As we continue to make our way into the new decade, we can’t help but think about ways that will make your life easier. Running an ecommerce business is hard work, and there’s no way around that, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do all of that work by yourself. Whether you are a solopreneur, or even if you have a solid team to help you, there is a lot that is needed in order to be successful, and it is easy to get overwhelmed or simply run out of time.
Thankfully, you can turn to automation in order to scale your business. Saving you valuable time, and helping provide your customers with a better user experience, automation is something that can help everyone. It has increased in popularity over the last few years, and especially after the difficulty of 2020 and the increase in demand for online shopping experiences, it is safe to say that automation is here to stay.
In fact, spending on marketing automation is expected to grow to $25.1 billion annually by 2023. It’s also not just popular; it’s effective. Almost 90% of agencies have said their marketing automation strategy is successful.
Why Automate?
A lot of marketers feel like getting started with automation is more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, after all, aren’t you part of a team that handles marketing? Can’t you just continue handling everything on your own? To a certain extent, sure, but if you want to grow, automation is one of the best ways to go. This doesn’t mean that you sit back and put your feet up while these programs handle every aspect of your marketing, but rather, it saves you valuable time that you can put into other crucial areas that can’t be automated- such as content creation.
If you have been afraid to get started with marketing automation, now is really the time to dive in and give it a try. There are plenty of services out there and best of all, getting started could not be easier if you happen to run a Shopify store. Their app store is loaded with useful tools that will easily make 2021 your best year yet. Here are our top 8 picks for the best Shopify marketing automation apps.
If you run an ecommerce store with a large inventory, Post Studio is an app that you absolutely need. Manually taking the time to share all of your items to social media would take such a massive amount of time. You know the power of social media, so getting this figured out should be at the top of your list. Automate it!
With Post Studio, you can set up which items you want to be shared to your social media. They currently share to Facebook and Twitter, with Pinterest and Instagram coming soon. You have control over the caption, with other elements dynamically changing according to the product. Simply set it up, and let it do its thing!
Price: Free!
A top tactic for boosting sales is cross-selling, or the act of selling additional related items to a customer. In fact, research shows that up to 30% of ecommerce sales come from product recommendations. To manually set this up on product or checkout pages would be incredibly time-consuming. An app like Recomatic takes care of all of that work for you.
Not only will Recomatic automate these product suggestions, saving you valuable time, it will also likely do a better job than you thanks to its powerful AI that analyzes your inventory and sales history to display the items that users are most likely to purchase.
Their app is incredibly easy to start using, and best of all, their team will help ensure that everything fits the style of your Shopify store seamlessly. Don’t worry about having development skills or a developer on staff- they will take care of it for you!
Price: $69/month with a 14-day free trial
Retargeting is one of the most powerful marketing tactics out there. We’ve discussed it in detail in the past, as we really do believe it is one of the best ways to improve web traffic and boost conversions. You can easily automate your retargeting ad efforts with a tool like Adroll. Best of all, with Adroll you can set up retargeting campaigns that display both on the web and social media.
Adroll is really easy to get set up with and offers tons of guidance when it comes to uploading your ads- including what sizes they need to be, what type of caption information you can include descriptions of various ad placements, and a lot more.
You can also take advantage of their dynamic retargeting in order to display personalized ads that display specific products a user has looked at on your website. It’s a great way to improve the effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns and boost conversions. Include something like a discount code to really see some excellent results.
There is absolutely no reason to let interested users leave your website without a trace. Retarget them and bring them back to your website and edge them closer towards converting. All through the power of automation!
Price: There is a free starter plan, with paid plans starting at $25/month with a 30-day free trial
Social proof is another awesome tactic for skyrocketing your sales. Nothing can beat the power of a great customer review and photo. Nearly 90% of ecommerce customers look for user-generated content before deciding to purchase. Loox is a marketing automation app that will help you collect and display user reviews and photos.
Loox makes it easy on you by allowing you to set up automated emails that send out after every purchase asking the customer for a review and an image. You can even incentivize the email by offering a discount to users who leave a photo review.
What we like best about Loox is how many unique options you have for displaying user reviews and photos- including in rich snippets on Google, on product pages, in popups, on Facebook, and more. With this app, you can fully harness the power of user reviews and put it to great use across search engines, your website, social media, and more!
