0:00
[MUSIC PLAYING] COREY FERREIRA: We've positioned our store and products and we know who we're targeting. We now have the fundamental knowledge to begin determining where we'll be getting our traffic and how we'll be going about acquiring it. First things first, it's important to note that we want to send customers to our store, not visitors. So there's a difference. 100 targeted visitors to your store are better than 1,000 random visitors. Often I'll hear new store owners complain, hey, I got 80 visitors to my store and I got no sales.
0:31
What am I doing wrong? The first question I inevitably ask them is, where did those visitors come from? And most of the time I'll get an answer like, I don't know or from posting my store link on X. The problem is that we rely too much on the traffic metric to determine success when ultimately what matters most is figuring out where your traffic is coming from and if they're buying. So what I want to talk about is more customer acquisition than simply driving traffic.
0:58
There are a lot of ways to send traffic to your store but only a few ways to send people who are actually interested in what you're selling to your store. So here's a list of the common ways to get customers. Now, these aren't all the ways and places but it's a really good start. If you focus on just these and make it work, it's often enough. So where will you get your traffic from? So the first is paid advertising. So Facebook ads, Google search ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest ads, YouTube ads.
1:27
Influencer marketing. So finding influencers on Instagram, YouTube, or on a blog and have them promote your products to their audience. Affiliate marketing. So share a sale, a network of affiliate marketers, or creating your own referral program on your store. Content marketing. Your own blog, YouTube channel, podcast. You build up an audience and then you monetize it with your products.
1:50
Communities. Reddit, Facebook groups, and forums. Going through each of these acquisition strategies in detail would each be a several hour long course in themselves. And even after all that, you still might not get a sale. That's why I want to leave you with the most important thing you should take away from this module. Because every business and store is different, everyone is selling something different, everyone has different skills and abilities, you will need to figure things out.
2:18
And I don't mean that in a bad or negative way. I mean take all the things you learned today like positioning your product and finding a target customer and apply it your own way-- in a way that you think would work for your store. So how do you determine what will work? Well, by testing. Test channels, ads, strategies, offers, and products. There are a lot of resources and guides on the Shopify blog that will set you up with the basics of any strategy you're interested in as well as more in Shopify Academy.
2:47
However, ultimately, you will need to test it and adjust based on your results. Anything you try should be considered a test. It's also important to consider what you're willing to invest. If you're willing to invest your time, you need to be patient. So try their free methods, put in a lot of work, and go from there. Free methods of acquiring traffic and sales take a while before you see a result.
3:10
But they might not cost you much in terms of money. If you're willing to invest money, you might have more options. This is riskier but is likely the option that'll provide you the fastest results or at least the quickest feedback to determine whether or not what you're doing is going to work. If you're willing to start spending money to acquire traffic, how much do you start with? Well my recommendation for those who aren't looking to spend a lot but would like to test products is to use a break-even budget.
3:37
So this is a very conservative approach to budgeting for ads. It won't yield the best results but it might give you enough data or even enough sales to begin increasing the budget. For example, here's how we would determine a break-even budget for Facebook ads. So let's say we sell a pair of sunglasses for $55. They cost us $20 from our supplier including shipping leaving us with a $35 profit per sale. That means a break-even budget is $35 a day on Facebook.
4:06
If we can at least get one sale a day, we'll break even. And we won't make any money but we won't lose any money either. It might also tell us if the product or ad is working or not working without risking too much money early on. That's the break-even budget in a nutshell. Now let's apply all we've learned so far and begin talking about conversions and average order value in the next lesson.
4:29
I'll see you there. [MUSIC PLAYING]
