From shopping cart software to marketing automation tools, getting your online store setup can be a bit tiring and confusing. Each category of tools serves an important function in a business, but investing in every single tool across each category is unfeasible and uneconomical.

An ideal combination of smart marketing strategy with the right tools and tips can grow your online store exponentially.

Here is why we’ve compiled a list of 5 must-have Shopify apps for Shopify eCommerce beginners including brands like Yotpo, Ai Trillion, and a few more. Before you go ahead spending your hard-earned money trying different tools, find out what is it that is truly worth your time and money, and what’s not.

To choose an e-commerce website tool or platform, keep in mind your technical expertise and budget, as well as factors like SEO, onsite search, mobile-friendliness, and scalability which makes it easier for users to find your site and for your business to flourish.

Keeping in mind all this, one area I wouldn’t overlook is marketing. Without marketing your potential customers don’t know you exist. And without customers, your business is nothing but an expensive dream. And thus the list below is the crème de la crème; the holy grail of website tools for which we have willingly put ourselves out and announce that it will help you grow your online store if utilized properly and efficiently.

So, take a look.

 

1. Yotpo

Yotpo is an e-commerce marketing platform for Shopify that provides advanced solutions for loyalty, referrals, visual marketing, and customer reviews. It helps brands leverage customer reviews and photos throughout the buyer’s journey to improve trust and social proof, thereby generating sales.

With Yotpo, businesses can collect almost every type of user-generated content and leverage it to improve customer experience, consequently creating a stronger brand image. It is an integrated solution that lets brands curate, manage, collect, and respond to user-generated content from a single platform.

It provides brands with all the essential marketing tools required to rule over in this rapidly transforming customer-centric demographic. Its entire suite of integrated solutions for user-generated content marketing, loyalty, and referrals help e-commerce businesses accelerate growth by maximizing the average customer lifetime value.

Yotpo is also the official partner to Shopify, Facebook, and Google, and boasts an employee base of over 300+ globally.

Pricing begins at $29/month for the growth plan.

Features:

  • Reward Management: Yotpo offers one of the best in class reward management functionality. The Yotpo team has successfully been able to streamline the process of customers on-boarding by presenting intuitive insights into the entire process.
  • Yotpo platform can be efficiently deployed over Cloud, SaaS, and Web.
  • Customer Satisfaction: By introducing features such as feedback collection and data-driven analytics, Yotpo has successfully increased customer satisfaction. Most importantly, their feedback collection plug-in has been rated as one of the most critical features of many customers.
  • Reputation Management: Under the umbrella of reputation management, Yotpo offers incredible features such as Campaign Management, sentiment analysis, review monitoring, and customer review platform.
  • Review Management: Yotpo offers some of the unique features to effectively moderate and manage customer reviews. Some of them are campaign management, review notification, review request, negative feedback management, response management, social sharing, etc.

Pros:

  • Yotpo’s customer service is considered top-notch.
  • Yotpo’s review management is also one of the critical features ensuring success
  • New features are constantly being added.
  • Yotpo offers some impressive features and that too at extremely competitive pricing.
  • Controlling reviews becomes easy with Yotpo.
  • Their dashboard and the moderate system are easy to handle and very intuitive.

Cons:

  • One needs to pay an additional fee if you want to use more features.
  • The cost turns out high for a business of medium size.

2. AiTrillion

AiTrillion is the first-ever SaaS-based artificial intelligence (AI) enabled – all-in-one marketing platform for Shopify eCommerce.

With 11+ customer engagement channels integrated with analytics, AiTrillion specializes at connecting the dots between thousands of customers with a wide range of 93 k merchant network spread across 175+ countries. Their AI-powered solution enables efficient prediction and engagement with the target customer. Their AI product leverage predictive analysis and data-driven algorithms to generate quick sales automate marketing and provide insightful engagement with customers & visitors. AiTrillion aims to boost the impact of eCommerce marketing across the entire customer lifecycle by leveraging user data, automation, AI/ML, and personalized techniques in a seamlessly integrated & automated enterprise-level platform for both enterprises as well as starters seamlessly.

While other platforms in the list cater to only a set of problems out there, AiTrillion has taken it up a notch and unlike its counterparts, it offers a wide casket of services like Loyalty rewards, push notifications, email marketing automation, product recommendation, email subscription as well as personalized offers which otherwise would require a subscription to various platforms.

