Must Have Apps for Your New Shopify Store in 2019

So, you’ve finished loading products into your ecomm store, designing your home page, and connecting your payment gateways. Now what? Should you launch? Not without exploring the Shopify app store you shouldn’t. Below, in no particular order, are a few of our favorite apps we use on a regular basis, that can help with SEO services, email marketing, data backups, and more. Outlined in each app description is ease of use, potential impact on store, and reasoning behind why they’re one of our go-to apps! Looking for some more advanced help? If you’re in need of a marketing agency in Ottawa (or anywhere around the world), let’s chat, we’d love to help!

Privy

Ease of use score: 8/10
Potential Impact score: 10/10
Cost: Free - $
TL;DR - Collect friggin emails

One of the most commonly overlooked aspects of e-commerce for new entrepreneurs is email marketing. It’s an extremely cost effective way to build trust, retarget visitors to your store, and boost revenue. A good email collection tool is integral to convincing consumers to fork over their contact info, and Privy is simple and flexible enough to be effective for the majority of store owners. Privy is listed for numerous reasons; the first of which is that the majority of Shopify themes do not come with a built in exit intent enabled email collection pop-up. Yes, pop-ups can be annoying, but the bottom line is they work when executed properly, and Privy when setup correctly, does just that. Privy is beginner friendly, and setting up a basic pop-up can be done relatively quickly/cost effectively, while the impact of collecting emails on a regular basis can have a huge impact on your marketing effectiveness, and bottom line revenue.

Shopify Experts Tip: Ensure your pop-up is set to appear only on exit intent, and offers a real incentive for the visitor to leave their email. A 10% discount incentive is only valuable when the customer is convinced they want to purchase from your store, which they likely aren’t sure of yet. Consider creating a downloadable e-book, video, or other tangible value add that customers can download after leaving their email address.

Rewind.io

Ease of use score: 10/10
Potential Impact score: 10/10
Cost: Dependent on store
TL;DR: Save your store if a meteor hits

How much time did you put into building your ecomm store? If you learned from the ground up,  spent countless evenings grinding after work, or even paid an expert to set it up for you, Rewind.io is an app that needs to be on your essentials list. Rewind is the easiest way to backup your Shopify store and undo unwanted changes. While Shopify backs up all of your data, you don’t have access to it. That means if you accidentally delete a product, the prices of all products, or even your entire theme, you are in a tough spot. Enter Rewind: Rewind backs up everything daily in your store. From products through to store policies, menu navigation, pages, and more. With a one click install it’s almost too easy to protect your store’s data.

SEO Manager

Ease of use score: 5/10
Potential Impact score: 6.5/10
Cost: $20.00
TL;DR: Google likey good SEO

Not ready to pay for SEO services? Totally understandable, good SEO is expensive! While SEO Manager won’t help you acquire valuable high authority links, it will help you keep up with your on page SEO and let you know when things are going array. SEO Manager is designed to inform you of errors in your store, and provide a really (and we mean really) easy way to fix them. Editing meta titles, meta descriptions, updating 404-errors, and more, SEO Manager is designed to keep you informed, and give you a great start on your optimization. While SEO Manager is easy to use, it is extremely difficult to replicate the benefits provided by a specialist, and you should expect to create awesome content, and acquire a chunk of good backlinks pointing to your site before seeing huge shifts in your keyterm positions.

Klaviyo

Ease of use score: 5/10
Potential Impact score: 10/10
Cost: Dependent on number of email subscribers
TL;DR: Sendy the emails to people, but automate them

Back to email marketing, yay! Now, since we know you totally took our advice and installed an email pop-up to collect those emails, what do you do with them? Personally, we prefer the term efficient over the term lazy, but in this scenario, lazy is good, and Klaviyo let’s you be lazy. Klaviyo is a powerful marketing and email automation software, that can work wonders on your bottom line revenue. By far our favorite part of Klaviyo is automated flows, which once populated with content, trigger based off numerous actions people take in your store (for example: when someone subscribes to your awesome newsletter popup!). A great base set of flows to set up is as follows:

These flows below are examples explained for educational purposes. Please reach out to a qualified email marketer should you choose to implement email marketing automation for your business.

Abandon Cart Triggers:

What happens: When someone abandons their cart, a series of four emails trigger.

