If you did nothing else in the next 30 days to launch your next product, or improve a current product, other than follow the product creation secrets that I’m about to show you, you’d grow your online store’s sales faster than 90% of all businesses.

In this video below, I’ll give you tons of product creation examples from real e-commerce brands, breaking down winners. You’ll learn what’s important for winning sales in e-commerce with a simple formula so that you can do it too.

Whether you sell private label, do dropshipping, or develop your products from scratch, this is how you smash competitors, even Amazon. I will also give you an insider trick of someone doing this as I travel to Turkey to spy on a multi-million dollar Shopify client who makes winning products within 2 days.

The Science of Creating Winning Products that Customers Love and Competitors Fear

This recent story that happened to me will change how you think about anything you make or sell.

A while back I filled in a form online to get solar installed on my new home. The solar company was quick to reply, showed me where the panels would go on our home, and gave a low-priced quote that blew my mind.

Most solar jobs are made of panels that push power to the inverter. I shared with the company that I wanted the inverter for a future battery at a different location to where they would normally put it. When the electrician came to do the job, the company never shared this requirement with the installer. This meant the installer had to get extra cabling that he didn’t have and would spend more time installing it by climbing through the roof.

The installer also didn’t want to continue because he said I didn’t get enough panels for my power consumption. He said I would have warranty issues with the quality of equipment, and I’d spend dozens of hours myself chasing future warranties because the company was just salesmen. My secret installer saved me. He wanted me to cancel the job so I did.

Then I got another local solar company to quote and do the job. They looked at my power bills, they knew I wanted a battery in the future, and they came out on-site before the job to see for themselves where everything was to be placed. What I brought was not cheaper, it was not faster, but it was better in every way. I paid them three times as much. Now when the apocalypse comes, I still have electricity to make my coffee.

This story shows you there’s only three ways to make a winning product or service. You can play the price game, the speed game, or the superiority game. The solar company I went with won the superiority game. Whether you dropship, tweak a private label product, or develop your own products, I will show you how to win these business games and give you loads of real examples so your next product doesn’t launch to an audience of crickets.

The Price Game: Racing to the Bottom

Proctor and Gamble are masters of the cheaper game. Proctor and Gamble’s products such as Gillette, Crest, Oral-B, Pantene, Olay, and Vicks are in major supermarkets around the world. If P&G can source coconut oil used in a moisturizer for 1 cent cheaper, it’s worth it for them because they have economies of scale. The cheaper they can make a product, they either get more profit or they can sell for less to get more distribution in low-cost retail outlets.

You’re an entrepreneur without millions of dollars, supplier relationships, and manufacturing assets. You don’t have a chance in making a winning product by getting people the product for cheaper. There are some ideas where you could get lucky, but this is an arbitrage strategy that would last only a few months until someone in “China” beats you out.

Even if you’re winning the price game in a niche, it’ll always be short-term. Your profit will suck because you won’t have distribution like Proctor and Gamble. There’s no economies of scale. Marketer Seth Godin said:

It’s tempting to race to the bottom. The problem is that you might win, and then you’ll have to stay there.

The Speed Game: How to Use Product Creation to Get Superior Results for Customers in Less Time

If you don’t make a winning product by having it cheaper, a second option is you can give someone results faster.

Chilisleep lets people go to sleep faster by getting a person’s body temperature to the right level for sleep. Most doctors say people sleep best between 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 15.6 to 20 degrees Celsius. Their direct and indirect competition is anything for sleep, from blue lights, masks, and ear plugs to doonas, white noise machines, and supplementation.

Here’s another example of giving someone results faster, but beyond the product. Our client Blue Bungalow has same day delivery so women can shop online for clothing that morning, then be wearing their new outfit that night at dinner. This gives people a reason to buy from them over their competition.

Delivering results faster, works for services as well. I run a Shopify marketing agency and one of our goals is to get clients a win from day one. Sometimes we’re able to take over the Google Ads or Facebook Ads for a Shopify store that’s been running campaigns for years, then get instant results because we ask deep questions about the business, research the market with ChatGPT, look at the data, and then do what works on the paid ads channel. This happened to our Turkish client Galen Leather.

A good exercise you can work through is asking yourself, how can you deliver faster results in your product and business? List many ideas down. You will always have a better business by delivering results faster because you’re increasing value.

