ecommerce marketing

6 Essential Shopify Apps For Medium Size Retailers

October 24, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

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

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.

Google’s Retail & Ecommerce Marketing Event Recap

August 23, 2017 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

On Wednesday, August 16th, Google provided some great tips, insight, and advice to retailers regarding ecommerce marketing. Kristen Johanson, Head of Industry for Retail at Google and Alex Chen, Product Marketing Manager at Google Shopping, did a great job presenting 3 major problems the shoppers and retailers face online, and steps that retailers can take to remedy these problems.

Problem #1 – Discoverability – Can Consumers Find You?

While having a storefront on the main street helps, in-store foot traffic has been and continues to decline. However, shoppers are not disappearing, rather relocating online. Making your website and overall online presence (local listings, social media, reviews, etc.) that much more important. Today, having a great website isn’t enough, it has to be easily viewed and used on multiple screen sizes especially smaller mobile devices.

Problem #2 – Personalization – Mass Message Is an Easy Way to Fail

Each of your customers’ want/need something, but not all the same thing. While communicating with your client base according to their wants/needs is challenging, it is also a huge opportunity. Present the right offer to the right person at the right time, and watch your sales increase. For instance, imagine your favorite coffee shop texted you a discount coupon for your favorite drink when you are within walking distance of their new location (which you might not have even known about). Are you going to visit the new locations? – most likely.

Problem # 3 – Frictionless – Easy Consumption or Loss of Sale

Being found is step one. Customizing communication with your customers is step two. Step three is ensuring a good user experience. This includes fast load times, fewer clicks to check out, streamlined forms, ease of navigation, and much more. With global competition, sometimes the littlest pain points for a customer could drive them away.

Essentially, consumers are online looking for stores that cannot only provide the products they need/want but also a service that makes purchasing and receiving these products easy. The full Google video can be viewed on YouTube.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss your ecommerce marketing further, you can contact DaBrian Marketing Group, a certified Google Partner.

Penske Racing Shocks Receives Marketing Assistance from DaBrian Marketing

August 23, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Reading, PA – August 23, 2017– Penske Racing Shocks hand builds high-performance shock absorbers tailored to customer’s needs, and they wanted their website to match that performance. Perpetually driven to be the best at everything they do, Penske Racing Shocks gave DaBrian Marketing Group the green light to create a new Ecommerce website design and revamp the digital marketing strategy for the famous manufacturer.

DaBrian Marketing put a substantial amount of energy into giving the website a sleek new design. A combination of web design and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques made the new website a well-oiled machine for both Penske Racing Shocks’ customers and employees. Many of the updates were aimed at providing a smooth user experience while increasing the speed of the site.

After an in-depth analysis, the site was reorganized to allow potential customers to reach their destination quicker and easier based on specific racing style and environment. The ecommerce site’s product feed was also optimized to enhance user experience, help visitors find products easily, and increase product visibility.

Today, the Penske Racing Shocks website is easy to use, pleasing to look at, and features live price updates, clear tax and shipping information, as well as convenient and secure payment gateways.

View the updated website at: https://www.PenskeShocks.com.

DaBrian Soups-up Penske Racing Shocks’ Ecommerce Marketing to Boost Sales

While the project has consisted mainly of web design, the professionals at the digital marketing agency have executed on other marketing initiatives as a part of Penske Racing Shocks’ Ecommerce marketing strategy. In fact, the first assignment DaBrian Marketing completed was a redesign of Penske Racing Shocks’ branded and product-descriptive flyers. The design of the flyers was the basis of the website design to ensure brand consistency.

DaBrian Marketing Group then provided a one-time social media marketing consultation to help Penske Racing Shocks reach more fans on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Aaron Lambert, Director of Competition, expressed his satisfaction with the partnership, “Penske Racing Shocks number one goal is our customers. Whether it’s understanding how to rebuild their own shocks, tune their vehicle at the racetrack, or just find some information that will help them understand what they are buying. Here at Penske Racing Shocks we build championship winning suspensions, so we teamed with DaBrian Marketing to help give us that same quality in our marketing, website, and social media platforms. It’s been a great experience so far, and we are very excited to see our new website launch, as well as other exciting ideas coming down the line.”

As the relationship continues, Penske Racing Shocks plans to execute on email marketing campaigns for their Ecommerce website. Emails will be used to send newsletters, announce product updates, discuss maintenance availability, and remind users of forgotten items in their online shopping carts.

About Penske Racing Shocks

Penske Racing Shocks is the global leader in suspension technology. Formed in 1988, Penske Racing Shocks have a worldwide reputation for producing quality shock absorbers. Their mission is to supply customers with the best suspension technology and technical support available. Penske Racing’s office is located at 150 Franklin Street, Reading, Pennsylvania, 19602. Contact the company with questions or inquiries on their website, www.PenskeShocks.com or call 610.375.6180.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit DaBrianMarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

July 24, 2017 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Omnichannel marketing is about ensuring that ecommerce & retail marketing strategies are geared toward enabling customers to purchase on any channel. Often there is some confusion about omnichannel versus multichannel marketing. It is my opinion that multichannel marketing is more specific to the tactical efforts of a campaign while omnichannel marketing is based on an organization’s strategic approach.

Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important for Retail & Ecommerce?

The US Census Bureau reported an increase of 14.7% in e-commerce sales with the latest year-over-year increase compared to the first quarter of 2016. The level of competition will continue to grow while US retail sales drop 0.3% versus 0.1% increase that was expected in May. I don’t think that shoppers are so interested in shopping locally and a look for value with a seamless experience. It is important for retailers to understand the latest omnichannel trends and how integrated marketing can turn shoppers into loyal customers.

5 Ways to Turn Shoppers into Customers

Omnichannel marketing is a strategic approach that will require a clear strategy, integrations, execution, and measurement. Below are 5 ways to start turning your shoppers into profitable customers:

1. Have a digital marketing strategy that addresses abandoned shopping carts. Consider including a progress indicator on the checkout pages and offer multiple payment options.
2. Improve the mobile & mobile apps users experience to help shoppers compare, interact, and offer customers enhanced features to increase your mobile sales.
3. Shopping search engines allow you to search specifically for products for sale from online merchants. Enhance your product feed by automating and optimizing your product listing for shopping engines, mobile shopping apps, and social networks to increase product visibility and sales.
4. Use remarketing to engage with previous customers and retargeting to stay top of mind throughout the shoppers’ journey to purchase. Retargeting is often referred to online placement or display ads that target users who have visited your website in a specific way. Remarketing is often used as an email campaign to reconnect with customers.
5. Ask for online reviews from your customers to build trust and customer recommendations to shop at your location.

Measure Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

By no means is the list of ways to turn shoppers into customers limited to 5! I would recommend that your company solidifies a realistic strategy and set goals with targets to measure the effective and overall impact your strategy has on increased revenue. What works for your competition may not be realistic for your brand or customers so maintain your uniqueness and measure strategies and tactics that work for your company!

For more information on E-Commerce and retail, download our free 5-Step Guide to Ecommerce and start to increase your sales.

References: