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DaBrian Marketing Blog: News, Insights, and Digital Marketing

6 Essential Shopify Apps For Medium Size Retailers

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If you’re an online store owner using Shopify, there are so many ways you can make your life easier.

There are plenty of Shopify apps to help you with all aspects of ecommerce entrepreneurship, but with so many to choose from that it’s hard to know where to start.

Luckily for you, we’ve come up with a list of 6 essential apps to have if you’re a Shopify store owner. Check out our list below to get inspired.

Recommended reading: The 5 Questions Everybody’s Asking About Shopify

Mailchimp for Shopify

Email marketing is an effective way of connecting with your customers — once you’ve got them subscribed to your mailing list, you can grab their attention with awesome offers and direct them to your store.

Having an email subscription tool like Mailchimp is super handy if you’re a medium size retailer. By now, you’ve climbed a few rungs up the entrepreneurial ladder, grown your store a bit more, and now you’re looking at ways to maintain existing relationships and build new ones.

Email marketing is a great way of doing this, and Mailchimp is the best of the best when it comes to email marketing tools.

The Mailchimp for Shopify app lets you integrate your Mailchimp account with your Shopify store easily. From here, you can import your customer information and use purchase data to create targeted email and ad campaigns that boost sales.

Facebook Store

You’re definitely missing out on potential leads if you leave out social media as a selling platform for your store. Facebook isn’t just good for advertising you know!

If you’re an established medium size retailer, then the Shopify Facebook Store app is perfect for you.

Sometimes people just won’t want to click through to your site. This is detrimental to your conversion rates — you’ve spent the time generating leads, and now you’ve fallen at the last hurdle.

Facebook Store lets you showcase your products or services on your store’s Facebook page and post collections to your timeline to highlight products. You can also build engagement around your items by tagging them in photos, which shoppers can click on to buy.

It’s an awesome app because it lets you reach more potential consumers, drives more traffic to your store, and provides an easy online shopping platform. Shoppers love it because they can browse, share or buy directly from your Facebook store.

Yotpo

It’s an awesome app because it lets you reach more potential consumers, drives more traffic to your store, and provides an easy online shopping platform. Shoppers love it because they can browse, share or buy directly from your Facebook store.

Yotpo is a cool — and free! — Shopify app that helps store owners to generate and leverage product reviews.

The majority of US customers consult reviews or ratings before making a final purchase. In this digital age, consumers want to know how they can trust online retailers, and how the quality of the product they are purchasing will be guaranteed. It’s fair enough — after all, you can’t physically inspect the product until you’ve received it, and that’s after you’ve parted with your well-earned cash.

That is where customer reviews and testimonials come in. They’re essential to building trust, and help to advise customers on the details and quality of your items. Yotpo helps you collect reviews, photos and Q&A from your customers, and compiles it into content for your site. This is essential for building trust in your store and increasing your online sales.

ReferralCandy

Apparently, every happy customer will tell nine more. Using a referral app to make the most of this lead generation opportunity saves you from missing out!

ReferralCandy is a really interesting Shopify app which you can use to incentivize customers to refer their friends to you. You decide what your referral incentive is — whether it’s coupons, exclusive offers or cash.

The app contains a dashboard where you can track referral information and metrics, as well as optimize your referral program. They’ll also chuck in automated reward delivery and referral reminder emails for good measure. (ReferralCandy integrates with Mailchimp so that you can track emails and referral campaigns).

Plug in SEO

This free Shopify app is essential to any medium size retailer. Maybe you’ve started up your own small online business, or you’ve bought a Shopify business and you want to scale up?

Plug in SEO is the difference between your business successfully growing or stagnating as a small online store.

You might sell the most awesome products at an incredible price, but unless your online store is search-friendly, you’re not going to generate enough web traffic to your site to make a decent profit.

Luckily, PIug in SEO can help to optimize your site to ensure that you’re ranking as high on the search engine results page as you can..

The app automatically checks for SEO problems with your page titles, descriptions, structure and much more, and flags them for you. They then give you clear and simple explanations, fix instructions and code to sort the problems out. A must-have for any medium size retailers out there.

Data Export - Reports

If you want to be successful in ecommerce, then you’re going to have to invest in a decent accounting app for Shopify.

As a small business owner, you’ve probably downloaded Xero or QuickBooks Online to sync your orders and refunds and run some financial reporting. These are brilliant for small retailers but can quickly become expensive for medium size retailers because of extra costs such as payroll services.

If you want to up your accounting game, then try out Data Export.

