email 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.

Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Business

April 3, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

There are many tactics in the digital marketing realm from PPC, SEO, to social media marketing. The one that’s often overlooked is email marketing which is probably one of your biggest missed opportunities. It has an ROI of 3800%. When you pair email marketing with your Ecommerce store, the results will be outstanding. If you’re not familiar with email marketing, let’s set you in the right direction and explore some of the tactics you can try.

How to Start Email Marketing

As with any marketing initiative, a clear strategy must be written to clearly align the business goals with your email marketing efforts. From there, create the process. Outline key roles, the frequency of each email, best practices for when your company should be sending out these emails, and any other features you’d like to take advantage of. Once you’ve outlined how you’ll be using email, pick the best email marketing platform for your company.

What Can I Send?

There are so many ways to regularly and creatively stay connected with your customers. These emails are critical in order to stay in front of your customers or those interested in your company. You can send an event invitation, a monthly newsletter, or announce a new product. I’m sure you’ve seen many of these in your personal inbox. But, think about which ones grabbed your attention and the ones you actually read. Having an appealing subject line and a unique element to each email is necessary for it to have any effect on your sales.

Set It, But Don’t Forget It

Automation is the simplest way for you to give each customer exactly what they would like to read. It gives you a chance to cross-sell, up-sell, and follow-up with your customers. Here are just a few ways you’d be able to take advantage of it:

Special Coupons – Deals based on a previous purchase.
Abandoned Shopping Carts – Get them to come back to your site and reconsider!
Recent Customer’s Email – Welcome them!
Customer Re-engagement Email – Win back customers you haven’t heard from.
Best Customers Email – Reward those who support you.

Tell Them What They Want To Hear

Segmenting your lists simply means adding extra information to your email list that will help organize and target specific people. This is the best way to truly give your customers what they will actually need or want. Note which category of items they typically buy, their average dollar sale, or where they live. If your business is B2B, note which industry they are in. This way, you will be able to personalize your emails and make them more inclined to engage with your content. Your customers already receive many emails that they immediately delete if it doesn’t pertain to them. Make them read yours!

Email marketing should not be forgotten with all of the ‘cool’, new tactics that are constantly being created. What ways do you see work best for your company? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

Want to learn more about Ecommerce? Download our Ecommerce eBook, now.

Email Marketing Strategies That Will Increase Your Ecommerce Sales

December 5, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

As a fellow marketer, I bet we both can agree that it seems like we can never get caught up with emails. Our inbox is flooded with random people or businesses trying to gain our attention. As we skim past every subject line and choose which emails to open, which ones to actually read, and which ones to simply delete, we quickly determine the ones worth our time. If we do it, your consumers do, too. Your email marketing efforts need to be focused on what’s going to attract your consumers to open, click, and buy your products.

Connect your Ecommerce Store

To do this, integrating your Ecommerce store to your email marketing platform correctly is the first step. The data you need to increase your sales will then automatically populate. You’ll begin capturing their purchase history, following their path to your website, and learning more about the people they are such as their demographics, geographic location, and interests. Before you start seeing an impact on your ROI, you need to learn what to actually do with the information you now have.

Segment Your Email Lists

Sending emails to your potential or current customers is a great way to continue the communication between the two of you, but it doesn’t mean they are interested in what you have to say. By segmenting your lists, you can distribute emails directed towards that particular customer.

Types of Customer Segments:

Potential Customers – Those who’ve shown interest, but never purchased should get an email to ensure you both stay connected.
Recent Customers – If they recently purchased an item, you now have an idea of what they like. Send them a follow-up email with other similar products.
First-time Customers – These new customers might enjoy a “thank you” email to feel more welcomed and appreciated.
Repeat Customers – They have purchased more than once already. Make sure they stay your repeat customers by sending them a special offer or coupon.
Lapsed Customers – Lapsed customers haven’t purchased anything in months. Become top-of-mind again by sending them a deal on the last product they purchased.
Seasonal Customers – Say some customers only buy during certain months of the year. When this month rolls around, be the first name they see. Send them an email with images of what they usually buy.

This segmentation can get you started with sending out the right emails, but there many other ways to segment your lists, also.

