Learn how to build an ecommerce digital marketing strategy. This practical framework covers channels, measurement, and how to scale what works.
An ecommerce digital marketing strategy is a plan for how you’ll reach and convert ecommerce customers online. It covers marketing channels like SEO, email, paid advertising, and social media. The goal is to acquire new customers and convince them to make subsequent purchases.
As Morgan Cros, founder of umbrella brand Original Duckhead, says: “It’s all well and good to have a great product, but if no one knows about it, then you’re not going to go anywhere… because best known beats best product.”
This guide shares the four main pillars of an ecommerce digital marketing strategy. We’ll also cover emerging tactics like AI search, and how they influence ecommerce marketing campaigns.
What an ecommerce digital marketing strategy actually is
An ecommerce digital marketing strategy describes how an online store acquires and retains their target customers. It happens in a four-stage framework: attract, convert, retain, and optimize.
Channels you might use in an ecommerce digital marketing strategy include:
- Organic search or search engine optimization (SEO)
- SMS and email marketing
- Social media marketing, including influencer marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Loyalty reward programs
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Stage 1 — Attract: Reaching the right audiences
The first stage of the ecommerce digital marketing funnel focuses on attracting customers. The goal here is reach and impressions; not necessarily to reach the greatest number of people, but to reach the right audience who fits your buyer personas.
Start with audience research to find out which channels your target audience uses. TikTok might be in the mix if you’re reaching people aged 18 to 34, while Facebook is popular with older generations.
“You don’t need to find that perfect person every day,” says Neil Hoyne, chief strategist for data and measurement at Google, in a Shopify Masters interview. “You just need to be mindful as to what’s leading to slightly better people, and put a little bit more emphasis there.”
Below we’ll discuss the channels you might consider, with tools that reduce the operational overhead of running multichannel acquisition programs.
Organic channels: SEO, content, and AI search
Organic channels are free platforms that ecommerce brands use to reach their audience. Paid placements are usually available on these channels as well (for example, Meta ads on Facebook or Shopping ads on Google), but an organic strategy aims to reach potential customers there without investing in paid campaigns.
- Search engine optimization (SEO):Organic search is still the dominant discovery channel. It’s a long-term acquisition asset that compounds over time and lets you reach customers when they’re actively searching for you. Polysleep, for example, covers sleep-related topics on their blog.
- AI search:Tools likeChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are how one in five customers discover new products and brands. AI-referred traffic to Shopify stores grew eight times year over year. These AI-referred shoppers convert at almost 50% higher rates than those who come from organic search and spend 14% more.
In addition to the obvious budgetary savings, organic search results can lend credibility to your brand for the subset of shoppers who intentionally skip over the paid search results to get to the “real” ones.
“We spend next to nothing on advertising, like less than 1% of our revenue,” says Adam Wolfe, founder and CEO of Boost Auto. “We’ve never hired an SEO agency. We use Shopify, read a couple articles, and we are the number one in search for most of what we want.”
Paid channels: Search, social, and shopping
Paid channels let you define exactly who you want to reach and put money behind a campaign to reach them.
Shopify Audiences can help you power these campaigns by creating purchase-intent lists for Meta and Google campaigns. Skincare brand Bushbalm used it to drive 42% higher clickthrough rates. Cofounder David Gaylord said: “Shopify Audiences has consistently outperformed our best campaigns by 20%–30%. Sustained results across several three-week campaigns, and inflight ad performance measurement has helped us to invest in the right areas.”
Once you’ve built audience lists, target them through paid channels like:
- Paid search:Google Ads appear above organic search results. As Ace Reunis, founder of Threadheads, says in a Shopify Masters interview: “Google Shopping is a really powerful way of getting traffic, and it takes them to the product page, which is very close to conversion.”
- Paid social: Every major platform, including Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, has its own advertising tools that let ecommerce brands target users on the platform. Emarketer predicts advertisers will spend over $121 billion advertising on these US social networks in 2026.
- Shop Campaigns: Run pay-per-conversion acquisition campaigns across the Shop app and third-party platforms. “This is the best thing going in commerce acquisition,” says David Segal, cofounder of Firebelly Tea. “We’ve basically stopped using all other acquisition channels since joining Shop Campaigns because it’s so effective.”
Earned channels: Influencer and affiliate marketing
Influencer and affiliate marketing are scalable earned-media strategies for midmarket and enterprise brands. Emarketer reported they’re the fastest growing category, as 1 in 4 Americans discover new products through influencers.
Ramen brand immi included these earned channels as part of their ecommerce digital marketing strategy. They use Shopify Collabs to recruit and vet influencers. They also give ambassadors an affiliate code to earn commission on online sales they influence.
Immi has driven more than $200,000 in sales through Shopify Collabs. They’ve proved you don’t need celebrity endorsements for this channel to work: One creator with just over 10,000 Instagram followers became their highest-performing affiliate seller.