The Superiority Game: How to Create Products That Sell Like Crazy and Multiply Your Profit

You’ve learned about making products cheaper and getting people results faster. The big secret to success in products or services is the third option: making it better.

There’s three ways in the product creation process to make better products. This is the game where most entrepreneurs succeed.

Alex Hormozi’s value equation lays out 4 factors of superiority in value, one being the speed to get results, which we’ve already covered:

Value = (Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay x Effort and Sacrifice)

Looking at maximizing the dream outcome. Chilisleep not only gets people to sleep faster, but by controlling body temperature throughout the night, they deliver on a bigger dream of a better night’s sleep—and literally, more dreams.

Schoolyard Snacks is another e-commerce brand that delivers on a bigger dream. They help people eat keto while giving them delicious options. You’ve been on a diet so you know how hard it is to eat well. If the food tastes great, the dopamine hit helps you stay the course of your eating plan.

Better doesn’t have to be a totally better product. It’s about getting the result. I have a whetstone used to sharpen my chef’s knife. To get a sharp edge, you need to sharpen at a consistent angle. I ordered a whetstone from a particular company because they sold a cheap plastic insert, which probably cost less than a dollar, that helps me maintain the same angle every time for a sharp edge.

If you’re a competitor, you could still do better than this product because sharpening towards the body is dangerous, takes time to do, and gets messy. There’s a robotic machine that solves all of this.

High-end restaurants will pay over five figures for this machine to solve real problems because they get more value than a one dollar plastic product. I want one. I can’t get a robotic knife sharpener that will sharpen 50 knives per hour, but you can make me smile by subscribing to this channel, and turning on notifications, so you can hear when a new video comes out to grow your Shopify store.

Maximize the Dream Outcome

You don’t create a winning product with a magical innovation by hiding inside a workshop. To deliver something better, you need to understand your customer’s desires, needs, and pain points. You need “Genchi Genbutsu” as the Japanese would say, or “Go and see”. Genchi Genbutsu is about witnessing reality, not relying on second-hand information or assumptions.

If you watched a beginner with no help sharpen a knife on a whetstone, you would see them struggle to maintain the same angle. You have to “go and see” to discover this so you can make a superior product.

• A backpack designer can spend a day hiking with people, who have different bodies and walking techniques, to understand where straps might chafe or pockets become inaccessible.
• A kitchenware creator can attend cooking classes, or watch people cook inside their home, to see which utensils chefs reach for and which they avoid.
• A children’s toy creator would make superior products by sitting in on playgroups to observe how kids interact with different toys compared to someone who spent no time watching children play.

These show the principle of immersing yourself in real-world scenarios to shape and refine physical product ideas. Businesses make the mistake during the product development process of jumping straight from ideas to sourcing.

7-Step Product Development Process

The most common product development process has seven steps: generate ideas, research, plan, prototype, source, cost, and commercialize.

Our Turkish client Galen Leather, is able to understand customer desires, needs, and pain points to make a better product faster than anything I’ve ever seen. They’ve figured out how to identify problems, prototype, then deliver on them quickly for a competitive edge.

In my interview with Yusuf from Galen Leather, he said, “We must listen to customers for what they need… We produce the first prototype and take some videos and show this product to our customers on social media. This is done to get feedback about the products. We then make a second, third, and fourth prototype.” The feedback is used in the product creation process to make perfect products.

While this is short of truly “going and seeing” customers in action, the closer you get to Genchi Genbutsu, rather than thinking in your own head or reading things online about what people are doing, the more superior your products will be in the eyes of shoppers. It makes marketing ridiculously easier when you have a good product that fulfills a need, solving some pain point or problem.

Many incredible businesses have been built from founders who scratched their own itch. They solved a problem they had. This is another real example of Genchi Genbutsu because the problem is right in your face. Many founders have crafted superior solutions to problems they experienced.

When I went to Turkey to meet Galen Leather’s co-founder, I used a Trtl Pillow on the plane.

This pillow saved me from a mental breakdown as I was able to get a few hours sleep on a 14-hour flight. The founders Michael Corrigan and David Kellock made the product to scratch their own itch. They found a u-shaped travel pillow made for uncomfortable flights. When I arrived in Turkey, I found out Galen Leather did the same with their product development process.