Test your Content

Simply because you sent out an email, doesn’t mean you will actually get every customer to open it– We know this. Find out what makes them more inclined to open and interact with your email. A/B testing is the perfect way to do so. This is when you change one variable of an email and see which one performs better. You can test the sender’s name, subject line, send time, copy inside the email, and imagery (videos, gifs, etc.). Does a more blunt, factual approach work for your customers or do they enjoy more humor? Whichever email generates the most sales is your winner!

Click Here for A/B Testing Ideas

Rely on Automated Emails

In a study completed by eMarketer, it was found that B2C marketers who leverage automation have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. Automated emails are reminders and follow-ups of a recent consumer interaction. One of the most important automated emails is an abandoned shopping cart reminder. eMarketer also reports that an email notification about an abandoned shopping cart receives a 40.5% open rate. You know they’re interested, so tell them they need it and don’t let them forget.

Track What You’ve Earned

Whether you’re sending an individual email or an entire email campaign, it’s important to analyze the results. How do the open rates and click percentages compare to industry averages? How many unsubscribed from receiving your emails? How many sales did it generate? What was its average dollar sale compared to your other emails? Find out why a certain email performed better (or worse) than another. Constant analysis allows for constant improvement.

Perfect your email marketing now so you can start the New Year with just one more way to improve your ROI.

What challenges do you face with your email marketing efforts? Comment below, or contact us today to learn more about email marketing opportunities.

Ecommerce Tips To Ensure Success on Cyber Monday

November 28, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

CYBER MONDAY IS HERE!

And, it’s expected to be the largest shopping day in US history (for the 7th straight year). It is imperative that your Ecommerce is locked down, functioning properly, and ready to go. You may think your company’s website is ready for the rush simply because you have a shopping cart built onto your page, but there’s much more to think about. Use this checklist to see if you are prepared to conquer and surpass your competitors’ numbers on the largest shopping day in HISTORY.

Mobile Friendly = Money Friendly

Cyber Monday is predicted to surpass $1 billion in mobile sales for the first time.
Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop.

Having a mobile friendly site is a necessity. Learn tips for designing and optimizing your site for mobile.

Does your shopping cart and discount codes work?

A functioning cart is the most important to closeout the purchase. When your customers leave items in your shopping cart, they should be able to return without losing them. They should also be able to to view these items across all devices.

Tie in your email marketing efforts with abandoned shopping carts, too. Send an automated reminder email later that day with, “There’s still time left!” or a few days later saying, “We’ll give you a second chance!”

Site Search and Filtering Plug-ins

When someone lands on your site for a particular product or service, it should be easily found right away. To do this, use a site search bar or filtering plug-in. Properly tagging each product with its brand, name and specific features will get your customers what they want and get you another sale.

Optimizing Your Pages and Products

Having products alone won’t drive traffic to your site, and will certainly decrease the chance of a purchase. Adding comprehensive product descriptions that include all necessary information along with image alt tags, captions, and descriptions will increase the search visibility of your product. If you want to rank well in search engines for a specific product or service, this is a. You also want to limit the amount of questions a customer has. By providing this information, your customers will feel confident in making that final purchasing decision.

Reviews and Rating System On-Site

According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers will trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Reviews on your website could boost your Cyber Monday sales. (or hurt them if not handled properly, ?)

24/7 Customer Support

Resolving an issue or answering customer questions immediately can save some headaches for both your company and customers. Offer multiple ways for anyone to get ahold of you. A “live chat” feature on your website can help customers make a purchasing decision faster. Your customers are less likely to make a purchasing decision if they still have unanswered questions. If you can’t answer their questions, your competitors will.

Monitoring social media on a day-to-day basis is also a great opportunity to connect with your customers. When there is an issue, a customer is more likely to head to social media first to bad-mouth your brand. Be part of that conversation; don’t avoid it.

Local SEO: Can They Find You?

Today, mobile is our new local directory. Your customers aren’t pulling out their phone books and local guides anymore, they are searching for your product or service online. The most popular search engines today have algorithms that heavily favor locality. Here are some tips to ensure your business is appearing atop the local search results:

Have your name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistently accurate all throughout your site (I suggest in your footer).
Embed Google Maps (viewing your location) on your contact us page.
Be listed on major local listing platforms such as Google My Business, Facebook, Apple Maps and Bing Places.
Use local Business Schema markup.
Use local keywords in your URLs, TTD’s, and content, where appropriate.