Stage 2 — Convert: Turning website traffic into buyers
At the conversion stage, your goal is to turn the traffic you’ve acquired into paying customers.
- Conversion rate:Benchmark yours against the average 2.74%. Track conversion rate by channel with Shopify Analytics to identify your best-performing channels and campaigns.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC):This ranges between $53 and $91, depending on your product category. Compare CAC against customer lifetime value (CLV) to determine whether you’re making any profit once you’ve paid to acquire each shopper.
Email and SMS automation for conversion
Email and SMS both offer a direct line of communication with subscribers who’ve opted in. Klaviyo puts the average email open rate at 31%—much higher than the average engagement rate of 0.48% on Instagram or 3.7% on TikTok.
Shopify Forms lets you build your email list through targeted website pop-ups. Those who opt in have a unified customer profile built to compile:
- Purchase history (both online and offline)
- Returns history
- Customer loyalty program participation
- Stores they’ve visited
- Email marketing campaigns they’ve opened
Use these profiles to segment customers, then send personalized outreachtomate the process. The Memo uses this to inform customers when their favorite items are back in stock
“With Shopify, we have one core system to capture customer information, run our website, process our orders—and have an extension of those capabilities with Shopify POS to serve our customers in-store,” says Wes Rodricks, head of ecommerce at The Memo.
“It’s seamless for our customers because they don’t have to provide us with additional information that they’ve already shared.”
Onsite conversion fundamentals
Optimize your ecommerce website so the traffic you’re driving there don’t get turned off by a poor user experience.
“Too many businesses spend too much money trying to fill their leaky bucket,” says Josh Garofalo, copywriter and founder of Sway Copy. “Right now, they get sales because they’re driving traffic to their online store. So, the best path to more sales must be more traffic, right?
“Maybe, but not always. If there are holes deeper in your funnel, it will pay to fix those first, and then drive a bunch of traffic into your funnel (or do both simultaneously).”
Run an ecommerce user experience (UX) audit to identify friction and conversion opportunities. That might mean:
- Optimizing product pages: Shoppers in Salsify’s 2026 consumer research say images, videos, pricing, availability, and customer ratings are the most important product page elements.
- Highlighting returns:While it may sound counterintuitive, 81% of customers actually read return policies before making a purchase.
- Offering one-page checkout: Some 17% of carts are abandoned because the checkout process was too long or complex. Shop Pay solves this problem. Everlane used it to reach record highs in checkout conversion rate; 15% of their audience in the first 30 days used Shop Pay at checkout.
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Stage 3 — Retain: Building repeat purchase and lifetime value
The first two stages of an ecommerce digital marketing strategy bring customers to your brand. The final two focus on retaining them, so you reach profitability quicker. Gorgias estimates that increasing your repeat customer base by 20% can increase revenue by up to 6%.
“You need to be mindful about what’s leading you to [repeat purchasers], and put a little bit more emphasis there and a little less emphasis on those people we know aren’t going to come back,” Neil says.
Post-purchase sequences and loyalty programs
Attentive’s 2026 Loyalty & Retention report found 88% of customers shopped with a new brand the previous quarter. Factors influencing their decision to become a loyal customer include:
- Post-purchase content:Attentive found 69% of shoppers think post-purchase content makes them feel more confident about their purchase. This includes user-generated content (UGC), photos, and care tips related to the item they’ve bought. Shopify Flow lets you automate these campaigns. They’re triggered when customers join a segment for that product.
- Loyalty programs: Some 18% of shoppers said exclusive loyalty offers were most likely to bring them back to shop again with a new brand. Lola’s Cupcakes integrates loyalty app Smile.io with Shopify POS to invite in-person shoppers to join. They’ve since added over 10,000 new members to their loyalty program.
- Shop App: Customers can track orders and repurchase within the Shop App, then check out using their vaulted credit card details inside Shop Pay. Customers who use both have a 57% higher repurchase rate when the Shop Buyer Network is in play.
Subscriptions and recurring revenue
Subscriptions encourage customers to make repeat purchases by automatically billing them for new orders on a set cadence. They’ve grown by 12.6% year over year, per Recurly’s 2026 “State of Subscriptions” report.
Magic Spoon implemented subscriptions after finding customers were experiencing “analysis paralysis” when trying to decide which flavors to choose. Their new subscription service lets customers pick multiple flavors to have delivered each month.
Working with Acadia, Magic Spoon ran an A/B test on the impact of subscriptions on product pages. Advertising the benefits of a subscription drove a 29% lift in opt-ins and 9% higher onsite conversion rates.
“It was a small test that had a huge impact,” says Ciara Lydon, ecommerce and digital product manager at Magic Spoon. “Even simple UI tweaks on Shopify can create outsized results.”
Stage 4 — Optimize: Measuring what works and improving it
It’s rare for customers to see your digital marketing campaigns and purchase immediately.