Galen Leather’s co-founder, Zeynep, was asked by her husband for a leather case that holds three fountain plants. So Zeynep took workshops and studied YouTube videos to master her craft. She enjoyed the product creation process. In the act, she ended up making a superior product.

Maximize the Likelihood of Achieving The Dream Outcome

The second way you can make a better product is by increasing the chance of someone getting their dream outcome.

Chilisleep is able to help almost anyone sleep better by getting their body temperature to the right level. Since they have a pad for couples, they increase the likelihood of achieving the dream outcome of a better night’s sleep. If they had a pad that worked for one person, the dream outcome would be less likely for couples because people’s body temperatures vary so much.

The plastic angle attachment for my knife nearly guarantees someone can get their dream outcome of a sharp knife. The robotic machine is superior because it does guarantee a sharp knife. Ah man, that robot is impressive. Something that anyone should do for a product that is not dead-simple to use, is to provide a good video tutorial, a step-by-step article, and customer support. This way you increase the chance of a customer achieving that dream outcome.

Minimising The Effort Required From the Buyer

The third and last way you can win the superiority game is by minimizing the effort required from the buyer.

If I could transform your lawn from dead to a putting green by sprinkling some magic dust on it, that’d be worth so much more than any other option.

You can have kits or an entire store, dedicated to solving a problem, as long as you are reducing the effort required from the buyer compared to other options. Japanese Taste gathers the best items including groceries, makeup, and supplements from Japan in one place. This saves Japanophiles the effort of going to multiple places.

Another example is Soylent. Soylent’s founder was an engineer. And in the most engineering way possible, he scratched his own itch because food took too much time for him to prepare and consume. He purchased 35 chemical ingredients that he deemed necessary for survival, blended them with water, and consumed only this drink for the next 30 days.

Drinking Soylent requires so much less effort than the alternative of shopping, cooking, chewing your food, and washing. Chewing is for peasants. No dietitian will tell you to live off Soylent, but my point remains that you can make a better product by making it require less effort.

The key to successful product creation lies in deeply understanding customer needs, innovating beyond the basics. Skip the whole price war drama; it’s a dead-end street. Put your energy into making products that deliver results faster and way better than alternative options. Embrace Genchi Genbutsu to understand the real experiences of customers. This is your ticket to create products that are mind-blowingly awesome so they sell like crazy.

Discover how ancient garden design principles can can help you sell and retain more Shopify subscriptions. Whether you’re thinking about setting up a subscription or already have one, I’ll show you the tactics used by million dollar and one hundred million dollar brands.

I’ve read a few books and currently care for my own new Japanese garden built from scratch and am amazed at the principles that help Digital Darts’ clients grow their business. Japanese gardens are not merely picturesque landscapes; they are meticulously crafted with each element serving a purpose.

This blog post, inspired by our YouTube video below, reveals nine secrets to supercharge your Shopify store with predictable revenue every week, month, and year.

How To Sell More Subscriptions on Shopify: The Harmonious Blend of Old and New

Much like a Japanese garden is a sanctuary for introspection and peace, a well-designed Shopify subscription program can serve as a stable revenue stream for your business. The key lies in blending ancient principles with modern strategies to create something extraordinarily profitable. Whether you’re in the initial stages of setting up a subscription business or already running one, these nine secrets could be the missing link between you and the million-dollar brands.

First Secret: Deliberate Design—Your Shopify Subscription Strategy

I went to the Japanese garden at the University of Southern Queensland to dive in and see how each tree, stone, and line has a specific reason for being. Similarly, your Shopify subscription program should not come about by accident. It needs planning, research, and a well-defined strategy.

A Harvard Business School study found retaining 5% more customers can increase profits by 25-95%. Possibly the best way to retain customers is with a subscription. Turn that one hard-earned sale into five or more sales.

The Digital Darts’ trifecta tech stack for subscriptions is:

1. Loop
2. Klaviyo
3. Shopify

Second Secret: First Impressions and Shopify Subscription Previews

Japanese gardens are designed to draw visitors in from the first step. Similarly, your online store should entice customers by giving them a preview of what they can expect from your subscription service.

Don’t push for subscriptions from the get-go as your lifetime purchase value will likely drop. Offer a one-time purchase to let customers test the waters, letting the product experience and follow up marketing convert the customer into a subscriber.