Their workflow is classified across three broad pillars –

  1. Engage – Engage across every customer touchpoint
  2. Analytics – Discover deep customer insights
  3. A.I – Optimize customer journeys with AI

Features:

  • AI-LoyaltyRewards: The AiTrillion platform offers numerous loyalty programs to maintain customer loyalty and increase repeat purchases. The customer lifetime value with points and rewards gives them more reasons to return to your store.
  • Ai Web Push: AiTrillion suite also includes push notifications to bring back customers to your website by sending timely and personalized push notifications. This helps generate insightful revenue reports to better analyze and comprehend how much revenue each of your notifications brings.
  • AI email: AiTrillion also offers targeted email marketing campaigns to engage customers outside the website. The campaigns can be easily customized and don’t require much setting up.
  • AI product recommendations: One of the most unique offerings of AiTrillion has to be its product recommendation feature. Using this platform one can conveniently recommend a product in which your customers are most likely to be interested in the website.
  • Network Insights: Leveraging AI helps derive solid insights into the minds of the customers.  Having a complete profile on customers like, name, email, phone number, organization, etc allows to efficiently determine who, when, and how to contact.

Pros:

  • AiTrillion boasts easy on-the-go integration with typically every major platform out there. Their insights are delivered in minutes of the integration as well.
  • The platform is ideal for almost any size of business be it small or medium-sized or even a large enterprise.
  • AiTrillion provides a wide array of marketing features like push notifications, email marketing, loyalty programs, etc, which otherwise would require businesses to purchase multiple platforms.
  • Their strong foothold across the globe has enabled them to create a trusted clientele of millions of users.

Concluding view:

Ai Trillion has the most advanced features that deeply understand your customers and take intelligent decisions boosting your company’s adoption and retention on Shopify. With seamless features integrated into one platform, it lets you drive measurable growth through the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. If you’re looking for a stronger hold on your Shopify eCommerce business at lesser costs than what your competitors are providing; it’s an option worth a deal! Besides, they keep offering free trials to their customers who are interested to try using the platform.

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3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the popular e-commerce marketing platforms on Shopify. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Mailchimp has over 700+ employees.

Millions of businesses and individuals – from small community organizations to Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies utilize Mailchimp services. Mailchimp is deployed to send automated messages, marketing emails, sell online, create targeted campaigns as well as facilitate reporting and analytics.

The organization is also increasingly delving into marketing automation for e-commerce businesses. It has become one of the leading marketing automation platform providers for small and medium-sized businesses.

Mailchimp uses eighty-four technology products and services including G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Google Analytics, WordPress.

Features:

  • Email marketing: One of the primary and most sought after features of Mailchimp has to be its email marketing component. With features such as Auto-responders, mailing list management CAN-SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics, Subscriber management, Drip Campaigns, email management, etc. Mailchimp definitely sits at the top of the pile for any organization looking for cranking up their email marketing efforts.
  • Marketing automation: Mailchimp also offers some of the best-in-class features for marketing such as automated A/B testing, Analytics/ROI Tracking, Landing Pages/Web Forms, Social Marketing, and segmentation.

Pros:

  • Mailchimp has a truly professional feel to it. The interface is responsive and well designed.
  • The platform makes it convenient to start for free and offers flexible plans, perfect for a startup.  
  • There are numerous options to customize the service, and it is extremely easy to make all the necessary changes in order to set an account even for a non-English speaking audience.
  • Once a campaign has been sent, reports are automatically generated. One could even witness the statistics being updated on-the-go just a few minutes after sending everything.
  • One can also see the reaction of every customer in each campaign: unsubscribe, bounce rate, number of clicks, etc.
  • There is detailed information about open rates, click rates, and statistics about the general industry to see clearly if the audience is being reached as expected.
  • The template editor works really well. One can easily place “blocks” of text, images, dividers, or other types of blocks on the other side of the page and can visualize them in real-time.

Cons:

  • Setup isn’t that easy and it does take a while to set up everything.
  • The File Manager isn’t as intuitive as the rest of the interface and is definitely something that should be worked upon.

Concluding View:

Many businesses around the globe rely on Mailchimp solutions to automate their marketing process. Mailchimp provides deep and meaningful insights into the customer’s minds making it easier to make strategic decisions.