Data Export has received many great reviews on the Shopify app store. It’s got some great accounting and reporting features, and you benefit from setup and customization by Data Export’s reporting experts. For scalability, it’s a lot more friendly than other apps, and has a load of awesome features perfect for midsize businesses.

As you can see, there are some amazing Shopify apps available to you as a medium size retailer. These are 6 of the best — ones that we think are essential to your success as an ecommerce entrepreneur. They can help you with everything from SEO to accounting to marketing and more — all things that you need to get right as a midsize store owner.

Are there any that you’d add to our list? Let us know in the comments below.

Victoria Greene is a freelance writer and branding consultant who is passionate about sharing her knowledge and helping store owners get the best return on their ecommerce businesses. For all the latest on developments in ecommerce, marketing, and design, check out her blog, Victoria Ecommerce.

A Beginner’s Guide to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

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“The secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.”

 -Marcus Aurelius

You don’t need to be a Roman emperor to realize that success depends on mastering the details that others miss. However, many businesses still try to drive their key sales and marketing campaigns without capturing and integrating the necessary information. The main reason they fall short is that they are not able to collect, track, and organize customer data in a useful way.

This is where an appropriate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can help. We’re here to explain what a CRM solution is, why you should use one, and highlight the pros and cons of three of the most popular CRMs in the marketplace today.

What is a CRM tool?

A CRM is a tool developed to help you manage all of your company’s interactions with current and potential customers. The primary purpose of a CRM is to better understand your customers and improve your relationship with them. CRM systems collect and organize customer data in a neat and timely manner so that you can go back to it and use the information when needed.

But what kind of data and information does it track? That’s entirely up to your unique sales and marketing goals. At a general level, it can track phone calls, messages, and mailings. Some of the more specific uses can including delivering what data is usable versus what is detrimental. Still not convinced about CRMs? Well, we will explain some reasons why it would be ideal to have one in your growing business.

Why should I use CRM?

1. Optimizing Efficiency
CRMs can keep track of multiple forms of data and customer information. In most cases, this can lead to the development of more accurate reporting and more efficient strategies. With the recorded data, analysts can study actions taken and recognize what works better to drive desired results. Did mailing current or potential customers create higher revenues? Which campaigns were the most effective? Which channel generated the highest ROI? Knowing the answer to these questions helps sales managers reallocate time and marketing managers reallocate budget.

2. Improving Relationships with Customers
This was a given: CRMs were originally designed to improve the relationships between employees and customers. All CRM software has features which automate processes entering every bit of data on a lead that would be tedious work if done manually. Sales representatives especially benefit from these features since they can maintain more constant contact with their client lists and devote more time to the hottest prospects. Similarly, sales reps give their low maintenance clients a little TLC – with minimal time investment – by showing that they have not thrown them on the back burner while pursuing other opportunities.

3. Tracks Performance of Agents
Sales managers benefit the most from CRMs mostly because of their ability to track the progress and activity done by agents. We all have targets to meet, be it earnings, total sales, the number of calls made, or office visits. CRMs help managers keep track of the activity and performance data for their direct reports and manage it accordingly.

Business owners can benefit from CRM tracking capabilities as well. Owners can view and understand how their agents are performing which can lead to the development of intelligent strategies. CRMs make employee schedules visible and help compare those who have been closing the highest or lowest number of deals for the company.

What is the best CRM software?

There are plenty of CRMs available across the internet, and it is essential to know which are user-friendly, simple, and effective. We chose three of the most commonly used CRM platforms and listed their Pros and Cons, below.

1. Pipedrive

Pros

  • Mobile app
  • Multiple pipeline creation
  • User-Friendly
  • Helpful guidance

Cons

  • No lists of new leads and contacts
  • Manually adding activity and updating information
  • Paid subscriptions

2. Hubspot

Pros

  • Free
  • Live Chat
  • Better Insights into customer interaction
  • Can be used with other CRMs

Cons

  • Lack of Flexibility
  • Lightweight and cant handle large sales team

3. SalesForce

Pros

  •       Customizable dashboard
  •       Easy to navigate
  •       Social capabilities

Cons

  •       Pricing
  •       Uncontrolled administration
  •       Problematic technical support

What's Next?

It’s very beneficial for any company to integrate CRMs into their sales and marketing data as it helps you turn that data into actionable insights. Giving you the assurance of having an organized and trackable system that will let you take your sales and marketing initiatives in an informed direction. With a quality CRM, you will see your sales team reach new heights.