Practical Tips:

Highlight the one-time purchase option in your ads over subscriptions. On the product page, set the one-time purchase as the default option. Eventually you want to A/B test this to be confident in what’s for your store.

The below is an example of a “preview” of your product with a one-time purchase. It can entice customers, giving them confidence in the value they’ll receive from a subscription.

Bonus Insight: When Violating the Rule Works

Sometimes, the principle of easing customers into a subscription can be circumvented if you offer an irresistible bundle. Where I have seen this principle be violated and do well, is when the subscription is in a bundle that is so attractive it pulls you in. Manscaped do this well. A central one-time product like an electric trimmer is offered with unique extras to make the bundle attractive. The subscription is then tied into it. If you were to buy each individual item alone, it’d cost you over hundred dollars more.

Third Secret: Pathways and Pricing Display—Guide the Customer Journey

Just like pathways in a Japanese garden serve to guide the visitor’s eye and pace their journey, your pricing strategy can guide your customers’ perception of cost. A straightforward path in a garden may appear daunting, but a winding one seems more manageable. Similarly, breaking down a monthly subscription cost into a daily expense makes it more palatable for your customer.

Practical Tips:

• • Avoid using percentage savings, which can be confusing. Use clear cost comparisons like “$0.93 per serving for a subscription” versus “$1.11 per serving for a one-time purchase.”
  • For consumables like coffee, don’t just mention the number of bags; specify the number of cups a customer can make.

Chamberlain Coffee, pictured, right next to the vague number of bags you can buy, spell out the amount of cups of coffee you can make.

Fourth Secret: Simplicity and User Experience—The Kanso Principle

Japanese gardens often embody the principle of “Kanso”, which emphasizes simplicity. Similarly, your Shopify subscription program should offer an intuitive user experience.

One Shopfiy app that excels in subscriptions is Loop. With its straightforward interface, you can implement advanced subscription growth hacks without tech hurdles.

Fifth Secret: Seasonal Changes and Follow-Up—Adapt with Time

In a Japanese garden, there’s an understanding that certain tree species shed leaves during particular seasons or that a specific plant needs protection from a bug. Similarly, your follow-up communications should adapt based on individual customer behavior and product-specific timelines.

Practical Tips:

• Use Shopify and Klaviyo data to predict when a customer is likely to make their next purchase.
• Employ complex segmentation in Klaviyo to send the right messages at the right time, such as suggesting VIP actions after X number of purchases.

Below, see how in Klaviyo, you can get as complex as you want with segmentation of emails based on what someone has done, what they haven’t done, and who they are. After a certain number of repeat purchases, you can suggest different VIP actions to them like a phone call with a founder for feedback or a special product offer. We can create all of this for you as part of our email marketing service.

Consider an email crafted for a brand that is sent out when Klaviyo predicts the expected date of the customer’s next order. If the product has a limited lifespan, is a consumable, or needs some replinishable cross-sell to support it, the email can promote the benefits of a subscription, breaking down costs and comparing it to one-off purchases.

By understanding the seasonality of your customer’s needs and preferences, you can send timely messages that are more likely to convert them into subscribers.

Sixth Secret: Japanese Black Pine and Growth Steroids—Optimize for Sustainable Growth

The Japanese Black Pine is an excellent example of how meticulous care can lead to growth optimization. When tips, known as candles, develop on the trees, gardeners fertilize the tree, eventually pinching off the candles to redistribute energy. This “hack” gets new growth within the branch for a lovely shape.

There’s a way to manage customer subscriptions to stimulate steady growth in your store. If your product helps customers walk the right path, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases and tell others. Illuminating the path will rapidly grow your subscriptions.

Practical Tips:

• Communicate upcoming subscription orders with customers via email, and educate them on how to make the most of their purchases.
• Use Loop’s features to let customers know what’s in their upcoming order and how they can tweak it for maximum value.
• Email customers about an upcoming subscription. In the email, include links to FAQs for any maintenance questions they might have about their subscription. Below is an example of an upcoming renewal email reminder automatically sent to customers.

Seventh Secret: Discovery and Personalization in Shopify Subscriptions

Japanese gardens invite visitors to discover landscapes bit by bit. Similarly, personalized subscription offerings can make your service more enticing to different customer groups.

