The Best BigCommerce Marketing Apps of 2021

As one of the premier eCommerce platforms, BigCommerce has some pretty impressive native functionality to help retailers get up and running selling products online. But as eCommerce businesses grow and scale, they often look for ways to get more from their eCommerce setups-especially when it comes to marketing. Thankfully, BigCommerce has a large apps marketplace with some powerful third-party plugins and tools that can help round out a successful eCommerce marketing strategy.

From email marketing, to upselling, to rewards programs, and much more, here are Codal’s picks for the best BigCommerce marketing apps.

Yotpo Reviews, Loyalty, Referrals

Adding social proof to online stores is a popular tactic used by eCommerce retailers to boost conversion rates. The strategy is based on the idea that people are likely to get on board with the actions of the masses-meaning if they see evidence that a significant group is doing something one way, they will follow.

When it comes to eCommerce websites, the best form of social proof is customer reviews. According to Hubspot, 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as a personal recommendation. That makes reviews incredibly compelling from a conversion perspective.

Yotpo provides the premier application for incorporating them into your site. Yotpo Reviews offers extensive free functionality, as well as some impressive paid features, including user-generated content like photos, as well as coupons and Q&As.

While incorporating reviews as social proof can be a cost-effective way of enticing new customers to make purchases, numerous brands fall into the trap of spending too much on other, more costly customer acquisition efforts. Spending more on things like advertising to bring new customers in can eat into your revenue and minimize profits. Because of this, retaining existing customers is imperative. Refining your marketing efforts to drive down customer acquisition costs (CAC) and entice returning customers to make purchases is key for all eCommerce businesses. One of the best ways to do this is to implement loyalty and rewards programs, and Yotpo’s Loyalty and Referrals app can make that a reality.

The app makes it easy to enroll customers into a program while automating purchase and referral awards. You get a robust dashboard for creating, launching, and monitoring active rewards programs. Deploying programs timed around holidays or high-traffic periods (hello, Black Friday-Cyber Monday) becomes extremely simple.

With multiple, integrated products on a single eCommerce marketing platform, Yotpo gives brands on BigCommerce an edge by consolidating customer data-allowing merchants to get to know their customers on a deeper level, offer VIP experiences, and achieve higher ROI for their marketing efforts.

Klaviyo

With a return on investment (ROI) of 38-to-1, email is one of the most effective components of a well-rounded eCommerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to boost brand awareness, drive traffic, and ultimately, increase revenue. To give your BigCommerce store a major advantage, consider implementing an extensive email marketing app like Klaviyo.

Klaviyo offers robust email capabilities, like easily customizable templates, simple automation, extensive analytics and reporting, and much more. It also offers powerful integrations that allow you to create improved customer experiences across SMS, in-app communications, and much more. Klaviyo is the perfect tool for newbies and advanced email marketers alike and is a solid addition to any BigCommerce environment.

Optimizely

Here at Codal, we know a thing or two about improving UX to boost the performance of online stores. These days, it’s crucial for online retailers to stay in the know about changing design trends and industry practices to keep their customers satisfied and stay ahead of the competition. Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to make simple yet impactful UX changes to enhance the customer experience of your online store — and generate more sales as a result. Optimizely is a powerful tool that can help you implement those changes.

Optimizely has extensive A/B testing and analytics capturing functionality that allows you to assess how simple changes to your store’s UX-like the location of call to action (CTA) buttons or types of product images-impact its overall performance. Optimizely gives you the freedom to experiment, trying out different approaches in order to find the best path forward to true eCommerce success.

Searchspring

Having intelligent search functionality on your eCommerce store is a must. Shoppers that utilize the search bar on a site tend to be more engaged and more likely to make purchases. Therefore, if you can deliver accurate search results, you maximize the value of your traffic.

Searchspring is one of the premier search and merchandising apps available to BigCommerce merchants. It offers speedy results, with the ability to refine results using auto-generated filters. You can expand your site’s search capabilities to incorporate product attributes and more. Additionally, Searchspring provides merchants the ability to control the full on-site product discovery experience of your BigCommerce store with their advanced merchandising tools and personalized recommendation modules.

Searchspring even offers extensive reporting and analysis capabilities to help you understand more about your customers’ interactions and conversion paths through search and category pages. All these features help your customers find what they are looking for faster and more efficiently, improving your site’s paths-to-purchase and delivering more conversions.

“By implementing Searchspring on your BigCommerce store, you can expect accurate search results, the freedom to fully merchandise your category pages, access to insightful reports, and the ability to index as needed,” says Thomas Turley, director of partnerships at Searchspring.

Easy Upsell

Upselling is an age-old method of growing revenue by getting users who are already making a purchase to upgrade their item or tack on additional ones to their order. Easy Upsell is an app that creates targeted product upsell pop-ups to entice customers to spend a little more when they get to the checkout phase.

Easy Upsell offers three types of upsells, as well as extensive analytics capabilities, A/B testing, support for local currencies, and much more. It’s a powerful tool for extracting extra revenue from purchasers, thus improving your site’s average order value (AOV).

FavSEO

The importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for eCommerce sites cannot be overstated. You need to stay ahead of your competition by ensuring your products rank higher on results pages and therefore attract more traffic to your site. When implemented correctly, SEO strategies are relatively inexpensive methods of ensuring customers can easily find your products through a simple Google search.

FavSEO is aptly named, as it’s the preferred SEO tool for many BigCommerce merchants. It allows you to easily optimize all titles, meta descriptions, and other content to rank higher in search results. FavSEO can also conduct audits to provide visibility into which of your product pages could stand to see SEO improvements. Its SEO Score Card grades your site’s homepage, helping you see where improvements are most needed.

Take advantage of BigCommerce’s app marketplace

With BigCommerce’s expansive list of apps, your store has numerous options to improve its marketing capabilities. As a certified BigCommerce partner, Codal is here to help you learn more about its third-party offerings and how they can help you boost your online store’s conversions

Codal’s eCommerce designers and developers are masters of their craft and can help you select the best BigCommerce apps to help your business drive sales. Interested in learning more about Codal’s BigCommerce solutions? Get in touch today.

Originally published at https://codal.com.