marketing idea

Whether your goal is to boost brand awareness, increase sales, improve online visibility, you need an effective Magento marketing strategy. While you can rely on various built-in marketing tools, these won't be enough in an expanding Magento landscape. 

That's why we've put together this ultimate guide to Magento marketing. To help you leverage limitless marketing opportunities of the platform and automate your efforts.

You'll find an overview of the best marketing strategies and practices that work and already drive sales for your competitors. Besides, you'll discover different Magento marketing tools to support your journey. 

Ready to start?

Understanding Magento Marketing Potential

Before we get to the marketing strategies for Magento, you need to answer a serious question. Are you using built-in Magento marketing tools already? Because there are a lot. And you might realise you didn't use even half of them.

Let's get into more details.

Promotions and discounts

When the sales season is around the corner, incredible Magento promotion features come into play. You can set up multiple catalogue price rules to apply discounts for entire catalogues or specific categories.

Or just create coupon codes and cart price rules to offer discounts directly on checkout.

But the best part is Magento allows you to set special prices based on various conditions. Customer groups, the amounts of products they purchase and others.

magento 2 customer group pricing settings

Example of the customer group advanced pricing

This brings us right to the next feature.

Customer segmentation

Marketing is impossible without personalization since it allows you to target the right people with the right offers. Magento is brilliant with this. 

It allows you to segment your customers into groups based on whatever criteria. You can then use them to show personalized offers and content based on customer behaviour and demographics.

Magento Customer Groups

Default Magento customer groups

Email marketing features

You don't need to integrate some third-party tool to communicate with customers post sale. The platform comes with ready-made order-related email templates. It allows you to customize, translate and send them based on different conditions.

Magento 2 Transaction Email Template, Load Default Template

Default Magento "New Order" email template

On top of that, you can create and send newsletters and manage newsletter subscribers directly from the admin panel. 

However, if you exceed the default functionality, just opt for an integration.

Search engine optimization tools

Since marketing is about driving, satisfying and retaining customers, you can't market Magento without a proper Magento SEO guide. Especially since it's responsible for the "driving customers" part. 

SEO features like XML sitemap, robots.txt, rich snippets and meta tags play one of the main parts in that. They are responsible for your website being discovered, crawled and indexed by the search crawlers.

seo optimization magento

Search engine optimization section on all Magento pages

Content marketing

Catalog pages are not the only pages that are available in your store. That's why you shouldn't focus only on them. 

Magento allows you to create landing pages, FAQs and content blocks (banners) just as easily. Besides, you can manage and display customer reviews to build trust.

Add FAQ rich snippet to Magento

Example of a separate FAQ page with a structured data snippet

Analytics and reports

Whether you've started a marketing campaign or just planning one, you need data. About customers' behaviour, products, sales, refunds, abandoned carts and others.

If you know what works and what doesn't you can adjust your campaigns accordingly. And while you're most likely using Google Analytics 4 reports, just know that Magento already collects a lot of data for you. Besides, it allows you to create custom reports if you need to.

Loyalty and retention

The worst thing customers can do from a merchant's perspective is abandon their carts. But you can return these customers with the abandoned cart email.

So, a far bigger problem is when a product is out of stock or priced too high. In this case, customers wait for a better time to buy or just leave.

And you have no way of tracking how many times that happens. But there is a solution — out of stock notifications and product alerts Magento offers by default.

Notify me when this products is back in stock

Out-of-stock notification (product alert) on the Magento product page

Up-selling and cross-selling

Finally, a feature that helps you increase sales and the average order value. It helps you add related products, up-sells and cross-sells for each Magento product. The platforms will display them accordingly on the product, and cart pages.

Product Recommendations Magento

Magento related products

So you don't have to worry about placing custom blocks. But if you need to, we'll show you how later in this guide.

Key Magento Marketing Strategies

There's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to marketing. This means you can't rely only on emails or social media to drive customers. Marketing Magento is about combining different strategies and focusing on a holistic approach. 

That's why you should consider various marketing strategies described below and see what drives results for you.

Content marketing and SEO

If you want to extend your reach you need more attention driven to your store. And the best place to get that is where people already come to find things — search engines. Especially when 87% of people confirmed that they go to search engines to find products. 

So, before investing time in other marketing approaches, make sure you're ranking high in search. That's going to create a constant stream of customers and increase your visibility online.

The best way to start is to use all default SEO features and create a blog on Magento. It helps you to rank for more keywords and increases user engagement. 

Magento 2 Blog Category

Example of the Magento blog category page

Email marketing

Email marketing is the best tool for turning your one-time purchasers, subscribers, or leads into lifetime customers. It also helps you retain potential customers with abandoned cart emails and product alerts.

You just have to make sure that all kinds of emails you send are catered to the customers' needs. It means your emails should be timely, personalized, targeted and most importantly automated.

While Magento covers a lot in this regard, to make the most of your marketing efforts you need an integration, e.g. Magento Mautic Integration. The flexibility of the platform allows that.

Influencers and affiliates

People will believe just about anything they see online these days if it comes from a person they trust. That's why influencer marketing budgets are growing by the day. Use that to attract more attention to your brand and products. 