Practical Tips:

• Empower customers with full control over their subscriptions to reduce cancellations.
• Utilize Loop to add upsells and offer customization options to members. Your ecommerce strategy can literally be around crafting new products for subscribers to increase lifetime value. The best brands are doing this. Each cross-sell or upsell directly contributes to profit. The more complementary your products are, the better uptake you’ll have.

Eighth Secret: Koi Carp Lessons—Setting the Right Subscription Frequency

Just as Koi Carp have specific feeding needs, the frequency of your subscription offerings needs to be just right. Feeding too much leads to health issues, while feeding too little leaves the fish hungry.

If the frequency of your subscription is too high, people will cancel as they get a backlog of products. If the frequency is too low, you miss profit by not getting your subscribers their purchase soon enough. The secret is to let customers set their frequency before and during the subscription.

Practical Tips:

• Use Loop to let customers set and adjust the frequency of their subscription.
• Provide options to change quantity, immediately place orders, or pause subscriptions to minimize churn.

Ninth Secret: Pruning—Focus on What Matters

In Japanese gardens, pruning is essential to promote new growth and longevity of plants. Similarly, you need to focus your business resources on what really matters.

Practical Tips:

• Run in-depth analytics on your product portfolio to identify what first purchase, or what marketing channel, leads to the highest lifetime value. Consider a 120-day or less window to help cashflow. This directs resources to drive growth. Use Triple Whale to find the products and channels that are most profitable.  You can track and analyze the lifetime value within customer cohorts of first purchases and marketing channels to acquire great customers for your brand.
• Prune away non-essential efforts to concentrate on high-impact activities. For you, what low-yielding tasks detract from tasks that drive profit?

Bonus Growth Hacks for Subscription Growth

Here are some additional tips to enhance your subscription program, all of which can be implemented within Loop:

• Offer passwordless logins.
• Enable login from different sections of your store.
• Allow coupon usage for added incentivization.
• Let customers merge subscriptions to save on shipping.
• Facilitate address changes.
• Translate content to customers’ primary languages.
• Provide incentives to retain customers upon cancellation.

The 9 subscription principles in this video were taken from my book Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization. You can read it for free right now to help you do what’s taught in the video so you get more revenue per visitor.

Subscribe to the Digital Darts newsletter for more tips to profitably grow your Shopify business by entering your name and email below.

You want more visitors to buy from your Shopify store, but don’t know where to begin. There is a lot of theory, case studies, and bad advice out there about what you can do to increase your ecommerce conversion rate.

Your store’s ability to efficiently turn a visitor into a sale is the difference between a wildly successful store and one that bleeds profit on advertising because enough people don’t buy enough.

I wrote the guide to Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization so you have everything in one place to turn more visitors into customers. The mega guide shows you step-by-step how to increase the profit of your store by getting more people to buy, increasing your average order value, and improving the lifetime value of customers. These are devastatingly the best growth hacks to double or triple your profits from existing traffic.

These 23 online marketing tools make your life easier, boost engagement, increase customer research, and grow your store. The team at Digital Darts use every tool recommended here. Best of all, they are free. Most have paid options but you can do great things with free versions.

Why do tools matter? Your skills to market a business is the greatest factor you can control to keep it alive. The right tools aid your skills, making you more efficient and effective. The best online marketing tool is the one that suits your needs.

The most recent statistics show there are 400 million businesses worldwide. Competition is stiff. The ease of starting a business does not make having one easy. Statistics in the US show that 20% of small business close within their first year. 10% close in the second year, 7% in the third year, and 3% each year on average from then on. No one sets on a new venture with the view of having to shut it down. Yet, in competition there is always opportunity. Richard Branson, said, “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”

Digital marketing tools allow you to create effective marketing campaigns, execute, test them and measure their success. From coming up with content, sourcing influencers, fixing Shopify marketing mistakes, and doing deep work, use these marketing tools to grow your business.

Klaviyo For Email And SMS Marketing Automation

Klaviyo enables you to send personalized and targeted emails and texts to your customers, which improves sales.

You can create email automations for nearly anything under the sun you can think of, from people who abandon cart to customers who ordered a particular product twice. Klaviyo’s visual flow builder makes creating email, SMS—and all the conditions for them—a pleasure to work with.

