When it comes to marketing, you need to sharpen up your arsenal with a number of tactics to help you bring out the best in your strategy. For some people, a great affiliate program, email list, or even social media presence helps to take your e-commerce marketing to another level. However, apps have become a dependable service for desktop and mobile services. Speaking of which, Shopify has built a reputation of creating premier marketing apps to help e-commerce stores run efficiently. Here are 4 great shopify apps to help you set the standard for your own business. If you want a list of other awesome shopify apps then check affiliate app geeks.
Omnistar Affiliate Software
When it comes to affiliate software, it can’t get much better than this. Do you have a growing ecommerce brand but you need the right push to make sure that stays here for the long run? Omnistar Affiliate Software (OSI) is your answer. Why? Here are some main reasons why you want to use this in your ecommerce brand:
- You’ll get more website visitors to promote your brand
- Turn more customers into affiliate agents
- Turn your leads into sales from each page of the website
- Grow an effective email list
- Reduce your bounce rate
- Reward your referrals
- Develop great partnerships with brands
This is just the tip of the iceberg. What makes OSI stand out from the rest is the A-B-C approach to integrating your software. Let’s say you’ve been a Shopify user for a while, but want to use another program to do your affiliate marketing. Well, OSI makes it easy for you to integrate your software. The great thing is you don’t have to worry about writing a bunch of code. It’s all pretty much written for you because you can just copy and paste. It takes just a few minutes of your time. However, if you don’t even want to spend that much, you can get this service done free of charge with your sign up to the software ($47-$247 depending on the level of the plan).
There are a lot of great benefits to using OSI like having a contest built-in for your loyal affiliates. This makes it much easier to see who really supports your brand and definitely adds a bit of kick to your program. Your loyal affiliates will be rewarded with great prizes and it helps to keep them there long term. Additionally, they have great exit intent and timed popups. This is perfect for building subscribers. You always want to cater to their needs and find a way to do it in a non-invasive manner. It’s always better to catch flies with honey, not vinegar. You’ll find that they help you create good banners to draw in more traffic and sales. It’s important to have things stick out more so that it attracts the eye.
Not to mention, a support team is very important. You never know what technical issues or general inquiries can come about on the job. They have great service for sales and support on the phone from 10am-7pm EST (Monday-Friday). If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact someone from the team. Additionally, if you need a live demo of how the program works, you can gain access to that as well. It’s always good to have a program that generally wants you to succeed and doesn’t do it solely for financial gain. They will work with you to help get your goals in order so you can truly excel in your niche.
Upsell on Exit & Visit
This is honestly one of the most important marketing tactics, period. It’s better to have 50 customer purchase 10 items a piece than to have 500 just buy one thing. It’s about cultivating a loyal following and knowing what items tick and the ones that don’t. With an app like this is in your marketing campaign, it’ll make things a lot easier to find the data to help you see what products attract your customers for the long term. A few of the main features of this app include the following:
- Make an offer to a client who’s leaving the store and did not make a purchase.
- Set up an exclusive offer to any first time visitors.
- Get statistical analysis of the views of popups and if they were used in the checkout.
This is a great foundation for a few reasons. One, you’ll be able to really get that last ditch effort in to turn a lead to an actual buying decision. This is very important because people buy on impulse and if you give them the right kind of motivation, it’ll surely help you out in the long term.
Additionally, the first time visitor needs to be impressed. Maybe you can set up an offer of 30% off the first item they purchase, a buy one/get one free option, or even free shipping depending on the spending amount. Any kind of incentive will certainly make that first purchase stick. Also, if you have consistent deals, it keeps them coming back for more. Speaking of coming back for more, it’s good to see what popups work and how they were used in the checkout. Maybe you have a popup coupon and you find that 20 out 25 people used during the checkout process. What this means is 80% of the people used it, which ultimately says: the coupon works!
