If you are an e-commerce merchant building on Shopify, you have an opportunity to access a wide range of tools on the app store. Most of the offerings here will have free plans or trials that you can access easily to test and measure results.

Having the right tools focused on specific parts of your ecommerce funnel will help you achieve better marketing, conversion, and sales results. Paid acquisition is great to get the top of the funnel engine going, but we highly recommend taking advantage of other tools to repair any leaky buckets and retain more of the customers that come into your store.

Here, we’re going to share the top few tools that are highly rated and tested by the Shopify merchant base. The categories that we are covering include tools that help you:

1. Communicate to customers (i.e. leads)
2. Convert customers at a higher rate
3. Increase the average order value (AOV) in customer carts
4. Improve the lifetime value of each customer, and how to retain more of them

Customer Communication Tools (Email Marketing)

We’re going to cover the top two email marketing tools below. Paid advertising is great for brand awareness, but email marketing is by far the most effective channel for merchants to have a cheap, consistent way to share deals and products with customers who love the brand. There are two main tools we found that merchants love that are focused on e-commerce email marketing:

1. Klaviyo: Email Marketing

Rating: 4.3 / 5.0 (1178 Reviews)

Klaviyo helps businesses create memorable experiences across owned marketing channels—email, SMS, web and in-app notifications—by listening for and understanding cues from visitors, subscribers, and customers, and turning that information into valuable, relevant messages.

Tools to Help You Analyze Your Data

2. Putler

Putler is the most comprehensive analytics and reporting app for Shopify. Putler provides you with in-depth reports on sales, products, customers, subscriptions and website visitors. Apart from reports, Putler also helps accomplish marketing tasks like customer segmentation, processing refunds, forecasting, sales heatmaps, and a lot more. Putler is also one of the few tools that can help you monitor and analyze multiple Shopify stores from a single place.  In addition to Shopify, you can connect many other services to Putler like Woocommerce, Paypal, Stripe, Braintree, Bigcommerce, eBay, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, etc.

Tools to Improve Customer Conversion (Social Proof and Urgency)

There are two main mechanisms to help convert customers while they are viewing your email, on your store, or in their final deciding moments at checkout. The first is social proof, which helps a lot to get people to put things in their cart and have trust in the brand/product. The second is urgency while they are at checkout, or browsing products.

Here are some of the highest reviewed social proof tools that can help build the trust that you need to sell more products. Think about when you’re buying something online yourself, and how you always read product reviews before buying. There are tools out there that can help you gather images from customers and use those to promote your products not only on each product page, but you can also use them on other pages as well!

3. Loox Product Reviews Referrals

Rating: 4.9 / 5.0 (6156 Reviews)

Loox is a fully-featured product review app that enables small and large brands to automatically collect customer reviews with photos and beautifully display happy customer content. Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants use our easy setup reviews plugin to boost trust, drive word of mouth and referrals, and increase customer retention and sales. Loox verified reviews and photo reviews are your greatest assets for increasing brand awareness and improving conversion rates.

4. Judge.me Product Reviews

Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 (3726 Reviews)

Judge.me helps you collect and display star ratings and reviews about your products and Shopify store. Social proof from reviews and other user-generated content like photos and videos increases your conversion rate, organic traffic, and buyer engagement.

Have you ever been casually shopping around and all of a sudden a count-down timer pops up at checkout, or the store is telling you there’s only a few left? These tactics are used by the top merchants to encourage sales conversions and get customers to buy now, not later. Here are some tools that you can use to convert like the best.

5. Ultimate Sales Boost

Rating: 4.8 / 5.0 (6703 Reviews)

As an eCommerce merchant, you may know that a sense of urgency, scarcity and trust can drive more sales from online shoppers who tend to procrastinate and delay their purchasing decisions. With ad traffic getting more expensive, newly launched stores cannot afford to let customers have a second thought about whether your store is trustworthy, or whether they should leave the cart and come back later.

6. Sales Pop Up - Conversion Pro

Rating: 4.7 / 5.0 (2838 Reviews)

Sales pop ups create urgency and allow you to show your visitors what items have been bought recently to build the trust and creating social proof that your store needs among new store visitors.

Tools to Increase Average Order Value (AOV) in Customer Carts

Something that Amazon does great that most merchants don’t do is a proper upsell and cross-sell recommendation to customers while they are browsing and close to paying at checkout. Everyone has definitely spent an extra few bucks on things they didn’t really need but because it was shown at the right time, and you’ve been looking at similar products for a while, you added it just to stop thinking about it. Now, you can do the same with these tools.

7. Frequently Bought Together

Rating: 4.9 / 5.0 (1649 Reviews)

You have probably browsed Amazon before and noticed that sometimes you can add a bunch of related products with one single click. The Frequently Bought Together app brings this smart upsell feature into Shopify in the most convenient way: you can have it ready in your store within seconds and with zero configuration.

8. Bold Upsell - True upsells!

Rating: 4.6 / 5.0 (1508 Reviews)

Trusted by over 1,000+ merchants to increase average order value during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Make each customer order bigger and better. Offer and replace customers items with an upgraded version of their product. Upsell customers from a single product to a product bundle or kit. Cross-sell complementary products that are added to your customers cart.

Tools to Increase Repeat Purchases And Customer Lifetime Value

9. Apteo

We all know that keeping an existing customer is less expensive and more profitable than acquiring a new customer, but there aren't a lot of great tools on the market today to help you re-engage with your existing customers. The most successful ecommerce businesses have figured out how to keep their customers continuing to make purchases by identifying exactly who their customers are, what they want, and what messaging they'll respond to. Apteo helps you do just that.

Generic blast emails are so last decade.

What the top e-commerce stores are doing is segmenting out personas of customers (i.e. high value shoppers, discount hunters, etc.) and sending different deals and messaging to each cohort of customers. By using A.I., Apteo automatically segments your customers based on what they're likely to do next (for example, which of your customers are primed for a cross-sale on a specific product, or which customers are at-risk and need to be re-engaged with a discount), and helps you send out personalized marketing campaigns to those customers using the tools you already use. Apteo helps you make better marketing decisions by using your customer data to help you figure out exactly what you should do next.

The best part? You can try Apteo for free and get started with your own predictive marketing today.

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