15 Things We Wish We Knew About Dropshipping Before Running Ads

What’s something you wish you knew before you started running ads that could potentially save you thousands of dollars, lots of precious time, and immeasurable amounts of worries? 🤔

We’ve thought of that for you and now present you with the 15 best dropshipping marketing tips that can prevent you from experiencing what I’ve just mentioned above.

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Focus On Organic Traffic

If you’re a beginner, one of the best dropshipping tips on marketing I can give you is to dedicate time early to driving organic traffic.

If you don’t know what organic traffic is, it can be easily explained as follows:

Organic traffic is the visitors that come to your stores from unpaid sources. 

Essentially, it can also be referred to as free traffic, because you don’t have to pay for ads, shoutouts, promotions, or similar. 

Why is this one of the most important tips on dropshipping? 🤔

It’s important because organic traffic can skyrocket your business over the long term. 

👉 Check out the 100+ TikTok Bio Ideas For Your Dropshipping Business In 2024.

All of the free content you post, all of the TikTok videos, guest posts, blog posts, and so on will eventually start bringing in more and more customers over a long period of time.

💡 Tip: 10 Best Dropshipping Video Ads Service For Aspiring Dropshippers

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Utilize Upsells and Cross-Sells Before Running Ads

Upselling and cross-selling strategies can help you increase the value of each conversion. 

For example, if your Facebook ads bring a visitor to your store who decides to buy the item you were advertising, they can, in addition, buy another complimentary item that you decide to place at a smart location during checkout.

To clarify, this process increases your ROI and results in a much higher dropshipping profit margin when you calculate the cost of ads.

Learn More: Guide to mastering Upsells and Cross-sells for Dropshipping.

Don’t Underestimate Referral Programs

Referral programs are free marketing strategies that can be automated and used to make sales without you lifting a finger. It’s one of the most clever tips for dropshipping ads without actually paying for ads.

It works like this:

You set up a referral program → customers start signing up for a bonus in return → they bring in new customers → you make a sale without ad spend.

Sure, a percentage of that sale goes to the referral and the discount for the customer. However, you never initially paid ads for that customer. As a result, even a lower profit margin on those sales is still a win for you.

It literally costs you a few minutes to set up a referral program and let it do the work for you. It actually grows exponentially, and once it starts to pick up you’ll notice a significant boost in sales.

💡 Tip: If you’re dropshipping on Shopify, here are 10 of the best Shopify referral program apps you can use to quickly set this up.

Plan Ahead for Holidays

When I say this, I don’t mean to pause the store on holidays and go out partying. Instead, you should mark huge holidays on your calendar and create special marketing campaigns for those days. 

Obviously, you should consider holidays that are only important to the customers you are targeting. For example, you shouldn’t create a 4th of July marketing campaign for customers outside the US, as this holiday is exclusive to the United States.

Why is this important?

People generally buy more on holidays or ahead of holidays. Their spirits are lifted and they often buy mainly because they want to gift the product to someone they care about. 

With this in mind, it’s your job to create discounts and market them aggressively to your target audience. There is a great chance to see an increase in conversions during these times.

Don’t Stick to Only One Payment Option

Not all customers will be able to pay with PayPal, despite it being the most popular payment option. As a result, it’s important to include multiple of the most popular payment methods, such as:

• PayPal
• Credit Cards
• Debit Cards
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• Amazon Pay

This one may not be exactly defined as dropshipping marketing tips but it’s a no-brainer and is still important to include it as some of you may forget about it or think that it’s not necessary. 

📝 Note: Don’t simply include every payment method there is. That will make you look like a scammer and complicate things even further. Stick to these 5-6 most popular ones and you’ll be fine.

MUST READ: Dropshipping Scams & How To Avoid Them As a Beginner

Improve Your Copywriting Skills

One of the all-time best dropshipping marketing tips to increase your sales is to master copywriting. This skill applies to everything in dropshipping.

It applies to writing great product descriptions, writing high-converting ads, posts, landing page content, emails, and much more.

With this in mind, improving your copywriting skills is crucial and should be something you must focus on. It can serve you for the rest of your life in countless other businesses, not just dropshipping.

Double-Check Everything In Your Store

Before you start running ads, one of the most ridiculous and costly mistakes you can make is to have a crucial feature on your store not working.

