The Best Shopify Marketing App and Tools
Below is a list of Shopify marketing tools we’ve developed to help you get more traffic and sales to your Shopify store. Also included are our recommendations for Shopify apps or additional services in a particular area of growth. These are the best of the best. We are a certified Shopify marketing expert who works with a lot of stores, tried many apps, and have discovered some sneaky tactics. I hope the list helps you.
Reporting, Attribution, and Profit
There are five metrics every ecommerce business investing in marketing needs to measure for optimal use of their money:
- New customer ROAS (ncROAS) measures efficiency. ncROAS = Total Ad Spend / (Shopify Sales of New Customers – Shopify Discounts of New Customers)
- Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures effectiveness. MER = (Shopify Sales of New Customers – Shopify Discounts of New Customers) / Total Ad Spend
- Profit on ad spend (POAS) measures profit. POAS = (Net Sales – Cost of Goods Sold) / Total Ad Spend
- Contribution margin for new customers as your core metric to determine marketing decisions. The average contribution margin per new customer order = New Customer AOV – CAC – ((COGS + Shipping Costs + Gateway Fees) / New Customer Orders) – (Return Percentage * AOV)
- Contribution margin for overall profit. The average contribution margin per order = AOV – Total CPA – ((COGS + Shipping Costs + Gateway Fees) / Orders) – (Return Percentage * AOV)
The problem is, how do you get this data?
All marketing channels cannot separate new versus repeat customers. The data exists only in Shopify so a solution needs to access your Shopify. You also need ad spend across multiple channels pulled together into one location. You need a third-party solution to gather the metrics of ncROAS, MER, POAS, new customer contribution margin, and contribution margin.
To get these key marketing metrics, I recommend Triple Whale. The tool also gives you extra insight for decisions with your own server-side pixel to track first-party data. This deals with tracking limitations of Apple’s privacy policy.
We ask all clients to sign up to Triple Whale because it becomes the heart for growth. Triple Whale can become the central source of truth for your Shopify store to view all meaningful data in real-time.
See the tool in action to profitably scale your advertising.
Facebook Ads
DataFeedWatch for Facebook feed management. The most popular option you hear about is Flexify but it is simplistic. You can do whatever you want with DataFeedWatch. Some profitable tactics we have implemented for Facebook clients using the tool that you cannot do with Flexify include: 1) filling the feed with lifestyle images rather than white isolate photos (based on file name rules) which performs great for dynamic product ads because they look organic, excluding variants from ads when they are 60% or more out of stock (this has helped conversions), and injecting reviews into the feed to build social proof and reduce ad fatigue.
Google Ads
- DataFeedWatch – The ultimate tool for feed management in Shopify to work with all different channels and types of advertising. I extensively brag about this tool in my book Google Shopping for Shopify.
- Google Campaign URL Builder – Track any marketing campaign like Facebook ads or emails, in Google Analytics. I also developed a spreadsheet for you to track your UTM parameters so you know what each refers to.
- Google Ads Match Type Tool – Quickly create various match types from your broad match keyword list for Google and Bing Ads. The right match-type is one of the best ways to improve your AdWords.
SEO
- Related Blog Posts Shopify app – Quickly and easily suggest related blog posts to your readers anywhere on your Shopify blog to improve readership and SEO.
- Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags Shopify app – Perfect hreflang tags for multiple stores even if you have different collections, pages, products, articles, or languages in URLs.
- Link Research Tool – Find quality guest blog opportunities and places to get good links for better SEO and website traffic.
Email Marketing
Most small Shopify stores are on MailChimp, which is a mistake. You need an email platform that lets you automate emails with the finest targeting based on user information, website behaviors, and purchase patterns.
Klaviyo lets you do the standard flows of cart abandonment, customer follow up, newsletter series, and anything you can think of: did a customer view a product for 5-minutes then fail to buy? You can automatically email them about the product and offer your support.
Set up is actually easy yet you have the nuances to develop advanced campaigns. One example is sending a cross-sell email to customers who brought one of your products 30 days ago then having this customer be synced with your Facebook Ads to deliver the same ad message. 90% of successful Facebook advertisers we see on Shopify use Klaviyo to help manage Facebook targeting. There are many other integrations at no extra charge within Klaviyo that make it a data hub for growth marketing.
The email platform is an investment for the lifetime of your store. You can sign-up for a free trial of Klaviyo here.
Direct Mail
Do you rely on digital marketing channels, like email, social media, or Google to reach customers? You’re missing out on an automatic way to get more customers and get customers buying more. Direct mail is a powerful non-digital channel that gets overlookedl.
PostPilot is the #1 direct mail app for Shopify brands. Brands don’t have to go all-in on one marketing channel—an omnichannel approach can generate huge returns. Supplement your Klaviyo flows with automated direct mail campaigns to unlock a new way to “wow” customers. Plus, tangible, premium direct mail is immune to spam filters, unsubscribes, and iOS changes.
PostPilot directly integrates with your Shopify store and Klaviyo account to automate personalized direct mail campaigns based on customer data, behaviors, and purchasing patterns. Getting started is a breeze. Once you connect PostPilot to Shopify, their team of experts will build your campaign for you. All you do is sit back and watch the conversions roll in.
PostPilot is available at a discounted rate for all Digital Darts clients so sign up here today to learn more.
Capturing More Emails With Quizzes
When more people enter your email funnels, you get more sales. Marketers only think of pop-ups and other behavior-interfering messages with coupons as the means to capture more emails. Pop-ups work, but you can do more by also having valuable offers.
The most universal offer a Shopify store can make to increase email captures is a quiz. People love taking quizzes and sharing their answers with friends. We highly recommend Typeform to create quizzes that people enjoy answering while letting you capture emails.
Few people marry at first sight. If you’re running paid ads, 98% of people won’t buy the first time they come to your store. Of that 98%, a high percentage will never come to your store again. The growing limitations with tracking people online is more reason you need to capture someone’s email so you can stay top of mind and eventually persuade them to become a customer.
We’ve used Typeform with Facebook ads to capture email leads for under a dollar. When coupled with an email sequence in Klaviyo, you get an enormous advantage over competitors who try to sell products upfront.
Customer Support
The less time you and staff spend managing customers and enquiries, is more money for the business. Good customer support software is not only about time-saving, but it’s also an overlooked way to grow your store. By responding to social media comments and emails quickly, you create a good customer experience. The challenge a lot of sellers have is managing Facebook comments, Instagram comments, emails, form enquiries, live chat, and phone then you have customer and order details from multiple stores, integration wishes, and efficient order management.
There’s a solution that does all this and more. My recommended software for excellent customer support in Shopify is Gorgias. Gorgias enables merchants to centralize all their customer interactions in a Shopify-integrated helpdesk built with automation and monetization. Stores who spend over $5k a month in advertising on Facebook or Instagram should use Gorgias to improve their return on ad spend.