Price: Plans start at $9.99/month with a 14-day free trial
Email marketing remains an effective tactic and a great method of keeping in contact with your audience. However, growing an email list can be quite a challenge, especially these days. People’s inboxes are overflowing and as a result, users are a lot pickier about who they give their email to.
WooHoo is a marketing automation app that will help you boost your email list by offering fun games in exit-intent popups that will help you capture a user’s information before they leave your website (possibly forever). By offering something fun, you are increasing the likelihood that a user will give over their email.
With WooHoo, you have several different game setups to choose from- including a wheel spin, a reel design, gift box selection, or card layout. You also have full control over what ‘prize’ options you offer and what percentages you want for each. For example, a 5% chance of winning a 50% off discount and a 20% chance of winning a 15% discount.
We like that you can A/B test your popups to see which performs better and gets a better conversion rate. Test out different games and see which your audience responds to better. The result? More emails, and more sales!
Price: There is a free plan available, or upgrade for more features starting at $4.95/month with a 7-day free trial
Like we mentioned above, email marketing is still an effective way to engage your audience, and a tool like Constant Contact can help you create some really gorgeous-looking emails and set up some cool automation. Their easy-to-use interface and affordable pricing make it a great option for anyone, but in particular small businesses that want to start quickly and easily.
Their drag and drop editor also comes complete with tons of templates that span a variety of industries, giving you easy access to visually appealing emails without having to hire your own graphic designer. These emails can then be set up to automate based on a variety of factors. Send automatic welcome emails, set up an autoresponder, or even run a Facebook promotion to help increase your followers on the social media platform.
There’s no denying the popularity of email. By automating some of your campaigns, you are sure to save tons of valuable time.
Price: Plans start at $20/month with a 60-day free trial
For many ecommerce stores, a solid content marketing strategy is what helps pull in new users, turning them into valued, repeat customers that also regularly engage with your website and content. In fact, marketers that prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI.
To help advance your content marketing efforts, you should rely on an automated app like Related Blog Posts. This app, which is totally free, will suggest related blog posts to users, encouraging them to stay engaged and read additional articles at your site.
Not only will this app help increase views to your blog posts, it will also help with your SEO, giving you some great additional internal linking, which helps Google and other search engines properly crawl and index your site.
If you are already blogging, there is no reason not to install this app. With no cost involved, there’s no risk to try it out. All that’s waiting for you is more traffic, engagement, and improved SEO.
Price: Free!
If you’re looking for an excellent, automated method for engaging with your customers, you really can’t beat web push notifications. Delivering both to desktop and mobile devices, these notifications deliver instantly to a subscriber no matter what they are doing. What other platform offers that level of visibility?
Best of all, you have tons of automation opportunities that are really easy to set up. From retargeting abandoned carts to making personalized product recommendations, sending welcome notifications, re-engaging old visitors, and more, you’ve got options. Here are 5 great automation opportunities for boosting customer engagement specifically.
With web push, you can also create campaigns incredibly quickly without needing to hire a graphic designer or a developer. Anyone can do it! Triggered campaigns give you awesome opportunities for sending relevant, personalized campaigns that you only have to set up once. Determine the trigger, create the campaign, and set it live! Check in with your results and adjust as needed. It really couldn’t be easier.
Price: Plans start at $49/month with a 14-day free trial
Wrapping Up
You’ve got a lot of great options for marketing automation with your ecommerce store. Hopefully, these Shopify marketing automation apps have you thinking about how you can incorporate more automation into your marketing strategy.
From simple email campaigns to more complex personalized web push notifications, ad retargeting, content marketing automation, product reviews, and more, hopefully, you now realize how many great automation options you have for just about every aspect of your ecommerce brand.
Looking for more great tools? Be sure to check out our other Shopify roundup posts with other great app suggestions for boosting sales and improving your marketing.
If you want to start using Aimtell to send web push notifications to your customers, you can get started for free, or you can learn more by reading our Beginner’s Guide.
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automation, digital marketing, ecommerce, ecommerce tools, marketing automation, shopify, shopify marketing automation apps*.
