Last updated on October 20th, 2025 at 11:58 am
Have a dropshipping business?
Today we will discuss five cool ways to market it.
We will also share a sales funnel that you can use to grow your online store.
Best Dropshipping Marketing Strategies
Dropshipping Marketing Strategy#1: Paid Advertising
We believe that paid advertising is the best marketing strategy for dropshipping businesses. Why?
Because paid traffic is:
- Immediate – If you pay for ads, you’ll get traffic. Will that traffic convert? Who knows. But at least you’ll be gathering data that you can then use to make data-driven decisions. This is especially important if you have a brand new online store that isn’t getting any traffic at the moment.
- Targeted – Social media platforms are in fact advertising platforms because that’s how these companies make money. They offer incredible ad targeting capabilities that allow you to zero in on your dream customers. This level of precision is simply not possible with other marketing strategies.
- Scalable – Social media platforms also offer great ad analytics. This access to granular data enables you to validate, optimize, and scale your ad campaigns in an intelligent manner.
While all major social media platforms allow you to run ads on them, Facebook and Instagram are best suited for marketing e-commerce stores, so you should probably start there.
Create an ad campaign designed to drive traffic to your cart funnel (more on that later) and start running it with a small daily budget. Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, you can begin gradually scaling your campaign.
A word of warning, though: just like with any other skill, mastering paid advertising will inevitably involve making mistakes. And those mistakes are going to cost you money. There’s simply no way around this.
However, while you can’t avoid losing money on ads, you can minimize the amount of money you lose by being careful. Validate your idea, optimize your marketing campaign, and only then start scaling it. And make sure to do it gradually, even if everything seems to be working well.
We highly recommend reading up on agile marketing because it can help you avoid disastrous business mistakes.
Dropshipping Marketing Strategy #2: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is another great way to market your dropshipping business.
Of course, you need to make sure that either you and the influencer have the same target audience or that there’s a significant overlap between your target audiences. That’s what matters, not the size of their following.
In fact, we would argue that the larger the following, the smaller percentage of it will be people who are your dream customers. That’s why you will probably get the best ROI by working with micro-influencers.
Just like with paid advertising, you want to be careful and take the agile marketing approach:
- Identify promising micro-influencers.
- Reach out to them and work out a deal where you get three shoutouts over the course of three months. So one shoutout per month.
- After those initial three months, analyze the data to see which partnerships generated the most sales.
- Double down on the best-performing influencers, continue working with the average-performing ones, and drop the worst-performing ones.
- Invest in relationships with the influencers that have proven themselves. Offer them longer contracts, gradually increase their pay, send them free stuff, etc.
You will need to develop a system that allows you to track the performance of the influencers that you are working with.
One way to do that is to create a special link for every influencer so that you can see who is driving the most traffic and whether those visitors are converting into paying customers.
Also, remember that influencers want to make a living from this. They will appreciate it if you help them get closer to that goal, especially early in their careers.
That’s why we strongly recommend paying influencers right from the get-go, even if they would give you shoutouts for free products or discounts.
Offering a monetary payment, even if it’s a small one in the beginning, is a good way to set up the right dynamic for a long-term, mutually beneficial business relationship.
Dropshipping Marketing Strategy #3: Social Media Marketing
The marketing strategies that we have discussed so far are all about getting immediate traffic.
That’s what you should focus on if you have a brand-new dropshipping business. Your priority should be to start making sales ASAP.
However, once you have some money coming in consistently, you want to start diversifying your traffic sources.
At that point, you should start investing in creating traffic-generating assets of your own. And the easiest such asset to build is a social media following.
Just like with paid advertising, Facebook and Instagram tend to work best for dropshipping businesses, so we suggest starting there.
While each platform has its own peculiarities, the general process of building a following is the same everywhere:
- Create a content schedule that you can keep up with indefinitely.
- Commit to that content schedule and adhere to it religiously. You can produce content in batches and then use social media scheduling tools like Buffer or MeetEdgar to schedule and publish it.
- Ensure that each and every piece of content that you publish provides value to your followers.
- Use your social media to drive traffic to your cart funnel but don’t be obnoxious about it. Providing value to your followers should be the main focus.
