What Apps Do I Need for my Shopify Store?

The Best Shopify Apps for Shopify Merchants

Shopify apps are a great way of getting your business off the ground and of gaining an edge over your competitors. They allow you to drive traffic, engage with customers, and manage orders. No matter how much time and effort you put into making your e-commerce store, you can always take it to the next level with the right apps. To assist, we've compiled some of the top Shopify apps from the Shopify App Store to help you increase your sales in this post. I hope this guide can you give you a glimpse in the steps that founders take to build their brands and e-commerce stores.

Lead Capture: Privy & JustUno

Lead generation is the core of every successful business. But how do you lead customers to the right offer at the precise moment when they're ready to buy? If you're looking for a few pointers about how to get your landing page game together, we recommend considering Privy & JustUno. They are both useful and productive tools and integrate with all of the other apps mentioned in this list. I use Privy on more sites currently as their pricing is a little more affordable and it's easy to bounce between monthly rates if you have huge surges of traffic. Justuno is a little pricier, but just as good and robust for lead capture. An example use case for Privy is collecting user emails with beautiful interactive popups.
 

For Privy, we like to set up a half-page popup for mobile, and a footer input email field to collect emails. For popups, it's best to set it to 50% scroll or 3 seconds. 

SMS Marketing: Postscript

SMS marketing is a great tool to utilize to continue the conversation with customers, after they've left your site. Postscript is the leader in SMS. One example of its usage is sending emails with a call to action of signing up for the VIP text club and giving them a 20% discount code for completing signup. PostScript is extremely powerful both for list building, sending campaigns and using automations to convert more abandoned carts.

We believe that every visitor to your site can be a customer, but not all of them will buy the same day. Collect email and SMS with your pop up so you can market to them down the line. Use this opportunity to introduce your brand, offer a discount, and nurture the customer relationship.

Use Cases for SMS Marketing: 

1. Use SMS as a communication channel to talk to your customers 1:1 to build relationships and entice them to come back.

2. Send broadcasts to the audience list for special promotions and content to get them to visit the site again.

Email Marketing: Klaviyo

Klaviyo is the golden standard of email service providers in the commerce world. I'd recommend this to everybody selling online regardless of annual revenue, their plans scale based on how many emails you collect and how many emails you send, but this is a tool that prints money. For all of my business Klaviyo (email) makes up 20-30% of the stores total revenue, so if your business is doing a million dollars without any emphasis on email that could be an extra $250k/yr you're missing out on! Klaviyo has all the basic features of sending automated flows like a welcome or abandon cart but also things like back-in-stock notifications so you can email people when you restock items that were sold out, and also helps with merchandise planning. 
 

Email flows are absolutely Godly for brands who want to create a much more customer-centric experience, and automate everything from order follow-ups to dishing out coupon codes, etc. Use Klaviyo for more than driving sales. Use it to connect with your customers and get them to perfect actions beyond purchasing, such as writing reviews, joining private groups on social media, etc. We set up Klaviyo for all of our clients to ensure they have a robust customer acquisition and retention strategy.

Return Management: Returnly

Using an app to manage your returns is a huge time saver for your customer service team (one of our reps was dedicating a few hours every day on returns, and now it's down to a few per week total), but it also just streamlines the experience for your customer. It auto-generates shipping labels to any carrier of your choice, and works in US (not currenctly working for international returns.To learn more about return management, please visit this blog post we created.
 

Yotpo or Stamped.io Product Reviews

Product reviews for your Shopify store aren’t just important, they are critical to users’ purchasing decisions. During The Baymard Institute's large-scale usability testing, "95% of users relied on reviews to evaluate the product or learn more about products. In some cases, users mainly used the product information contained in the reviews instead of the product descriptions or spec sheets."

It's critical for your customer experience to feature reviews, and both of these apps work well in integrating into your product pages. These apps send automatic review requests to your customers, making the entire review collection process easy and quick. Both apps help collect product reviews, ratings, site reviews and photos using automatic review emails or directly on-site with a review widget. 

We also highly recommend checking out Shopify's post on the 27 Free Shopify Apps to Help You Build, Manage, and Grow Your Store

Looking to build or redesign your Shopify website? Check out the Exhibea Website.