For basic use, it’s free to implement in your program. However, the advanced features cost up to $19.95. This is the perfect measure to use when you’re getting a rhythm with your clients. You always need to test what works and what doesn’t. You can get a gauge of what coupons or popups perform the best. The great thing is you can edit the message as needed because it takes a bit of time to find the actual call to action that gets the most response. Take the effort to find out what kinds of things really work in your favor. You’ll be surprised with what a few well-placed popups can do to help you gain some extra sales. Do an experiment with them and see how it affects your reach. You can set popups for particular pages, for a specific amount of time, and even at a particular price point at the checkout. It’s all in how you want to really cater to you and the customer’s interest.
Outfy – Social Media Promotion
The need for social media has become more apparent these days as people want to interact. Social media marketing is a gateway to finding out the trends/relevancy of different topics. As an ecommerce marketer, you can certainly use this to your advantage in regards to expanding the range of your demographic. Remember, some people like more interactivity on social media than they do strictly a website. It’s important to also cater to the on the go people who might enjoy a little more personal dialogue before they make a purchase decision. So what does Outfy do for you? Good question. Here are some features you’ll enjoy:
- Helps you save valuable time
- Connect your store to URL
- Make uniform postings by automating it through up to 12 networks
- Auto-syncing
- Put posts on auto-pilot
- Create different shoutouts across all your forms of media
If you’re the ecommerce person that doesn’t like to be trapped behind a desk, this is an advantage for you. You can work through a mobile app and manage your different accounts with ease and speed. Since there is no monthly fee, you can pay as you use it to really set in a good budget. You know when’s the time to pitch a product and go all in or fall back and let nature take its course. There’s a lot of flexibility because you can fill up the credits as you go or when you may have a campaign coming up. This helps you pre-determine how you’ll get your posts together as well as give them a certain time period of showing on your social media platforms. By choosing this method, it’ll help you get on a better plan of budgeting things. Whether you want to display new product or recurring items, the choice is yours on how you want to map everything out accordingly.
Another great thing about this service is you won’t be working alone. There is round the clock customer service in case of any major questions or concerns. They have a 24/7 chat available for your quick questions and will be able to help you out ASAP. If you’re more comfortable with email, you’ll get a response in 24 hrs. Maybe you like a bit more of one on one, you can use the customer connect option to get even more help. With a price ranging as low as 2.5 cents per share or post, you can build a great custom program that helps you accelerate your social media campaign.
SEO Image Optimize
This is very underrated but the right image really can make a difference between a purchase or a simple “on to the next site” kind of decision. You definitely need to get your image optimization game up to date because Google still looks at the content. Having well-placed images and descriptions will help you gain traffic and sales. You need this attention because it’s all about capturing a certain audience. Let’s say your ecommerce business was on beauty products. It would be helpful to have multiple views of the product as well as people using it. However, the search engine can’t read the images. It’s like organic ice on a road during the winter. It’s very hard to trace but you know it’s there. That’s why it’s so important to use a good image optimizer so you have the right text to go with the image. This way the search engine can crawl your page and rank you much better.
The good thing about SEO Image Optimizer is you can set it up in less than a minute. It already has a reputation of being a stellar service. In fact, it’s one the top selling products in Shopify. Just go to the reviews and you’ll see the amount good faith that the people put into app. You can pick either a default template or your very own. When you have right optimization tactics to add to your images, you can really get a leg up on your competition. Some business might be old school and don’t know the value of optimizing your content. You can take this as a step in the right direction in order to defeat your adversaries. Additionally, this is a free service. And don’t worry about coding…one click install right off the bat. If you’re strapped for time and don’t want to go through so much just to add context to pictures, this is the app you need to download. Once you start to optimize your images, you’ll notice much more traffic, interaction, and sales. It all works as a domino effect.
Remember, this is a part of marketing because you are giving detail to the product you intend to sell. You’re creating a picture in a visitor’s head of what it looks and feels like. This makes things relatable so that they can vision themselves using the product.
These are just 4 quality Shopify apps you can use to enhance your marketing. As you can see, there are good apps that help you in social media promotion, affiliate marketing, image optimization, and even upselling your products. It takes some real strategies to keep your business afloat for the long haul. When you build stability in a number of areas, it’ll help you decide how to expand but at the same time, you’ll keep your identity. What are some good Shopify apps you use for your e-commerce business? Do you go through an affiliate marketing, social media, or more old school approach? Drop us a note below.