If you have further questions about CRMs or want to know more details, then contact us or leave a comment below! Further info can be obtained directly from the platform websites:

https://pipelinecrm.com/

https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

https://www.salesforce.com/crm/crm-for-small-business/

What To Know Before Setting Up WooCommerce

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In my last blog post, I went over how to use the popular ecommerce platform Shopify. Today, we’ll focus on another popular ecommerce tool used by millions of online stores: WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin used to power a large portion of the ecommerce industry. It can be easily applied to any WordPress website.

Why Should I Use WooCommerce?

One thing that sets WooCommerce apart from platforms like Shopify is that it’s completely open source. This means that you have as much control over the site as you please. In this case, with great freedom comes great opportunity — you can design your site any way you think would best appeal to your customers. Apart from web design, you also have control over most of the ecommerce process, from the kind of products you sell to shipping, and then to payment and checkout. This allows for a good amount of optimization on your part.

How To Create a WooCommerce Store

In order to take your first step on your ecommerce journey, you have to download and install the WooCommerce plugin. You should be able to do this from your WordPress dashboard. Then, run the WooCommerce Setup Wizard, which will help you build the basic framework of your site.

From this point forward, it’s up to you to manage your site’s settings. You have power over things from your default currency to the logistics of your checkout page. You can also choose from WooCommerce’s huge selection of themes for your site in order to build an attractive store for your future customers.

WooCommerce’s Product Options

With some ecommerce platforms, you’re only able to sell physical goods. This isn’t the case with WooCommerce. With this plugin, you can sell anything you put your mind to. Things like downloads, access codes and services can all be distributed through WooCommerce, on top of good old physical products. This is another example of what makes this plugin so open-ended. No matter what your specialty is, WooCommerce will help you take it online!

Once you choose what to sell, you must then make sure that the product pages are as helpful and informative as possible. The more product information you give customers, the more likely they’ll be sure whether or not they want to make a purchase. More information also makes your store look more credible.

Adding Additional Content

Like any other website, it’s always a good idea to provide your users with rich content when it comes to ecommerce. Things like product reviews, case studies, blog posts and more all help to enhance the user experience for your online store. After all, 82% of consumers have a more positive view of a brand after reading its custom content. From an SEO perspective, it will also increase your search engine visibility, therefore bringing in more potential customers.

Best WooCommerce Plugins To Start With

For those of you who have less experience with web design, WooCommerce’s freedom may be frightening. Never fear! There are plenty of plugins available that make setup manageable for anybody regardless of experience.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
This plugin helps the user find exactly what they are looking for with a handy search bar at the top of the page. Reducing the time it takes for the customer to find what they want leads to more sales!

WooCommerce Checkout Manager
Checkout Manager allows you to play around with the layout of your Checkout page. Having a Checkout page that is as easy as possible to maneuver will reflect well on your conversion numbers.

Stripe Payment Gateway
Stripe is another way to streamline your checkout page. It does so by allowing users to pay on your site instead of being redirected to a different one, e.g PayPal. You’d be surprised how finicky users can be, and keeping them on your site throughout the payment process will make it more likely that they stay focused on making a purchase.

Dynamic Pricing and Discounts by ELEX
This plugin will allow you more creativity with the pricing of your items. Discounts based on many different factors are enabled by this plugin, which will help you increase your sales. You’re also able to implement Buy One, Get One Free deals.

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Many of the ecommerce stores you have visited probably had some sort of wishlist feature. This is a great thing to implement in your own store. It gives people who don’t want to make purchases immediately a reason to come back once they’ve made up their mind. With the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, they can also share this list with family and friends for holidays or birthdays.

WooCommerce Currency Switcher
If you plan on selling your products globally, the WooCommerce Currency Switcher is a must-have plugin for your site. It allows your international customers to easily switch between currencies. It even calculates the conversion rate so they know exactly what they’re spending.

WooMarketing Bundle
In ecommerce, marketing is one of the most important areas you have to consider if you want to make sales. The Woomarketing Bundle is a plugin developed by the WooCommerce team that gives you control over things like email marketing and remarketing.

Conclusion

In closing, WooCommerce is a great way to sell your products and services online no matter who you are. It grants you the freedom to go in whichever direction you want with your online store and can be finely tuned to get the best conversion rates possible. With a quality product and a quality site, you’ll be making money in no time!

If you have further questions about WooCommerce or need help developing your ecommerce store, contact us or leave a comment below!