- Interact with your followers. Ideally, you want to respond to each comment, tweet, and reply that you get.
That’s pretty much all there is to it but the catch is that you will have to keep this up for several years to build a social media following. Consistency is the name of the game!
Dropshipping Marketing Strategy #4: YouTube Marketing
Another traffic-generating asset that you might want to consider building is a YouTube channel.
Here’s how you can do that:
- Choose a niche – It should be related to your dropshipping business. Say, if you sell women’s clothes, you can create a women’s fashion channel.
- Create a content schedule that you can keep up with indefinitely – Just as with social media, consistency is what matters the most.
- Make sure that each video you create targets a specific keyword – Type in a general search term related to your niche and look at the suggestions that come up. These are the long-tail keywords that people are searching for. Target the ones that your dream customers might be using.
- Do competitive research for your target keyword – Once you have chosen a keyword, you should watch the top five videos that are ranking for it and read the comments. You want to figure out how you can make a video that’s better than the current top five videos.
- Write the script, shoot the video, and edit it – While you can use an outline with bullet points, word-for-word scrips tend to work best. It’s okay to film with your smartphone but you might want to invest in a professional-grade microphone. Make sure to edit out the awkwardness, verbal tics, etc.
- Create a thumbnail for your video – Thumbnails are the most important factor that determines whether someone will click on your video or ignore it. That’s why every video should have an attention-grabbing thumbnail. Ideally, you want to have a consistent thumbnail aesthetic (color scheme, font, design, etc.) so that your subscribers would immediately recognize your content once it pops up in their subscription feeds or recommendations.
- Come up with a title for your video – It should include the target keyword, describe what the video entails, and pique curiosity. All of these three elements are important!
- Upload your video – Make sure to choose the right tags, mention your target keyword in the description etc. This stuff is boring but it’s important to get it right if you want YouTube’s algorithm to give you exposure.
- Rinse and repeat – Realistically, building a YouTube channel will probably take a few years, so keep at it. You’ll start seeing results eventually!
And don’t forget that the goal here is to drive traffic to your cart funnel. Promote your best-selling product on your homepage, in your video descriptions, and at the end of your videos. You can also promote other products when they are relevant to the topic at hand.
Dropshipping Marketing Strategy #5: TikTok Marketing
Consider repurposing your YouTube content into short clips and then uploading them to TikTok.
While YouTube is also increasingly prioritizing short content, TikTok is still the top platform for that.
You also want to take advantage of the virality of its algorithm. You never know, you might hit a jackpot and go viral with one of your shorts!
Grow Your Dropshipping Business With a Cart Funnel
We believe that the best way to grow your dropshipping business is to build a cart funnel and then use the marketing strategies that we just discussed to drive traffic to it.
What is a Cart Funnel?
It’s an e-commerce sales funnel designed to convert new visitors into customers.
It consists of four pages:
- A sales page
- An upsell page
- A cross sell page
- A thank you page
How to Create a Cart Funnel for Your Dropshipping Business
Now let’s take a closer look at the structure of this sales funnel:
The Offer
Analyze your sales data and identify your best-selling product. That’s the product that you want to promote with your cart funnel.
Not your latest product, not your favorite product, not your most expensive product. Your best-selling product.
You also want to take that product and create an offer. What’s the difference between a product and an offer?
Here’s how our co-founder Russell Brunson explains it:
The Sales Page
Here are some of the sales page copywriting basics that you need to get right if you want your sales page to convert:
- Headline – Your headline should convey the value of your offer. How will it make the potential customer’s life better? Lead with that.
- Body copy – Appeal to the emotional buyers first with emotion-driven copy, then to the logical buyers with benefit-driven copy, and finally to the fearful buyers with scarcity-driven copy.
- Social proof – Provide as much social proof as you can in the form of customer testimonials, endorsements from well-known people, and “As Seen On” media badges.
- Call to action – Use an offer-specific call-to-action button copy (e.g. “YES! I Want [The Product]!’”) instead of generic copy (e.g. “Buy Now”).
- 30-day money-back guarantee – Make sure that your money-back guarantee is explained clearly and is featured prominently next to the call-to-action button. It should be impossible to miss!
