Shopify made a big splash recently with their Editions Summer 2022 announcement, where they unveiled 100+ new product features to help merchants scale faster. We’ve reviewed their recent product announcements with a focus on improving the performance of advertising across platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and now Twitter.
1. Shopify Audiences for Facebook & Instagram
Shopify Audiences is a new app from Shopify that according to Shopify “helps you find your next best customer.” This native app allows you to choose a product for which you want to find new customers. Shopify will create a list of buyers located in the United States and Canada from across the Shopify ecosystem who are likely to purchase the type of product that you want to sell more of.
This list can be exported to your Facebook Ads account, where you can then launch ad campaigns that target that audience. You can also build lookalike audiences from these custom audiences to further scale your potential reach. In this way, you can combine Shopify’s unique view on purchase intent across their merchant network together with Facebook’s unique view of their users’ behaviors.
2. New Customer Segmentation Capabilities
Shopify’s Customer Segmentation feature enables you to group customers who display common behaviors, such as how much they spend, the number of orders they placed, and more. These segments can then be deployed into marketing automation, such as evergreen email campaigns but can also be exported for use in ad platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Google, and TikTok.
For the first time, this feature from Shopify now comes with a no-code interface providing powerful audience-building capabilities which can be used to fuel personalized messages and offer across email and ad channels. Pre-built templates make it easy to get started with many features focused on allowing you to identify customers with the highest future purchase potential.
3. Facebook & Instagram Sales Channel - Now Managed by Meta
Sales Channels inside Shopify enable you to list your catalog and sell directly from within Facebook Shopping and Instagram Shopping. With Instagram Shopping, for example, you can sell your products directly within Instagram whenever you tag them in a post.
Effective from May 28, 2022, the Facebook & Instagram Sales Channel is managed by Meta and can be accessed inside your Facebook Ads Manager. The update is automatic, so you’ll need to click on the Facebook Sales Channel inside Shopify to see if this change has been applied to your account already.
4. Shopify’s New Twitter Sales Channel
With Twitter reporting that shopping-related tweets saw 40 billion impressions last year, it is no wonder that a Twitter Sales Channel has finally come to Shopify. Twitter’s shopping features include Twitter Shops and Shop Spotlight which are both currently available to Shopify U.S. merchants selling to U.S. consumers.
Twitter Shops allows merchants to showcase up to 50 products from a Shop button on their profile. Shop Spotlight enables merchants to showcase up to 5 products directly on their profile page. With the Twitter Sales Channel app you can sync your catalog with Twitter’s Shopping Manager and from there select the products you want to showcase. When a shopper clicks on a product they are brought directly to the relevant product on your Shopify store.
5. TikTok Video Creation
The TikTok sales channel has been available for some time now but many merchants are still somewhat intimidated by the platform. With over 140 million and growing North American users on TikTok, now is the time to jump on in order to grow your audience base. One of the great features that is constantly evolving in the TikTok sales channel is video creation and optimization.
TikTok provides a massive array of highly performant video templates to get you started with building your next viral video ads. Even better, with their Automated Creative Optimization, you can upload images or videos, write some ad text, and select your call-to-action (CTA) buttons. TikTok will then automatically combine your creative assets into multiple ads for your campaign. These ads are continuously evaluated and optimized to find the optimal combination of variables.