The 5 Questions Everybody’s Asking About Shopify

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Increased internet access means one thing for your business: it’s easier than ever to make money online. A variety of ecommerce platforms are now available to connect merchants with potential customers. Popular choices include WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and X-Cart, but which one is the best for you?

The most popular ecommerce platform on the Internet is Shopify. Shopify is great if you’re just starting out in ecommerce. The platform makes setting up your online store simple and painless. With Shopify, anybody can become successful selling products online. Here you can find the answers to some of the most common questions people have about Shopify.

Shopify

How Shopify Works

Unlike other retailers, the Shopify merchant (you) doesn’t need to have their own inventory. Instead, you’re able to buy a product from another retailer after the customer places an order for it. This is a model called drop-shipping. This is great if you are starting out with little in terms of money or products. The retailer ships the products to the customer without you ever coming in contact with them. Shopify then pays you the difference.

What if you already have an existing line of products you want to sell? Great! Shopify can still work for you. Also, if you’re worrying whether or not the platform is secure, worry no longer. Shopify uses the most advanced security features in the industry, meaning yours and your customers’ money is safe. Shopify is a fantastic platform for getting a website up and running to give your business an online presence.

What To Sell On Shopify

The most important decision you will make for your Shopify store is picking a product to sell online. If you already have products, you can use what you know about your business and transfer it to ecommerce. If you’re going with the drop-shipping model, we recommend choosing a specific niche. For example, sell men’s golf clothing instead of all kinds of men’s clothing. This will keep your store from being buried under all the others selling broad categories of products.

How To Make Money On Shopify

You need to take the different products and prices of your competitors into account when running your ecommerce store. You should also put your best foot forward in terms of marketing. This is in order to attract enough clicks and impressions to keep your sales numbers up. Social media, SEO and Google Ads are all good ideas in terms of marketing since competition in ecommerce is high.

Make Money on Shopify

How To Set Up A Shopify Store

The Shopify platform makes it very easy and intuitive to start building your store. After creating your Shopify admin account, the first thing you need to do is start adding products. You add a product by going to the Products page, clicking “Add Product,” and entering a title and description.

Once all your products are added, you then need to pick a theme for your site. Pick a theme that you think best represents what you’re selling. For example, you don’t want to use a black-on-black theme to sell flower seeds. Finally, you must choose a URL that your customers can reach your store from.

DaBrian Marketing recommends that you use words in your URL that are relevant to what you are selling. If you want to sell flower seeds you should include either “flower” or “seeds” in your URL. This is so customers who click on a link to your site know what they’re getting into. There are detailed instructions on all of these steps on the Shopify website.

From this point, it’s all about organizing your ecommerce store for the customer. You should make your site as easy to use as possible so customers can find exactly what they’re looking for. This is an extremely important aspect of your online store. You’ll miss out on a ton of sales if the customer can’t find what they’re looking for.

You also have to think about making your website mobile responsive. A mobile-friendly design is extremely important in today’s market. Nowadays more people surf the Internet on their phones than on a desktop! Making your site the best it can be requires knowledge of web development and design. You can find free tips and resources for these areas in other DaBrian blog posts such as our recent articles on WordPress and Content Management Systems.

How To Find Shopify Stores

For the potential customers reading this, there are countless stores on the Shopify platform that sell a variety of products. You can find anything from clothing, watches, and eyewear to teas and electronics — and that’s just for starters. There are plenty of blog posts and resources available to help you find the perfect store for your needs. If you want to open your own store, it’s also a good idea to check out others that are successful. Shopify even gives out awards for the stores it considers the best in specific categories.

In conclusion, Shopify is a great option for people new to ecommerce. It’s simple, effective, and popular with people looking to shop online. With good marketing and strategy, you too can become an ecommerce success story!

Still have questions about Shopify or ecommerce as a whole? Contact us today or leave a comment below!

DaBrian Marketing Visits South Mountain YMCA

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The DaBrian Marketing team recently had the privilege of visiting South Mountain YMCA for a day of team-building activities. Operating as an independent YMCA Camp and Conference Center since 1983, The South Mountain YMCA Camps have been providing youth recreational and educational programs for over 60 years.

South Mountain YMCA Reinholds PA

The YMCA serves over 8,500 individuals annually with participants predominantly from the local area and surrounding communities. Their mission is to provide a camping experience as well as educational and other programs that build personal leadership, character and life skills while developing caring, honesty, respect and responsibility in young people, families and communities.

The beautiful 600 acre landscape of the South Mountain YMCA delivered a picturesque setting for a day of team building activities. Typical team building programs include a high ropes course, climbing tower, zip-line, and a low ropes course. Traditional programs can be expanded around a team-building goal.