To wrap up, Mailchimp is a wonderful and reliable solution and with the introduction of exciting marketing automation features, it is definitely an option worth considering. Keeping that aside, there are several up-and-coming platforms that are offering a similar suite of services at much competitive pricing. Hence, I would advise you to take a look around before finalizing your ideal platform.

4. Loyalty Lion

LoyaltyLion is a social loyalty framework that provides innovative ways to engage and to retain customers on Shopify. One can quite conveniently set up a fully customized loyalty program with LoyaltyLion.

Some of the core features of the product include personalized loyalty emails to increase repeat purchases, loyalty tiers, and optimizing loyalty data for future marketing strategies. LoyaltyLion boasts an impressive conversion rate and typically generates stores anywhere between $15 for every $1 spent on the platform. Thus the platform has become a trusted platform by thousands of eCommerce merchants worldwide and is an official Shopify Plus Partner.

It is also backed by some of the very best entrepreneurs and investors with expertise in loyalty, marketing, eCommerce and SaaS ensuring spurious growth in the coming quarter.

Features:

  • Customer Loyalty: LoyaltyLion offers features such as customer activity tracking, No-card loyalty system, referral tracking, and rewards management.
  • Award points and rewards for any activity such as social engagement, reviews, referrals, and purchases.

 Pros:

  • Easy to use and integrate with Big Commerce.
  • In addition to points for purchase, Loyaltylion offers some unique features such as points for following on social media, writing reviews, referring friends, etc.
  • Loyalty Lion’s email platform is reliable that sends well-crafted emails to customers when they sign up when they reach the minimum point threshold to redeem a voucher, as well as monthly reminders to utilize points.

 Cons:

  • The user interface feels a little outdated and is something that definitely needs some working upon.
  • By far there is no ability for customers to automatically apply their points during checkout. Although this feature is available for Shopify, it isn’t yet available for Big Commerce.

Concluding View:

LoyaltyLion operates at a very competitive price point which is quite an advantage in this domain. It is also an ideal platform for anyone who is looking for a loyalty program for their store which is hands down one of the most comprehensive and elaborate programs out there.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is hands-down, the most widely used web analytics service on the web.

Google Analytics is web analytics accompanied by the Google Marketing Platform. It allows businesses to connect all parts of the customer journey for a dynamic and robust understanding of customer behavior. It is a service that basically tracks and reports website traffic.

The service was launched in November 2005 after Google acquired developer Urchin.

Google Analytics provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android applications (otherwise also known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps).

Google Analytics provides answers to every business burning questions, like,

  • Frequency of website visitors?
  • Geography of your majority clientele?
  • Deep and meaningful insights about click through and click rates?
  • Most visited pages?
  • Average time spent on the website?
  • Feedback.

Features:

  • Web Analytics: Google Analytics platform is touted as the best and most accurate platform for web tracking. Its features include conversion tracking, keyword tracking, page view tracking, referral source tracking, site search tracking, time-on-site tracking, user interaction tracking, etc.

Pros:

  • Google Analytics enables organizations to gather information on demographics, which is great for ad targeting, especially when you also use the Google Pixel which provides conversion data.
  • It also allows users to gather KPIs for various campaigns as well as track the success of influencer campaigns in combination with Google Tracking URLs.
  • The Google Data Studio, which draws from Analytics, is one of the most effective ways to create shareable reports that can be manipulated quickly and easily for specific groups of pages, which is great for organizations having multiple segments with different target audiences.

Cons:

  • It can take a while to learn how to navigate Google Analytics.

Concluding View:

Being a product of Google surely does put Google Analytics ahead in the game. Having so much data to play with makes Google analytics derive deeper and much more relevant insights than other industry counterparts. It is the tool to go for in case you are looking for actionable insights into the process.

Wrapping Up

When you plan on investing in a Shopify app for Shopify Ecommerce as a beginner, keep in mind your specific business use-case. Lots of businesses make the mistake of following the herd and opting for the same tool that their counterparts are employing, which is absolutely not the right way to go about this process.

Remember to tread carefully, choose the tools and platforms that your business can scale, most importantly, invest where it counts. If you are looking for rich analytic giving you deeper insights AiTrillion is a well-sought e-commerce business solution and gives you a free trial.  

However, the tools you utilize are really based on your technical knowledge, business model, and marketing budget.

Should you wish to know more about AiTrillion, feel free to contact us today!