Klaviyo integrates with more than 200 platforms allowing access to your data from a single place. You can import customer lists in Facebook and Google Ads to help the ad platforms find more customers like those people. It is the Rolls Royce we depend on for email marketing in Shopify.

Ahrefs For SEO

Ahrefs is one of the must-have online marketing tools that can take your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts to the next level by boosting your organic website traffic.

• The “Site Explorer” tool can check both your backlinks and your competitors. It will show you the keywords of your competition, which ones they are ranking for, the websites linking to their websites, and the quality of those backlinks.
• When you use the top pages tool, you can discover the pages on a website that get the highest traffic.
• With “Keyword Explorer”, you’ll have a variety of keywords along with their search volumes. The in-depth information Ahrefs provides can tell you the keywords you should target and the estimated amount of traffic you can get with them.

I highly recommend Ahrefs for SEO because it is comprehensive. It has the best and largest live backlinks, estimated to be more than 14 trillion.

We provide our Google Ads and SEO clients with data they want from Ahrefs, courtesy of our agency subscription with the company. If you’d also like to enjoy this benefit, get in touch with us.

Digital Darts Link Building Tool for Backlinks

When other websites link to yours, it can help your website rank higher in search results. This is where the Digital Darts link building tool comes in.

The first benefit of getting links is referral traffic. The second benefit is improved rankings since Google factors backlinks in its ranking algorithm.

The Digital Darts link building tool makes use of breadcrumbs in search engine results to detect link opportunities for any market. You enter a keyword related to your website then you get hundreds of links opportunities.

These opportunities are for directory submissions and blogs that welcome guest posts. When you can write blogs on other people’s websites, they include a link to your website. This leads to more traffic to your website and the backlinks boost your SEO.

DataFeedWatch For Feed Management

Feeds are used across nearly every major ad platform. Beyond ads, feeds can also push information into third-party marketplaces to manage listings.

DataFeedWatch is one of the best tools that can help you achieve this as it helps you create an effective product catalogue with highly optimized data about your business and products. Not enough marketers pay attention to every piece of data in their feeds.

The tool has high accuracy since it can download product and inventory data when you want. You don’t want to be wasting money advertising an out of stock product or bidding aggressively on a product with 8 out 9 variants out of stock.

For Facebook Ads, the most important optimization you can make with the feed is imagery. Stores by default use the first image of the product listing, which is often an uninspiring picture of the product on a white isolate background. You can customize your feed to include user-generated content to instantly grow key Facebook Ads metrics, like lowering CPA, of your catalog campaigns.

For Google Ads optimizations, you get complete freedom to customize the feed to increase impressions and click-through of product listings. Include your cost of goods sold in the feed to segment the profit margins of product groups. This lets you discriminate bids to scale profit.

If you run Google Ads or Facebook, you must use DataFeedWatch to boost your efforts.

Triple Whale For Attribution and Financial Wisdom

There are three metrics every ecommerce business investing in marketing needs to measure for optimal use of their money:

1. New customer ROAS (ncROAS) measures efficiency.
2. Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures effectiveness.
3. Profit on ad spend (POAS) measures profit.

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 three metrics of ncROAS, MER, and POAS.

To get these key three 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.

Google Analytics For Analytics

I cannot talk about online marketing tools without mentioning Google Analytics.

Google Analytics gives you statistics about your business that you can help to improve your marketing.

You’ll get information like your bounce rate, the amount of traffic on your website, how long users took on your page, and so on. From this, you’ll know what is working in your marketing campaign and the areas you need to step up.

If you use Shopify, it is important to know how to set up Google Analytics for your Shopify Store.

Typeform For Exciting Forms And Quizzes

One of the most effective ways of growing your sales is by increasing your leads. Typeform can help you with this. That’s why we’ve included it in our best Shopify marketing tools.

Typeform enables you to engage visitors to your website with exciting and interactive quizzes, forms, and surveys.

The usability is beautiful. Users can have fun filling out this information that they’ll easily provide their emails which you can use to build your contact list and turn these visitors into paying customers.

Typeform has integrations with other platforms such as Klaviyo, Canva, and Google Sheets, making it easy to access your data across these products.

Google Docs Editors For Documents and Collaboration

Google Docs Editors makes collaboration easier and more effective because it allows you to store documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and more. Team members can edit these documents then share them.

The interface inside all the tools makes each easy to learn. You get enough options to do what you need without the complexity.