Imagine, you start running ads, you pay a lot of money to bring in quality visitors, only to find out that your “Buy Now” button isn’t working or there’s a problem on your Checkout page. As a result, you would have flushed all your money on dropshipping ads down the toilet.

So, out of all the dropshipping marketing tips here, this one is probably the most important if you’re working in the bottom range of the minimum dropshipping budget.

Learn More: How to Set Up Your First Store on Shopify

Install a Live Chat App

You should definitely install a live chat Shopify app such as Tidio before you start running ads. 

Why?

Because great dropshipping customer service is critical. You should strive to answer all of your visitors’ questions almost instantly. This results in higher conversion rates and more happy customers.

Technically, this is one of the dropshipping marketing tips that won’t help your ads directly but are crucial to do before you start running ads.

💡Tip: Take a look at our in-depth Tidio ChatBot review to learn how to use the app and all of its features. 

Set Up Your Facebook Pixel and TikTok Pixel

Both Facebook and TikTok have a Pixel tool that helps your ads learn and optimize. As a result, these tools are crucial if you want to launch retargeting campaigns and really start to scale your dropshipping store.

Keep in mind that various Shopify alternatives have different ways of connecting the Pixel. However, this is usually a simple process that you can easily find out how to do on YouTube.

You Must Create Exceptional Offers to Win

If you want to blow away your competition and grow as quickly as possible, another one of the best dropshipping marketing tips I can give you is to focus on your offer.

This can be an extremely difficult task because great offers are usually hard to pull off. However, you still need to come up with one and show it off in your ads.

Here is an example of what a great offer looks like:

“[PRODUCT NAME] will definitely satisfy your needs. If you don’t think so after you try it, we will give you your money back and a 50% discount code for our other products.”

📝Note: Make sure you have a really great product before sticking to offers such as this one.

💡 Tip: Read about The Power Of Product Advertisement: How To Increase Your Sales?

Do Intense Customer Research

The most important goal at the start of your dropshipping business is to understand your customers.

• Who is your ideal customer? 
• What do they like? 
• Where do they work? 
• Who do they hang around with? 

Knowing the answer to as many questions about your customer is undoubtedly one of the best tips for dropshipping ads out there.

Why?

Because if you know your customers well enough, you will know exactly what kinds of ads to create, how to target them, how to price your product, and how to keep increasing your sales every day.

Create a Sales Funnel

Sales funnels are a hugely successful way to grow and automate your dropshipping sales. Once you master and create the perfect sales funnel, you can sit back and watch those orders coming in.

To clarify, an eCommerce sales funnel takes a mildly interested prospect and turns them into someone who can’t wait to buy more of your products.

Learn more: Dropshipping vs Ecommerce: What’s the Difference and Where to Start?

Learn More: How to Use eCommerce Sales Funnels

Order a Sample of Your Product

Again, this may not be among the dropshipping marketing tips that will help your marketing directly but it is still something you must do before you start running ads.

Why?

For several reasons.

To start with, you need to see how long it takes to fulfill and ship your order.

Secondly, you need to inspect the quality of your supplier’s packaging.

Lastly, you need to look at the actual product and check if it’s in good condition and if it actually works.

Apply Branding Strategies to Everything You Can

Branded dropshipping can be extremely helpful for building a successful store that you plan to run for years to come. 

If you apply early branding strategies to your ads, content, images, packaging, and so on, you can expect it to pay you back handsomely in the future. 

It doesn’t cost a lot but it is quite rewarding in terms of building customer loyalty and trust.

Try A Different Marketplace Instead of Giving Up

The last, but certainly not least, of our dropshipping marketing tips is to test different marketplaces and include multiple sales channels if you can.

With this in mind, you shouldn’t give up if, for example, Facebook ads don’t bring you satisfying results. If you pivot and try TikTok ads next, you may end up going viral and getting thousands of orders.

It all depends on your product and target audience. Once you match the two together, regardless of which marketplace it would be on, you will see very positive results.

Best Dropshipping Tips on Marketing – Summary 

I highly suggest writing down these dropshipping tips for marketing. Remember them and try to utilize as many as you can. 

Combining more of them together is a sure way to increase your odds and achieve success in dropshipping.