And if it's all new and you're not sure your niche product falls under the influencer umbrella, use affiliates. These are the professional marketers who will drive conversion-ready leads to you. 

You won't have to worry about the channels they use to drive those leads or pay them for the traffic. They earn a commission from a sale. So you're just paying for results. 

Social media marketing

The second place where customers can find your products is social media. But it would be safe to say that they don't even have to search for them. 

Take TikTok Business, Facebook Shop and Instagram Business profiles as an example. You can literally put your products in front of your target audience's faces now. Besides, the Shop integrations allow you to sell on social media directly.

Facebook Store Magento Integration

Facebook shop example

On top of that, you don't even have to create content yourself. Just encourage users to create user-generated content to build brand awareness and extend your reach.

But if you want to, continue posting stories and reels to keep your audience engaged. There's no limit.

Ads and retargeting

All the Magento marketing strategies we've discussed so far focus on the long-term results. But at least they're free. Unless you use some advanced third-party tools, of course.

If you want to get results instantly, it comes at a price. Depending on what results you're aiming for.

Advertising helps you target your ideal audience immediately. While retargeting covers "lost" customers. It includes those who've interacted with your website but left without making a purchase.

However, for those offers you show to work you have to make them personalized. And you can't do that without data about customers' behaviour in your store. 

So, before investing your time and money into ads, make sure you collect relevant data. 

Word-of-mouth marketing

Another marketing technique for Magento that often goes underrated is word-of-mouth marketing.

It's always better to encourage an existing customer to buy more than to drive a new customer. True. But your existing customers can become your product advocates and drive even more customers for you.

Encourage them to leave reviews, create testimonial pages, and share customer success stories. These are just a few things to start with. 

You can also add social media links to product pages or offer an option to "refer a friend".

Just whatever you do, remember that for people to recommend your brand they should be satisfied with the service. That drives us back to the marketing strategies we've just discussed.

Product up-selling and cross-selling

Last but not least on our list is the marketing strategy related to the sales part. It encourages people to buy a more expensive version of a product or just buy more products related to each other. 

That's a perfect way to increase the average order value since you're offering them during checkout. But note these tactic works only if your cross-sell or up-sell is highly personalized.

magento 2 cross sell products

Cross-sells on the Magento shopping cart page

Magento Marketing Automation

After reading about all these Magento marketing strategies you might be like — sounds great but how can I apply all of them? And I have the answer — marketing automation.

You don't have to hire a marketing team or constantly monitor and plan new marketing campaigns. A lot of things could be automated if you just set them up once. 

Let's skim through the options you have.

Dynamic blocks and pages

Personalization lies at the root of successful marketing. That's why you should implement it in everything you do, including banners and landing pages. 

Whether it's sales seasons or not, personalized offers generate more revenue. But the key here is to generate that revenue with less hassle for you. 

That's when Magento 2 dynamic blocks and pages come into play. This allows you to create different banners or pages for different customer groups. 

The best part? You set a schedule for them. It means the banners will be displayed and disabled according to the date, weekday and the exact time you set.

magento dynamic blocks date

Example of the scheduling option for Magento CMS blocks and pages

Automatic categories

Categories improve navigation in your catalogue and help customers find products faster. However, the behind-the-scenes of category management is far from easy. You have to go to each product to change or add a category. It's tedious.

Dynamic categories optimize the process. They work based on product attributes and conditions you set for them.

The logic is simple — once the product meets the category criteria, or not, it's added or removed from a certain category correspondingly.

Magento 2 dynamic category rules conditions

Example of the dynamic category rule conditions

Do you know what that means? You don't have to manage categories any more. You just set conditions for them.

Magento 2 sale category, best sellers, new arrivals — these are just a few examples of the variety of categories you can create. 

Automatic cross-sells and up-sells

The biggest drawback of the default Magento cross-sell and up-sell features is it's static. You have to manually set and change every cross-sell or up-sell for all products, which is extremely time-consuming. 

Why all this hassle if there are automatic related products, cross-sells and up-sells? They are generated based on the smart algorithms and the conditions you set.

Who Bought This Also Bought Block

Custom "Who Bought This Also Bought That" block

So, you can automate your marketing efforts in this area with just a few clicks. 

Dynamic product labels

When you need to drive customers' attention to certain items, there are a lot of options. You can, as we've already discussed, gather them into one category. Or you can enable multiple product labels in the Magento catalog.

Free shipping, big sales, best sellers, customers' choice etc. There are no limits to the number of labels you can come up with.

sale product labels magento

"Hot deal" product labels on Magento category

But the best part, of course, is you don't have to add labels to products manually. Just set the conditions, and choose what type of labels to display. They will be added, removed and changed automatically. 

This allows you to focus on some other important tasks while your product marketing works automatically.

Where to Start with Magento Marketing?

It might seem like a lot to grasp. And it is because marketing is a broad concept just like SEO. You have to combine different approaches till you find the one that works the best for you.

But remember that all these marketing strategies for Magento won't work just because you put in a lot of effort. 

You have to make informative decisions about the strategies you use. To do that you need to collect relevant data about your customer's behaviours, product performance, checkout, etc.

So, before making any changes implement Google Tag Manager and GA4 to collect and analyze data. Determine your strongest and weakest points to align your strategy with your goals.