Compare that to the Microsoft suite. If you haven’t used it consistently, you can’t find what feature you need. It is bloatware that they can’t fix because they must accommodate decade-long users of their software.

The change history feature makes editing documents secure so you don’t have to worry about team members accidentally deleting stuff.

Slack For Communication

Slack is an online marketing tool that makes communication at the workplace easier and more effective. The platform lets all team members communicate through messages, files, and video conferencing calls.

You can create channels for groups of people to isolate activity. This promotes productivity because everyone can concentrate on communication for that particular project.

An added advantage is that Slack works well with other tools you might already be using. A tiny list of popular integrations include Dropbox, Zoom, Google Drive, Mailchimp, and Google Calendar. There’s so many integrations now for Slack that it can become a notification platform for anything you want. You can minimize switching from Slack to another app.

Be sure to use /giphy in chat for top-tier gif communication.

ClickUp For Project Management

ClickUp is an online platform that makes it easier for teams to track and manage their work. It helps you and your team to be connected and more organized since you can see what everyone is working on and what tasks they’ve completed. Team members at Digital Darts have a browser tab for ClickUp open all day.

Through ClickUp, you can:

• Assign each team member tasks.
• Incredible views for any type of reporting you can image. It all depends on your use of custom fields.
• Help your team identify which tasks are a priority.
• Allow your team to communicate when they are stuck on a project while staying on top of tasks. If a comment needs to be action, it can be marked as an action step in one-click.
• Reference anything inside your ClickUp with the /link shortcut.
• Upload files and manage documents like a wiki.

ClickUp has all the major integraions like Slack, Google Drive, and even Google Assistant.

If you’re on another project management platform, you shouldn’t necessarily move to ClickUp. Use what works for you, but use something. ClickUp does everything that Notion can do, but in a simpler format. We used Asana for 10 years prior to moving to ClickUp, so I can also recommend Asana. Their feature development was slow and they lack flexibilty compared to the power of ClickUp.

Foreplay For Managing Paid Social Creative Inspiration

Sometimes, the Facebook Ad Library sparks your creativity with an idea for your next ad. Other times, it’s the creative center on TikTok.

The problem comes in when you want to use these scattered bits of inspiration that you have as screenshots, links saved somewhere, or you have to go back to the source and download the ad.

This can be tiring. You also lose your swipe file. That’s why Foreplay you should consider for your online marketing strategy.

Foreplay allows you to save the ad you’ll use as your inspiration so it is available forever. You can create boards for groups of ads, which can be shared with clients.

Frame For Teamwork On Video

If your marketing strategy involves the use of videos, Frame could be for you since it makes collaboration among your team much easier.

Through Frame, you can upload your projects in video formats and then share them with your group or clients so they can give their opinions and criticism. This prevents a lot of back-and-forth where you send a video project to everyone individually then wait for feedback.

Since you can provide feedback and also see other people’s comments, it ensures you are on the same page regarding the execution of a video.

Frame integrates with other video editing software such as DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere, and also apps like Google Drive and Dropbox. This gives you a clean workflow to speed up video production.

Shopify Collabs For Influencer Collaboration

Shopify Collabs lets business owners connect with influencers to help them promote products.

This latest online marketing tool allows you to enjoy the benefits of collaborating with brand influencers like direct sales, creative production, imagery or video for your website, and better SEO rankings when the influencer mentions in your brand on their website.

Other marketing tools you can check out that offer similar services include Incense, Tagger Media, and Grin.

Stock Up For Free Royalty-Free Photos

We all need good photos but sometimes don’t want to pay for them. Some people say blog posts with images get up to 94% more views compared to those without photos.

Stock Up came in to save the day by providing more than 25,000 great images you can use for free.

Examples of other platforms that provided free royalty-free photos include Burst, Adobe Stock, and Reusable Art.

GTmetrix For Analyzing Website Speed

A slow website can increase your bounce rate hence costing your website traffic, contributing to poor customer experience and making your SEO rankings drop.

You don’t want to deal with that. The first step to fixing your website speed is testing to know if it loads slowly.

GTmetrix can help you with this since it:

• Tests how fast your website loads in different nationalities, using various browsers and internet speeds.
• Enlightens you on what is slowing down your website and how you can use the various features to correct it.
• Informs you of any changes to your website speed over time.
• Notifies you whenever your website is slow so you can fix the issue.