Salsify’s 2026 research shows that more than half of shoppers research two to three channels for everyday essentials. Over two-thirds webroom and research a product online before buying it in-store. This means last-touch attribution models can make campaigns appear more (or less) influential than they truly are.
Shed light on how customers behave after viewing each part of your ecommerce digital marketing campaign with both qualitative and quantitative data.
Quantitative data through UTM tracking and attribution
IAB’s “State of Data 2026” found 73% of marketers use attribution analysis to measure success. Yet advanced measurement consistently underperforms on the coverage, timeliness, trust, and efficiency required to measure return on investment (ROI).
The challenge: Customers are increasingly concerned about their privacy. Some take steps to safeguard their online activity, like blocking the cookies that website analytics tools rely on.
The Shopify marketing hub offers a unified view of campaigns, channels, and performance from a single admin. Use pixels, customer events, and UTM parameters to track exactly what customers do when they visit your site. This existing infrastructure reduces the complexity of multi-tool attribution setups.
Sidekick even helps make sense of the customer data you have. Snocks, for example, uses Sidekick to give four teams independent data access. They’ve cut report-building time by up to 98%.
Qualitative data through customer feedback
Voice of the customer fills in the gaps that analytics limitations expose.
Toothbrush brand Suri does this through feedback surveys. “We’ll ask in post-checkout surveys how people found us,” says Suri’s cofounder Mark Rushmore in a Shopify Masters interview. “This is important information from an attribution perspective.”
| Funnel stage | Question to ask | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | What were you searching for when you found us? | Whether your content marketing matches search intent, and whether you’re ranking for relevant terms |
| Consideration | What questions do you still have about this product? | Missing product information that’s blocking purchase decisions |
| Purchase | What made you decide to buy today? | The final trigger (promo, urgency, review, or restock) to replicate what converts |
| Loyalty | What would bring you back to shop with us again? | Specific reasons for churn: Price, product fit, competitor switch, or simply forgot |
Josh Garafolo adds another advantage to regular feedback: “I wish more people understood that you cannot do effective conversion copywriting if you do not conduct thorough primary research on both voice of customer and existing customer behavior onsite.”
How to choose channels based on where your business is
Not every marketing channel is the right fit for every ecommerce business. Evaluate your customer journey map, profit margins, and average order value (AOV) to shortlist platforms to try.
Wilson Hung, former director of growth at Kettle & Fire, puts this into context: “For paid search, what are the search volumes? What’s your average order value? What are the margins on your product?” Wilson says in a Shopify Masters interview. “Depending on that, maybe paid search isn’t the best option. Maybe you need to go for lower customer acquisition cost channels.
“It worked for us. But I wouldn’t just blindly approach it the same way we did. You’ve got to apply the same systematic process to each channel to prioritize what to work on, and then test it from there.”
Building a multichannel mix that reduces platform risk
Relying on just one channel exposes you to algorithm changes, cost spikes, or policy shifts. Efforts spread across email, paid social, organic, or affiliate channels mean no single platform event can dry up acquisition or customer retention overnight.
“We can’t have all our eggs in one basket,” says Dan Demsky, cofounder and CEO of Unbound Merino, in a Shopify Masters interview. “We’re always looking: Where are the influencers? Where are the affiliates? How do we figure out TikTok? Is Pinterest worth trying?”
Digital channels aren’t the whole picture, though. For some brands, physical retail functions as its own acquisition channel that operates independently of any digital platform’s rules.
Kenny Haisfield, founder of Kenny Flowers, found that the brand’s Charleston flagship store became a new customer engine in its own right: “We’ve found that 80% of in-store orders come from new customers. This provides a valuable alternative to traditional digital marketing channels while allowing us to create strong, meaningful first impressions and brand connection through personal interaction.”
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Ecommerce digital marketing strategy FAQ
What are the most effective digital marketing channels for ecommerce?
The most effective digital marketing channel depends on where your target customers are. Wilson Hung and Jack Meredith, who manage growth at Kettle & Fire, say in a Shopify Masters interview: “You’ve got to apply the same systematic process to each channel to prioritize what to work on, and then test it from there.”
How much should an ecommerce business spend on digital marketing?
Gartner found the average business spends 7.8% of its annual revenue on marketing in 2026, up marginally from 7.7% in 2025. However, the same survey found that 56% of marketing managers think their budget is too low to deliver their 2026 strategy.
How often should you update your ecommerce digital marketing strategy?
How often you update your digital marketing strategy depends on your channel mix, growth stage, and how fast your industry moves. Set a baseline cadence for your context, then use off-cycle reviews whenever a channel’s performance, cost, or platform mechanics deviate.
How is AI changing ecommerce digital marketing?
A 2025 Shopify Merchant Survey found 38% of brands use AI for their marketing initiatives.* Gartner also found that AI-ready organizations spend 1.1% more of their annual revenue on marketing.
AI adoption is also on the rise for consumers: 1 in 4 US shoppers discover new brands and products through AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.
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