Ecommerce Marketing Guide for Online Stores (2026)

Ecommerce marketing is as much an exercise in relationship-building as it is part of your sales strategy. 

“There’s a massive difference between someone who buys your product and someone who invests in your brand. The first might come back if they like what they bought. The second becomes part of your story, and tells that story for you,” says Kailey Bradt, CEO of Sonsie Skin. 

Loyal customers like these impact your marketing efforts. For Sonsie Skin, word-of-mouth marketing has become a major strategy in their ecommerce marketing efforts. 

Ahead, learn about the core ecommerce marketing channels, strategies to drive repeat purchases, how to measure performance, and how AI is changing marketing for ecommerce businesses. 

What is ecommerce marketing?

Ecommerce marketing is the process of attracting potential customers to your online store through different channels and strategies. 

Traffic, conversion, and retention: the three pillars

The three pillars of ecommerce marketing are: traffic, conversion, and retention. Attract customers by driving website traffic, convert that traffic into sales, and retain customers long-term. 

For example, a shopper discovers your brand through a TikTok video (traffic), lands on a product page that answers their questions and makes checkout easy (conversion), and receives a follow-up email that brings them back for a second purchase (retention). 

Ecommerce marketing vs. traditional marketing

Traditional commerce marketing uses offline tactics like print ads, television ads, direct mail, radio, and billboards to capture attention. In contrast, ecommerce marketing uses a combination of digital and in-person strategies to engage customers and create lasting customer relationships.

Build your ecommerce marketing plan before picking channels

Worldwide ecommerce revenue is expected to reach $3.86 trillion in 2026. Give your business the best chance to tap into that revenue by first completing an ecommerce marketing plan. A successful ecommerce marketing plan addresses the ecommerce marketing tactics and strategies you plan to use for your online business.

• Set goals tied to your business stage
• Allocate your budget across paid, owned, and earned channels
• Use Shopify’s Marketing page to plan and track campaigns

Set goals tied to your business stage

Aside from tracking online sales from your ecommerce website, create and track goals based on your business stage. If possible, attach monetary key performance indicators (KPIs) to each stage.

Allocate your budget across paid, owned, and earned channels

On average, marketing budgets are expected to reach 7.8% of company revenue by the end of 2026. In your marketing plan, determine where you want that budget to go. The amount you allocate across paid, owned, and earned channels and the resulting ratio will depend on your business. 

One strategy is the 70-20-10 approach, where 70% of your marketing budget goes to proven channels, 20% to emerging channels, and 10% to fresh ideas. Coca-Cola frames it as: 70% established, 20% new, and 10% next.

• Paid ads are placed across social media, search engine results pages, video channels (like YouTube), and websites. 
• Owned channels (SMS, email) are completely controlled by you, as the brand. You’ll pay for platform fees, but these are not categorized as paid marketing channels.
• Earned channels (PR) are media opportunities, such as placements in articles or magazines. 

For accessory brand Dagne Dover, direct, non-paid channels ended up being the best fit for the brand.

“Over the past year and a half to two years, we’ve really taken down our paid spend, and the reason is simple: The return on investment (ROI) was just unjustifiable compared to our more organic, direct methods,” says Founder Melissa Mash. 

Use Shopify’s Marketing page to plan and track campaigns

If you use Shopify, measure marketing performance and create campaigns from the Growth section in your Shopify admin. 

To create a campaign, navigate to the Growth page in your Shopify admin. Select Create campaign, give the campaign a name, and edit or create shareable links. Set up an auto-match rule and add the traffic parameters you’d like to track. Add campaign activities.

In Growth > Campaigns, you’ll be able to monitor and track campaign activity.

Core ecommerce marketing channels

Ecommerce marketing success hinges on finding the right marketing channels for your business, and the continuous testing, growth, and iteration of strategy across those channels. 

“The way I look at marketing is, you’re walking down a hallway with a million doors. There are a million opportunities, and you’ve just got to nudge the door open with your foot. See, is there something in there? Nope. Just keep going. You have to never stop trying,” says Unbound Merino Founder Dan Demsky.

• SEO and content marketing: the compound channel
• Email and SMS marketing: your highest-ROI owned channel
• Paid search and social ads: fast traffic, measurable returns
• Social commerce: selling where your customers already are
• Influencer and affiliate marketing with Shopify Collabs

SEO and content marketing: the compound channel

Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality content to attract new customers and engage with current ones. For Revenge Of, that means delivering valuable blog content. 

“I correspond with our customers, like, two or three days a week. We’re also moving a little bit more into a blog-hosted atmosphere instead of trying to cram a bunch into our newsletters,” says Revenge Of Cofounder Joe Myers. 

Activities like search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research help grow traffic to these blog posts, with the goal of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERP). On your ecommerce website, optimize product pages and product descriptions with keywords.

While organic marketing takes a long time to be effective, the results pay off in the long run. For example, Epic Gardening started as a media company, and the brand now has a thriving ecommerce store built on the helpful blog content they continue to publish.

Email and SMS marketing: your highest-ROI owned channel

Litmus’s 2025 State of Email report found that 35% of businesses see return on investment (ROI) of 36:1 with email marketing. Email marketing is an owned channel, which means that brands have control over how content is distributed. This differs from social media channels, for example, which are driven by algorithms largely out of one’s control.

Examples of email types include: 

• Welcome emails 
• Promotional emails 
• Newsletters 
• Email campaigns 
• Product education 
• Thank you emails 
• Win back emails 
• Abandoned cart emails 
• Surveys and feedback 

SMS marketing is the practice of engaging with customers via text message. Like email marketing, it’s a high-ROI channel. For example, healthy soda brand Olipop made $30,000 in sales within 15 minutes of sending a text announcing a new campaign.