Most of our staff conquered the climbing tower and enjoyed the zip-line trip back to ground-zero. But for those scared of heights another adventure awaited: Paintball. Because what better way to show your coworkers you appreciate them than to shoot them with a paintball!? Thankfully, South Mountain Adventures provide modified versions of paintball guns which pack a lesser punch; making this a safe and enjoyable time for all.

After a quick training session on the equipment, we split into two teams and developed our strategies. The red team was victorious almost every match, largely because the blue team was saddled with agency owner, Danny Laws.

South Mountain YMCA Reinholds PA

There are so many valuable reasons for a business to hold team building events or activities. Not only do they give your staff a break from the usual grind, but team building events can have serious business and personal impacts. If you’re looking for something special to do with your team the South Mountain YMCA is an excellent choice. Whether your team would enjoy paintball like DaBrian Marketing, the rock climbing wall, or a leisurely hike, there is something for everyone at South Mountain.

South Mountain will work with you to plan an event that your whole team can participate in and will remember for years. For more information contact Greg McCrohan at 610-670-2267, ext. 250, or by emailing gmccrohan@smymca.org.

Need a new website? WordPress could be the answer

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What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular and free open source content management system (CMS) in the world. It allows WordPress developers to create websites, blogs, or apps. WordPress offers over 45,000 add-ons known as plugins. These plugins add features such as online stores, mailing lists, analytics and a lot more.

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphic design of a website. The theme can change the way a website is displayed without changing the code. The theme files are sometimes called template files. There are thousands of WordPress themes available for purchase. You can also hire a WordPress developer to create or edit a theme to customize it for your business.

new website consider WordPress

What is a WordPress Framework?

WordPress frameworks are used as a parent theme template with all of the functionality. WordPress developers can create a child theme to add custom styling and leave the functionality to the parent theme framework or template. The framework is used to reduce web development time and usually has additional features. Canvas, Gantry, and Genesis are common WordPress Frameworks.

What are the features & benefits of a WordPress website?

WordPress is great for businesses with simple structured websites. It has basic installation, set-up, and maintenance requirements to save businesses time and money. WordPress is a useful CMS with a simple web interface for companies that want to provide their visitors with frequently changing content in attractive layouts. WordPress has a large community of users and developers that offer a huge selection of themes, plugins, and widgets with much flexibility.

Can You Create a Mobile Responsive WordPress Website?

Yes, WordPress website can be mobile responsive! Often, outdated WordPress software and themes are the cause of poor mobile sites. Choosing the right WordPress Framework can give you a mobile responsive website and better load time to help the user navigate with ease.

We recommend focusing on mobile first and working your way up to desktop computers. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for faster load speed, better user experience, and to lower the website bounce rate. Remember, Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content in the search engine results and ranking.

How to Improve Slow Loading Speeds for WordPress Websites?

According to a report by Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduces user satisfaction by 3.8%. It increases lost revenue per user by 4.3% and decreases clicks to the website by 4.3%.

I would recommend good hosting with Private or Dedicated hosting services to reduce the number of site on the server and daily backups. Implement the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve slow loading speeds whenever offered by the hosting service. Use an established WordPress theme and framework because they are updated to improve load speed as well as security. You can have a developer optimize the website for speed by optimizing images, the database, and code.

How to Avoid Stale Content & Build a Brand?

WordPress can help you create, publish, update, and archive old content or information. You can use SEO plugins like Yoast or SmartCrawl to improve the content for search engines. Adding widgets can help to populate a page with social media posts or sales promotions. The blog functionality is simple for you to both use, and to update to avoid stale content.

Use WordPress to offer different types of content to potential customers. Reuse content in other formats such as videos, infographics, podcast and PDF downloads. You can build brand awareness and manage an online reputation, too. The reviews plugins can help manage business reviews.

How to Maintain a WordPress Website?

The average lifespan of a website is 2-5 years. The maintenance of a WordPress website is essential to maintain features, functionality, and security. Outdated WordPress website software, themes, and plugins leave sites vulnerable to hackers.

A WordPress website should receive scheduled monthly maintenance to update the software, theme, and plugins. Whenever possible, remove all deactivated plugins from the site. Audit the website for broken links on the website with a broken link checker. Do not hurt your search engine ranking, create a bad user experience, or give the idea that your business does not exist. With proper maintenance, WordPress can provide the answer for your business website needs.

Still have questions? Contact our sales team for a free consultation or submit your questions in the comments section.