ShareX For Screen Capturing And Sharing

Screen captures let you create standard operating procedures, share information with support of software tools, and communicate with your team.

With ShareX, you can capture screenshots and record GIFS with one keyword shortcut then share them. I used ShareX to produce most of the images in this article.

Vmaker For Video Capture Of Screen

Vmaker gives a video version of ShareX in an easy-to-use interface. Vmaker allows you to record your screen, webcam or both of them.

You can use the videos for customer support, educate potential customers about a product, and build standard operating procedures for your team.

Screaming Frog For Technical SEO

Screaming Frog is among the online marketing tools I highly recommend because it’s great for advanced-level SEO. It is the primary tool in our complete guide to Shopify SEO.

Checking each page of your website is not only exhausting but leaves room for error. It’s easy to not see a duplicate page or notice a blog is missing a meta description and so on. Businesses use Screaming Frog because it can comfortably crawl all websites in record time no matter their size.

You enter your domain then wait for the crawl to complete. The tool then avails the crawl data for you to improve the website’s SEO. You get nearly every on-page SEO factor presented to you in a variety of reports.

1Password For Password Management

When you’re running an online business, you have more passwords than you can remember. Sometimes, even the thought of coming up with another one is tiring. Using the same password across different websites increases your risk of an account being cracked.

Statistics show that 81% of people who get hacked experience this because of weak or stolen passwords. That’s why you need an effective password management system and I recommend 1Password.

This online marketing tool protects your personal information such as credit cards and passports by generating a secure note for each document then saving those details there. 1Password makes it safer to share login details of accounts with your team members. You can create “vaults” for individuals or groups to manage categories of passwords in bulk.

We moved away from LastPass for password management after repeated security leaks and liking how 1Password has a secret key that becomes a second barrier to accessing all passwords.

Digital Darts Google Ads Keyword Tool for Paid Search

If you do pay per click advertising and do not extensively use keyword match types, stop losing money. Use the Google Ads Match Type tool to quickly modify your keyword list in your search campaigns.

Default to phrase match types then include an exact match of each keyword. For high volume keywords that perform well, peel out the exact match version into their own ad groups then write ad copy and ad extensions. This lets you improve the click-through and conversion rate of the keyword to scale your search campaigns.

Convert For Split-Testing

Part of great marketing involves testing different strategies to see which one gives you the best results. If you constantly apply changes to your website without testing, you may mess up what’s working well or worsen what needs to be improved. This happens because you’re operating in the dark.

Convert.com is renowned for its rapid Shopify integration and extensive knowledge repository, enabling you to conduct a wide array of tests with ease. Convert has unique advantages for Shopify Plus merchants like theme testing, debugging transactions for tests run on the checkout, and granular tracking based on language, location and demographic data.

Changes don’t have to be major. You can swap the colour of an add to cart button to see if it increases clicks and sales. However, little edits rarely move the needle. For the most impact, the elements you test should be closest to the checkout or rooted in a hypothesis from research. For more help with conversion rate optimization in Shopify, read my free book.

Brain.fm For Music That Aids Deep Work

If you’re like me, sometimes you need music to be productive, especially if you’ve been working for hours. But not any music works for me.

I need something that helps me focus. I found YouTube music to be too hit-and-miss due to lyrics and the whole composition.

As the name suggests, Brain.fm doesn’t provide any regular music. Its selection is made up of songs with soft rhythmic pulses that according to science, stimulate your brain, without being distracting and therefore improve how you work.

So when you want to hit that deadline, work faster, or be more productive, you know where to get your music.

The Shopify Apps Experts Never Pay For

Time for something Shopify-specific. I’ve got a quick-fire list of Shopify apps to avoid—and their alternatives—to help your store grow.

You’re likely wasting money on overpriced apps you don’t need. I’ve scaled hundreds of Shopify stores over the past ten years and one of the quickest improvements you can make for your store is to cut wasted expenses from apps.

These alternatives to overpriced apps are beginner-friendly yet do exactly what you need without wasting money.

Take Your Online Marketing To The Next Level

Successfully carrying out a single marketing campaign is not easy. Achieving this for multiple campaigns is even harder.

The good news is that by having these online marketing tools, you’re equipped for battle.