Appearing at the top of local search results often lead to sales. According to Think With Google, 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. Of those 76% of searches, 28% result in a purchase.

PPC Remarketing to Remember

So your site functions properly and you’ve optimized it well enough to bring a lot of people to it, is that enough? Not quite. Just as you would shopping in person, your digital customers are going to weigh their options. This means either checking out your competitors, or visiting other websites for additional information about a specific product or service. Make sure you stay top of mind with PPC Remarketing. Remarketing allows you to basically “follow” users that have previously interacted with your brand, and place ads on other websites.

Now after today has come to an end and all the shoppers have gone to bed… Go to work tomorrow and compare your numbers from today to any other day of the year. Did you not see a significant difference? (Eh, or maybe you don’t even have the analytics to compare.?) Either way, that’s when you’ll know your business was not as prepared as it should and could have been.

If you didn’t check all of these items off, you can have better luck next year (and throughout the year) when you work with us. 😉 Give us a call and we can chat about how to grow your company and your Ecommerce website.

What else do you find important for an Ecommerce site to have? Let us know in the comments below!

Why Your Small Business Needs Digital Marketing

August 8, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group 4 Comments

As a business owner, your time is precious, budget is limited, and your hands are always full with a thousand different things. Currently, you have a website and are running ads in the local newspaper, but you know it’s not enough in today’s digital world. In order for your small business to be competitive in your respective industry, you need to utilize digital marketing.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Digital Marketing Agency

By hiring a qualified and reputable digital marketing agency, you will gain an entire team focused on your goals and objectives without the additional salaries and benefits to your payroll. As easy as it is to hire a digital marketing firm, you can just as easily fire them if they’re not performing to your standards. You pay for performance. Simple as that.

You will have more time to focus on your area of expertise. There are a lot of facets involved in digital marketing as you can see in the word cloud below.

You don’t have the time to learn it all, let alone manage it effectively and efficiently. You will quickly become overwhelmed. Hiring a certified partner agency with the likes of Google, Bing, Hootsuite, and Big Commerce, you won’t have to waste time training employees. An agency will allow you to hit the ground running as you and the agency focus on the areas of expertise you each possess.

Digital Marketing Helps David Fight Goliath

Digital marketing helps level the playing field. Done properly, it allows you to reallocate your marketing investment and target the audience you want to reach more efficiently. An agency will utilize their expertise and experience and be able to show exactly what is working and what’s not via analytics. The best practices large corporations use are the same ones an agency will (or should) be using. Let them use their expertise so you can use yours.

The fact is, many companies are still not utilizing digital marketing, so there is a real opportunity to grow quickly. This is especially true when you can eliminate the learning curve and hire a certified partner agency right from the start. They live and breathe SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, click-through rates, and conversion rates. An agency understands that your success is essential for their success and ultimate survival. That is a rather big motivation, wouldn’t you say? So you’ve waiting long enough, hire a certified partner agency before your competition does.

For more information about our digital marketing services, leave a comment below or call us for a free consultation!

DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC Hires Logan Bucks as Inbound Marketing Manager

June 28, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Reading, PA – DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC hires Logan Bucks for the new position of Inbound Marketing Manager.

Responsibilities of the Inbound Marketing Manager at DaBrian include the application, maintenance, and growth of clients’ social media accounts, email marketing campaigns, and all other forms of digital content. The Inbound Marketing Manager’s tasks are to evaluate the use of social media, email, and content, attract a client’s targeted audience through paid and organic initiatives, and promote services or products through a voice that matches the client’s unique brand. Answering customers’ questions, promoting discounts or sales, sharing a company’s unique culture, and building a company’s brand awareness are just some of the major goals of the Inbound Marketing Manager at DaBrian.

Logan Bucks is a 2016 Kutztown University graduate with a dual-major B.S./B.A. in Marketing and Management. Bucks, a former intern at DaBrian in 2015, demonstrates her skills and abilities to understand and utilize the world of social media, email marketing, and digital consumer behavior to improve clients’ online presence. She is a valued new addition to the close-knit team at DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC.

President and CEO, Daniel Laws gave the following statement: “We’re happy to have Logan back at DaBrian Marketing Group and we look forward to her continuous growth and valuable contributions to our team.”

Visit the team page of DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC’s website to learn more about Logan and the rest of DaBrian’s personnel.