Marketing & Growth: channels that bring in and keep customers
Every online store needs a steady flow of the right visitors, and a reason for them to come back. Marketing and growth covers the channels that bring shoppers to your store, the messages that turn them into customers, and the habits that keep them buying. This hub brings together our guides on paid advertising, search, email, social media and selling on marketplaces.
How the marketing channels fit together
No single channel carries an ecommerce brand on its own. Paid advertising buys reach quickly but costs money for every click. Search engine optimisation and content build traffic slowly but compound over time. Email and SMS turn one-off buyers into repeat customers at very low cost. Social media builds awareness and community, and marketplaces put your products in front of shoppers who are already searching to buy.
The strongest stores use each channel for what it does best: paid and social to find new customers, search and marketplaces to capture existing demand, and email to grow the value of every customer over time.
Guides in this section
- Digital Advertising & Media Buying: plan, launch and scale paid campaigns on Google, Meta, TikTok and beyond.
- SEO & Content Marketing: rank product and category pages and publish content that attracts buyers.
- Email & SMS Marketing: build lists, automate flows and drive repeat purchases.
- Social Media Management: grow an audience, run social commerce and work with creators.
- Marketplace Management: sell successfully on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and other marketplaces.
Where to start
If you are launching a new store, focus first on the basics that every other channel depends on: clear product pages, an email capture form and accurate tracking. Then pick one acquisition channel, learn it properly and add the next only when the first is profitable. Spreading a small budget across five channels at once usually means none of them gets enough attention to work.
Measuring growth
Track a small set of numbers consistently: traffic by channel, conversion rate, average order value, customer acquisition cost and repeat purchase rate. Our Analytics & Reporting Tools guide explains how to set this up so you can see which channels actually make money.