What percentage of your revenue is spent on marketing?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A widow who recently took over her family’s e-commerce business after her husband’s COVID-19 death is seeking advice on reducing marketing costs, which currently consume 50-60% of revenue—significantly higher than typical industry standards.

Current Situation:

  • Marketing spend primarily on Facebook and Google advertising
  • High costs threatening business sustainability
  • Sole income source for her and her children

Community Recommendations:

  • Shift focus to organic social media to reduce paid advertising dependency
  • AI-powered tools suggested:
    • Publer: Social media content management
    • Breeze.AI: Product photo transformation
    • Spreeflo: Email automation with hyper-personalized campaigns, abandoned cart recovery, and product recommendations
  • Gradual approach advised: Don’t immediately cut existing marketing spend due to risk

Key Insight: Respondents emphasize that marketing quality matters more than quantity, suggesting the current strategy may need optimization rather than just increased spending.

The discussion remains open as the business owner seeks additional guidance on building an effective marketing team or strategy.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
4

So sorry for your loss. I think you should be able to optimise your marketing costs further down.

I recommend you take a look at Spreeflo for email automation. Spreeflo looks at your customer segments and prepares hyper-personalised marketing emails for your customers. Every email is uniquely crafted for the customer by the app. It’ll save you a lot of time but it’s also constantly be working in the background to help acquire new sales from your existing customers. It includes abandoned cart recovery, brand promotion, product recommendations, and discount code emails. I just spend several minutes on the app to review the generated email copies every day and am able to dispatch personalised emails to hundreds of customers.
It fulfils many of your marketing needs at an affordable price.