How Is Shopify Elevating Its Marketing Game with Audiences V2.2?

Shopify’s Winter ’24 Editions highlights significant enhancements in digital marketing for Shopify Merchants, now offering an array of marketing tools for brands to sharpen their strategies and engage with their audience more effectively. How are Shopify’s new marketing tools transforming the marketing landscape?

Shopify Audiences

Shopify Audiences empowers brands with custom audience lists, utilising Shopify’s commerce customer insights to drive conversions and reduce acquisition costs significantly. The Shopify Audiences algorithm utilises insights from the entire buyer’s journey, from initial browsing to checkout or cart abandonment.

This process gathers valuable data on potential customers at the cusp of entering your sales funnel. By integrating this information with specific knowledge about your store and products, Shopify Audiences creates highly relevant target lists. These lists are then seamlessly integrated into your existing advertising campaigns, enhancing their effectiveness and lowering cost per acquisition.

So how does Shopify Audiences do this?

Shopify has combined forces with social advertising platforms to provide stronger results. Shopify’s scale and volume of commerce activity, as well as their server side access to every Shopify store on their platform, gives them unparalleled data which is stronger and more precise than what social platforms have access to. Combine this with the data fed in by social advertising platforms, and you can target ads more effectively, reaching potential buyers with precision and efficiency.

1. First Party Data Utilisation: First party data is the information a Merchant collects directly from their customers and audiences. This data is gathered from the store’s own channels and sources, including mobile apps, websites, social media, SMS, email, and more. Shopify can now effectively feed that data back to social platforms so that social platforms can provide better targeting of new customers. Read more about First Party Data here.
2. Shopify Ecosystem Growth: By increasing more relevant potential customers, social platforms make more advertising revenue and Shopify merchants increase relevant traffic and sales.
3. Enhanced Ad Targeting: Because of more accurate lookalike audiences created through Shopify Audiences, brands can expect to gain unprecedented access to more accurate data with the brand being put in front of users who have a high likelihood of becoming customers.
4. Mutual Success: More accurate advertising data resulting in social platforms increasing revenue inturn, Shopify merchants increase sales resulting in a win, win scenario.

So now we know what Shopify Audiences is, and how they are using their scale and volume of commerce activity combined with data fed in by social advertising platforms, we have a recipe for more successful marketing campaigns. What are the key features and benefits that might make you want to adopt Shopify’s Audiences and other marketing tools?

Custom Audience Lists

The Shopify Audiences algorithm identifies millions of customer behaviour patterns to match a customer’s intent with the unique attributes of a merchant’s store. These signals are used to create audience lists of potential customers who are selected based on how likely they are to convert. These lists enable ad targeting based on unique insights about buyer behaviours, your store, and your products.

Potential Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

Demonstrated potential to halve customer acquisition costs on advertising platforms, maximising ad performance. This will need to be tested further as we are only hearing success stories from Shopify at the moment.

It’s worth highlighting the small print:

“Ad campaigns using the latest version of Shopify Audiences for targeting have demonstrated as much as 50% lower customer acquisition costs, compared to campaigns relying solely on ad platform targeting. Results may vary.”

Comprehensive Marketing Funnel Engagement

Advertise to customers at every stage of their purchasing journey through more effective marketing funnel engagement, in turn enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. We take a holistic view when it comes to marketing strategy, looking at every entry and touch point in a potential customer journey to provide best in class marketing campaigns.

Integration with Key Marketing Channels

Shopify’s marketing tools seamlessly connect stores with all the major marketing channels such as Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat, simplifying campaign management, and reducing integration costs. Bringing all the insights into one easy to view dashboard.

* Currently this is only available to Shopify Plus merchants in the US. This custom advertising solution is powered by millions of commerce insights only available on Shopify, offering a significant advantage over alternative ecommerce platforms, allowing the scaling of advertising efforts and reduced acquisition costs.

Conclusion and New Shopify Marketing Tools

By leveraging the strength of first-party data and crafting custom audiences, Shopify is at the forefront of facilitating a more effective data exchange with major social advertising platforms. This initiative not only enhances the precision of targeted advertising but also fosters a symbiotic relationship where social platforms can direct more relevant traffic back to Shopify. Consequently, this empowers Shopify merchants to amplify their sales through more refined and impactful marketing strategies. This strategic data play highlights Shopify’s commitment to drive innovation in the digital marketing space, setting a new benchmark for how data can be shared and utilised.

We will be keeping a close eye on access to these marketing features for merchants on different plans, as well as regional rollout.

Shopify has a range of new marketing tools and upgrades featured in Winter ’24 editions, which are worth mentioning, and we will be following up with some more focused articles on the following tools:

Shopify Collabs

Shopify has introduced new features in its Shopify Collabs tool, including the capability to manage creator applications in bulk, allowing users to search, sort, and filter applicants to streamline the approval process. It also offers a feature to organise creator connections in a single table, with sorting options by affiliate tier, tags, and sales driven.

Shop App

Shopify’s Shop app upgrades, now known as Shop Campaigns, offer expanded channels including the web, Meta and Google to attract new customers at a fixed cost per acquisition, alongside enhanced estimates and analytics for scaling campaigns, driving new customer growth.

Integrated Reviews

The Shopify reviews upgrade facilitates synchronisation of ratings and reviews across multiple platforms such as the online store, Shop app, and Shopify Collective, with support from partners like Yotpo, Loox, Judge.me, Okendo, and Stamped.io, enabling seamless syncing of replies to reviews across channels, and introducing a Verified by Shop badge for reviews in the online store to enhance trust.