Paid search and social ads: fast traffic, measurable returns

Paid advertising acts like a tap: turn the faucet on, and the leads come in. Turn it off, and they’ll stop. Brands pay for paid ads that reach their target audience across platforms like display, search, social media, video, and retail. 

For example, Revenge Of sponsors products on Google search engine results pages so that they show up to browsers searching for key terms that match the products they offer. 

Similarly, social media advertising shows targeted campaigns to users who match criteria you set. Successful paid advertising strategies use creative campaigns backed by customer research, clear goals, and targeted budgets. You’ll use the information gained from ad performance to iterate and improve on campaigns going forward. 

Tip: Shop Campaigns offers a pay-per-conversion model, while traditional ad platforms offer an upfront spend model.

Social commerce: selling where your customers already are

A social commerce strategy uses social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to connect with followers and make sales. As 69.9% of the world’s population uses social media, it’s a powerful way to interact with customers where they already hang out online.

Customer engagement is a key component of social media marketing, so your strategy should encourage customers to interact with your brand online.

For example, the Rocky’s Matcha hashtag on TikTok shows customers making matcha, with the brand’s cobalt blue tin easily identifiable in each video thumbnail. 

Similar ideas apply to other channels like Instagram and YouTube. For example, Epic Gardening shares helpful content to their 4.1 million followers on YouTube, encouraging followers to share their own gardening photos to the community feed.

Influencer and affiliate marketing with Shopify Collabs

Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are effective channels no matter the size of your brand. To determine the best influencer and affiliate channels, Unbound Merino founder Dan Demsky takes an iterative approach.

“We’re always looking: where are the influencers, where are the affiliates, how do we figure out TikTok, is Pinterest worth trying,” says Dan. “Google’s really good for us. Influencer and affiliate. Some of these with pretty good success. They’re not as big as Meta, but pretty successful,” he says. 

Once shoppers make it to Unbound Merino’s website, they’ll see thousands of positive reviews that act as glowing customer testimonials. For example, the brand’s classic men’s crewneck tee has 4.8 stars resulting from more than 4,000 reviews. 

Affiliate marketing is when creators recommend products and link to them from their own content with a unique link called an affiliate link. If a shopper clicks the link and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. This user-generated content (UGC) is effective because it feels more authentic and comes from creators an audience trusts. 

Ecommerce marketing strategies that drive repeat purchases

Boost sales by bringing back your most valuable customers. Marketing strategies that drive repeat purchases include:

• Life cycle automations
• Customer segmentation for personalized campaigns
• Loyalty and retention beyond the first sale

Life cycle automations 

Use customer data to identify what part of the life cycle they’re in, and automate flows to bring them back. This includes welcome, abandoned cart, and win-back email flows.

Customer segmentation for personalized campaigns

As technology continues to advance, 73% of marketers believe that personalization will also improve. 

Segment your customers into groups to build a personalized ecommerce marketing campaign for each segment. Ezra Firestone, founder of digital marketing brand Smart Marketer, shares how powerful a personalized marketing approach can be. 

“If you understand who this group of people is and what set of experiences they have, you can relate to them through shared experiences,” says Ezra.

Loyalty and retention beyond the first sale

Build customer loyalty by offering a customer loyalty program. These types of programs provide loyalty rewards to shoppers each time they complete activities like following a brand on social media or making a purchase. 

Other, non-reward-based tactics include building online and offline communities around your brand. 

For example, Revenge Of Cofounders Jeff Eyser, Joe Myers, and Joe Kuntz use insights from their community to improve their ecommerce store. “We are very in touch with our community and what they’re into and what they’re reading. If we take that and apply it then to our ecom, we’ve seen a lot of great results,” says Joe Myers. 

How AI is changing ecommerce marketing

The market for the use of AI in marketing is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% from 2025 to 2030. It’s estimated at $35 billion in 2026, expected to reach $82.2 billion by 2030. 

Marketing tools powered by AI, like Shopify Audiences and Shopify Sidekick, are improving personalization and workflows for ecommerce businesses. 

AI-powered audience targeting with Shopify Audiences

Shopify Audiences is a tool for Shopify Plus users that uses Shopify algorithms to generate custom audience lists for precise ad targeting.

Shopify Audiences analyzes purchase behavior across the United States and Canada to build a list of shoppers likely to purchase from your store. Shopify automatically exports that list to your digital advertising account to use as a custom audience for marketing campaigns.

Using Shopify Sidekick and automation to scale content and campaigns

Shopify Sidekick can create messaging and email campaigns for you, including creating or editing email text, editing email design, generating images, and recommending customer segments. 

It also supports Campaign Autopilot, which uses your products, customers, and sales data to recommend marketing actions.

How to measure ecommerce marketing performance

Ensure you’re meeting customer expectations, hitting your marketing and performance goals, and growing your business by measuring ecommerce marketing performance. 

Key metrics

Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include: 

• Average order value (AOV). AOV is the average amount a customer spends on a transaction.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is the amount of money, on average, it costs to acquire a new customer.
• Customer retention rate. Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers a company is able to keep over time.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the estimated amount of money a customer will spend over their entire relationship with your business. 
• Return on ad spend (ROAS). ROAS measures how much a store earns per dollar spent on an advertising campaign.

Attribution and multichannel tracking in Shopify

Shopify provides tools for store owners to track and analyze marketing performance. Shopify’s commerce operating system (COS) adds each customer’s interaction to the same ID, creating clear multichannel attribution for your entire customer base. 

This means that if a customer makes an in-person purchase from a POS, and later orders something online, those actions are attributed to the same profile in your Shopify admin. You’ll also be able to see customers’ full journey to better track the marketing activities that are working and the ones that aren’t as effective.