There’s much more to sales page copywriting than that but unfortunately we can’t adequately cover this subject here due to space limitations.
But if you want to learn how to write copy that converts, we highly recommend our friend Jim Edwards’ book “Copywriting Secrets”.
You can get it for FREE. All Jim asks is that you cover the shipping!
Get “Copywriting Secrets” for FREE!
The 2-Step Order Form
Use a 2-step order form on your sales page:
- Step #1: Shipping information
- Step #2: Payment details
The reasoning behind splitting the order form into two steps is that the potential customer makes a micro-commitment by providing their shipping information.
This mico-commitment then makes them more likely to provide their payment details and finalize the purchase.
The Order Form Bump
You also want to add an order form bump to your 2-step order form.
You know how grocery stores have all these small items next to the checkout area (chewing gum, candy bars, etc.)?
They do that because they know that people will be tempted to grab a KitKat and throw it in their shopping cart.
An order form bump is the e-commerce equivalent of that Kit Kat – something inexpensive that the potential customer might add to their cart on an impulse because why not?
The key here is to keep it simple because an order bump should be something that doesn’t need an explanation (e.g. rushed shipping).
The Upsell
An upsell is an offer that you make to the potential customer after they have accepted your initial offer – it’s supposed to be an upgrade on it.
The easiest way to upsell is to offer the potential customer more of the same product at a better price.
Of course, that’s not always possible, in which case you can replace the upsell with a cross sell, so that instead of an upsell + a cross sell you’d have two cross sells in your cart funnel.
The Cross Sell
A cross sell is also an offer that you make to the potential customer after they have accepted your initial offer but instead of being an upgrade on it, it’s supposed to be complementary to it.
Figure out which product complements your main offer the best and use it as a cross sell.
The Thank You Page
Finally, you should create a thank you page, where you:
- Thank the customer
- Provide shipping information
- Provide customer service information
We also recommend displaying an offer wall – a catalog that showcases your other products – in case the customer wants to continue shopping.
The Secret Sauce That Can Help You Win at Dropshipping
Dropshipping is notorious for its:
- Extremely low barrier to entry
- Razor-thin profit margins
The problem with this is that it leads to a race-to-the-bottom situation where a bunch of people are selling the exact same product and competing on price.
While you can make some money that way, building a sustainable business will be extremely difficult. Why?
Because a new entrant or an existing competitor can take your market share at any time. So what can you do to gain a competitive edge?
As Dan Kennedy put it, “Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”
So the real question is how can you increase your customer lifetime value so that you could outspend everyone else on customer acquisition?
The secret sauce here is info products. You can increase your customer lifetime value by adding a digital cross sell to your cart funnel.
Some ideas:
- A video lesson or a video course that explains how to make the most out of your best-selling product. Say, if your main offer is a travel backpack, you could cross sell packing cubes on page 2, then cross sell a video that teaches various packing tricks on page 3.
- A video course or an email course that teaches the potential customer a skill that they want to learn. Say, if your main offer is a makeup kit, you could upsell a larger makeup kit on page 2, then cross sell a video course with makeup tutorials for that specific kit on page 3.
- An eBook that provides information that the potential customer needs. Say, if your main offer is a wool sweater, you could cross sell an eBook guide on taking care of wool items on page 2, then cross sell a kit for washing wool clothes on page 3.
We recommend pricing your digital cross sell at $7. Why?
This is a price point that isn’t low enough to make the potential customer question the value of that product but also isn’t high enough to make them stop and think twice before buying.
Adding a digital cross sell to your cart funnel should help you increase your customer lifetime value and enable you to be much more aggressive in terms of customer acquisition. In all likelihood, if your competitors aren’t using this approach themselves, they won’t be able to keep up.
Plus, digital products have insanely high-profit margins, so if you can find a way to incorporate them into your e-commerce business, that might help you drastically increase your profits.
Build a Cart Funnel for Your Dropshipping Business With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a cart funnel for your dropshipping business:
- A proven cart funnel template.
- A visual editor that you can use to customize that template.
- An email marketing functionality that allows you to collect customers’ email addresses and send them promotional emails.
We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk.
So why not start building your cart funnel today?