The Best Shopify Marketing Apps of 2021

Because of its speed, security, scalability, and a whole host of other benefits, Shopify has quickly become a premier eCommerce platform for merchants. It offers a ton of native features and functionality that make it easy to quickly stand up online stores and start selling products.

But as merchants begin to grow and look for more opportunities to increase revenue, they start asking more of their Shopify setups. Specifically, they look for ways to improve their marketing strategies, get their products in front of more people, and drive conversions. The extensive Shopify App Store serves as a marketplace of possibilities for merchants, allowing them to tack on some powerful third-party plugins and tools to their eCommerce setups to enhance their marketing efforts.

From omnichannel marketing, to rewards programs, to SEO, here are Codal’s picks for the top Shopify marketing apps.

Emarsys

In order to stay competitive in the current eCommerce environment, many brands are choosing to launch omnichannel marketing strategies — and reaping the benefits. Brands that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates when compared to businesses that use more traditional sales and marketing strategies.

The goal of omnichannel eCommerce is to deconstruct the walls between individual sales channels, providing a consistent experience across touchpoints like social media, marketplaces, mobile, kiosks, and more. By aligning your sales and marketing strategies across channels, you create a holistic and unified brand experience for consumers.

Emarsys offers the most comprehensive platform for eCommerce brands seeking to deploy omnichannel marketing strategies. It leverages existing eCommerce data to help you deliver personalized experiences to customers with minimal effort. It integrates seamlessly with Facebook, Google, and Instagram ad platforms, as well as numerous other touchpoints, to ensure you can meet your customers on their terms.

dotdigital

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of driving traffic to your Shopify site and leads to more brand awareness and — everyone’s favorite eCommerce metric — conversions. With a return on investment (ROI) of 38-to-1, an effective approach to email is a key component of any well-rounded eCommerce marketing strategy. dotdigital offers one the most intuitive and intelligent email marketing applications currently available for Shopify merchants.

dotdigital’s simple WYSIWYG editor makes sending personalized, timely emails to customers incredibly easy. Plus, it offers robust automation capabilities, so you can create hyper-specific email campaigns based on consumer behavior and other factors. As a bonus, dotdigital lets you incorporate AI-powered product recommendations into your emails, helping you drive sales from new and existing customers.

Klevu

You can’t have a successful Shopify eCommerce site without intelligent search functionality. As a general rule, customers that use the search bar to browse for products are more engaged and, as a result, more likely to make purchases. Delivering accurate search results to connect these shoppers with the products they’re looking for drives them to convert — and maximizes the value of your traffic.

Used by over 3,000 merchants around the world, Klevu’s Advanced Smart Search app is one of the premier search tools on Shopify. A great choice for headless brands, Klevu incorporates natural language processing (NLP) and AI into the search bar to deliver instant and accurate search results based on customer behavior and intent. It also uses insights gleaned from searches to provide customers with relevant product recommendations to encourage upselling and cross-selling.

Yotpo Product Reviews & Photos

Incorporating social proof into online stores is a highly effective method of boosting conversion rates for eCommerce brands. And when it comes to eCommerce websites, the best form of social proof is customer reviews. In fact, 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as a personal recommendation. How’s that for impactful?

Yotpo’s Product Reviews & Photos app is the premier tool for Shopify merchants looking to incorporate customer content into their eCommerce sites to increase conversion. The app offers extensive free functionality, as well as some impressive paid features, including user-generated content like photos, as well as coupons and Q&As.

Smile: Rewards & Loyalty

Acquiring new customers can be extremely costly for merchants. Anything you spend to draw in new customers-think advertising costs, discounts, etc.-ultimately eats into your revenue. This is why retaining existing customers is so important for upstart eCommerce brands. Driving down customer acquisition costs (CAC) while encouraging customers to keep coming back is the name of the game. One of the most common and effective ways of achieving this goal is to implement loyalty and rewards programs, and Smile: Rewards & Loyalty can help make that happen.

Trusted by 40,000+ Shopify merchants, Smile helps brands get better engagement from their customers through perks, discounts, VIP benefits, and other loyalty programs. Plus, it helps brands stand up referral programs that build social proof and inspire grassroots marketing. Smile is one of the most extensive and easy-to-use loyalty apps available and is an extremely valuable tool for eCommerce marketers.

SEO Manager

A well-rounded SEO strategy can make or break an eCommerce brand. SEO strategies are relatively inexpensive methods of ensuring customers can easily find your products through a simple Google search. But SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” proposition. Content on your eCommerce site needs to be continually tweaked to ensure it is primed to be well-positioned in search results as Google’s algorithm evolves. A good app can help you save time and effort ensuring your products appear on the first page of search results. And that’s exactly what SEO Manager delivers.

The app makes implementing SEO changes as easy as pie, helping you to rank higher in search engine results with minimal investment. SEO Manager makes it easy to be proactive in getting your store to appear on the first page of Google search results and provides real-time feedback on how your content is performing.

Candy Rack

If your online store is going to be successful in the long run, you’ll need to figure out how to upsell your products to customers. Thankfully, as the famous Apple phrase goes, there’s an app for that. Candy Rack helps merchants easily add one-click opportunities to upsell or cross-sell services like technical support, or to bundle products with related items. Candy Rack is effective because it provides an easy framework for merchants to increase order values, drawing additional sales revenue when customers have already committed to making a purchase.

Get the most out of the Shopify App Store

With Shopify’s expansive set of apps, your store has numerous options to improve its marketing capabilities. As a certified Shopify partner, Codal can help you learn more about its third-party tools and how they can help you build a well-rounded marketing strategy.

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

Originally published at https://codal.com.