  1. An initial email four hours after the cart has been abandoned simply encouraging them to complete their purchase;
  2. A second email X number of hours after email number 1, letting them know their order is reserved for Y number of  hours;
  3. A third email X number of  hours after email number 2, offering them an "exclusive" discount (Y%) for the next Z number of hours
  4. A fourth email (designed to be personalized from "you") that is "you" reaching out offering an exclusive X% off if they finish their order in Y number of  hours.

    Why this flow is useful: People abandon carts for many reasons, and while we can’t figure out exactly why every single abandoned cart happened, we can do our best to get them back to your store. This automated flow ensures that with zero effort after setup, customers that abandoned their cart are being nurtured, and encouraged to return to your store and complete their purchase.

Post purchase triggers (“Customer Thank You’ in Klaviyo):

What happens: When a customer makes a purchase on your store, a series of automated emails are sent to encourage more purchases, build trust, and solicit feedback on their experience. These are all from "Your Name". It's super important to nurture customers that have shown they are willing to purchase from you, so a personalized email is very effective.

  1. An email X number of hours after someone places an order thanking them.

If customer purchases again before 10 days, they enter a series b) of this flow, which begins with a wow! thank you again! email.

  1. After Y number of days (customer should have received item by then), a feedback related email that asks specifically about their experience purchasing from your store. This is a great opportunity for feedback and makes people feel confident in your brand.
  2. X number of days after #2, an upsell email with Y number of other products from your store that they may be interested in.
  3. X days after #3, an exclusive discount that offers people Y% off their order as they are "loyal customers".

Why this flow is useful: Essentially we want to increase the lifetime value of people who visit your store, by getting them to purchase over and over. Setting up this automated flow not only encourages them to provide feedback on their experience (allowing you to spot any issues and correct them quickly), but also helps increase people’s trust in your brand as they know their shopping experience is a genuine concern of your business.

Newsletter Signup (“Welcome series” in Klaviyo):

What happens: Individuals who visit your store and enter their email in your email collection pop up (Shoutout Privy!), are entered into a newsletter flow

  1. (instant) A simple welcome to the newsletter email, offering X% off their first order and/or any other incentive you already created (ebook, etc).
  2. X days after email 1 - An email encouraging users to follow your business on social media (This is mainly just a soft touch point so they can begin to trust your brand).
  3. Y days after email 2 - An upsell email showing off your “best sellers” (2-4 products at your discretion to choose)
  4. Z days after email 3 - An exclusive discount for newsletter subscribers offering X% off their order for the next 48-72 hours.

Why this flow is useful: The average conversion rate on an ecommerce store will float between 1-3%. That means for every 100 people that visit your store, 97 of them will not purchase! Our goal with this flow is to try and incentivize those 97 to come back at a later date and make a purchase. Once a potential customer enters this flow, the automated emails keep your brand top of mind, and will build trust before suggesting a purchase on their behalf, with an incentive to do so (discount).

Now, while Klaviyo is a bit more challenging to use, it’s results can be fantastic if executed correctly. If email marketing automation is something you’re considering for you store, reach out to us for a free no obligation chat, we’d be happy to help!

Hypervisual

Ease of use score: 7/10
Potential Impact score: 7/10
Cost: $9.99-$19.99
TL;DR: Pretty stores are good

Every noticed how Shopify’s standard page templates can leave a bit to be desired? Us too. While we can code some really cool stuff together, the majority of Shopify store owners will want something simpler. The answer is Hypervisual! Hypervisual is a drag and drop landing page tool that can effectively be used to create numerous pages on your store with ease, without needing to pay a developer to custom code the solution you’re looking for. Hypervisual is easy to use once you get the hang of it, and you can create some truly awesome designs with the additional templated sections, including adding new sections to your theme’s home page.

Product Reviews

Ease of use score: 5/10
Potential Impact score: 7/10
Cost: Free
TL;DR: Social Proof

Finally, we have Shopify’s free Reviews app. While reviews may seem like a bit of an afterthought, they can absolutely make a huge difference in your conversion percentage. In fact, according to Spiegel Research Center, Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%, and we believe it. Displaying reviews builds trust, and allows future clients to share their thoughts about your products, right on your store. In terms of usability, the app is straightforward (minus a small code install), and given the upside of increased conversions, definitely has the potential to make a big impact on your store!

What’s your thoughts? We’d love to hear about your favorite apps and plugins that you utilize on a daily basis. Let us know if there’s an app we missed, or if you’re building a new app that we should keep an eye out for!

The Ecomm Guys is a Shopify Experts Marketing agency based in Ottawa, Ontario. We specialize in SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Management, and of course, Shopify.

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