than upselling to existing customers. There’s also a much better chance of selling to people who already trust your brand, than selling to a completely new audience.

Upselling and cross-marketing allow you to make the most of every dropshipping transaction. These processes encourage impulse buys, which can boost your revenue in a big way.

To do upselling or cross-selling for your dropshipping store, you should offer recommended products to customers before they check out. For example, if a customer adds a tv to their cart, have a surround sound system and tv mount appear as recommended products. You could also offer a “customers who bought this product also like…” section to get your customers buying more. The customer has already made the decision to buy, so there’s a good chance that they will be happy to increase their purchase.

Amaon upselling

11. Know How to Recover Abandoned Carts

Being able to turn abandoned carts into sales will make a huge difference to your dropshipping revenue.

Many different factors could cause customers to abandon their carts. This could include things like having too many steps during your checkout process, not offering enough information, or having delivery costs that are too high. Optimizing the checkout process with short, easy steps and clearly offering all the information your customers need will make a big difference.

Another useful strategy is to make use of abandoned cart notifications. Things like push notifications, automated abandoned cart emails, or SMS notifications can help you recover carts and make more sales.

When a customer gets as far as the checkout page, they are an interested buyer. This means that sending relevant abandoned cart notifications can be incredibly effective at getting the customer to return and complete the sale.

abandoned cart email
Source

12. Make Sure Your Customers Come Back for More

Dropshipping is still a business that many consumers don’t fully trust. The absolute best thing that you can do to improve your reputation and grow your dropshipping store is to offer an excellent customer experience. This will result in more referrals, better word-of-mouth marketing, and more existing customers coming back for more purchases.

There are many different ways that you can achieve this. First of all, make sure that fulfillment is as fast and efficient as possible. Try to get the products shipped as quickly as possible, and offer a delivery fee that your customers are happy with. Once the product has been delivered, follow up with customers, asking for a review or their feedback.

Successful dropshipping requires a good supplier. If you aren’t working with someone who doesnt offer high-quality products and fast deliveries, then your dropshipping business will struggle to take off.

Wishpond_Newsletter

Conclusion

The dropshipping model may seem like a really simple way to get into eCommerce. However, getting dropshipping the right way requires a lot of dedication and the right marketing tactics. There are so many dropshipping businesses that fail because they aren’t able to market their stores properly.

If you want to get in on the rapidly growing eCommerce market without having to keep any stock, then dropshipping is for you. Follow the marketing tactics that we’ve listed above, and you will be on the right path for setting your dropshipping business up for success.

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