Hi Reader,

Mother's Day (Sunday, May 12) is a huge holiday for a lot of she shop owners we work with. Do you plan any marketing or products around this holiday? If so, now is the time to be planning your marketing campaigns.

While many people are happy to join you in your Mother's Day celebrations, this can be an uncomfortable day for some people (or maybe just not important to them). If you want to offer people the option to opt-out of Mother's Day marketing, that is a nice thing to do. It means you need to plan ahead even earlier -- it's helpful to ask customers if they want to opt out of Mother's Day emails before your messages start going out.

Q&A

Here's a reader question about Shopify vs. social selling, as answered by Helen Hulskamp, Ecommerce Strategist on our team:

Q: Why have a website as opposed to Instagram selling?

A: There two main reasons why we don’t recommend selling only on social platforms like Instagram, or even other ecommerce marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon:

You aren’t in control of your ability to reach your target customer on these platforms. Algorithms change without warning.
A channel that is particularly effective now might get no traction later. For example, at this moment you might want to be looking at TikTok Shop in a serious way. It is important to take advantage of these opportunities when they come up and run with them while they are performing well. But don’t rely on them to still be working or even existing a year from now.

And there are a lot of reasons why it is important to have your own website in addition to selling via social channels:

You own your online store and have full control over how you present your brand. This can have a huge impact on your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. Even if someone finds you on Instagram, they may want to check out the verified product reviews on your site before making a purchase.
You can collect visitors’ contact information so you can stay in touch on your own terms, not subject to algorithm changes. You can also collect customer information and remarket to your existing customers.
You can use web analytics and testing to understand exactly what is and isn’t working well with your online merchandising and marketing efforts.
If you have your own site, you can take advantage of marketing opportunities such as SEO and the many marketing platforms that integrate with Shopify.
There are few limits on the custom functionality you can have on Shopify, whereas functionality is very limited on 3rd party platforms. As you grow, if you want subscriptions or upsells or bundles or personalization or anything else, you can either find a Shopify app or have the functionality built for you.

Question: Answered

Our team includes experts in branding, design, development, email & SMS/text marketing, search engine optimization, copywriting, conversion optimization, ecommerce strategy, business growth and more. Email me back with your question! I'll consult one of our experts and share one response per week over email.

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