5 Great Shopify Apps to Optimize Your Ecommerce Store All five of these recommended apps come with a free trial, so you can get started today.
By Thomas Smale Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In August 2017, Shopify announced it had reached a milestone, having powered more than 500,000 ecommerce storefronts in 175 countries. That's a remarkable achievement for a company that began in 2004 as a platform for selling snowboards -- a fact that the shopping giant mentions on its site.
Related: The 9 Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales Available for Free
Obviously, Shopify is popular among entrepreneurs. And one thing that makes it so is their ease of getting up and running with little or no technical knowledge required. Additionally, with Shopify, it is easy to incorporate the best of the proprietary apps from the Shopify App Store so that a Shopify store can boost its chances of becoming a highly valuable business.
But, a problem: With thousands of Shopify apps to choose from, it's easy for a business to feel spoiled in terms of the many choices available -- or just overwhelmed. To make that selection easier, here are five Shopify apps I recommend to supercharge your ecommerce store today.
1. GrooveJar (for lead capture)
GrooveJar provides a powerful suite of lead capture and conversion tools that can help boost your conversion rate high above the industry average of under 3 percent (according to a study by SmartInsights). The result will be to nearly double what t he tools currently capture.
GrooveJar makes this possible by allowing Shopify store owners to capture the email addresses of visitors via eight different, fully-customizable pop-up tools.
Related: 6 Steps to Building a Million-Dollar Ecommerce Site in 60 Days
GrooveJar's flagship tool here is GrooveUrgent. GrooveUrgent uses the powerful psychological strategy of urgency to entice site visitors into leaving their email address in exchange for a discount or other incentive of your choice.
GrooveJar is the Shopify app to use for converting your site's visitors into customers.
2. Klaviyo (for email marketing)
A multitude of options are available when it comes to integrating email marketing software with your Shopify store. Some of the most popular apps include Omnisend, MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.
What sets Klaviyo apart from the rest is its deep integration with the user data collected by Shopify. It puts personalized, data-driven marketing easily within reach of Shopify merchants. And this can really pay off. It is estimated that the average Klaviyo user makes roughly $75 for every dollar spent on the app, according to the Klaviyo experts at FuelMade blog.
Most ecommerce store owners know that abandoned cart recovery emails are one of the best ways to convert lost prospects into buyers. Klaviyo takes this a step further by giving you the ability to target customers who have abandoned their browsing session -- even if they haven't added anything to the cart.
But Klaviyo isn't just about automating your email marketing. The Klaviyo dashboard helps you spot patterns in the way users interact with your site, allowing you to make your marketing campaigns laser-focused.
As an added bonus, GrooveJar comes with Klaviyo integration, making it easy to get your lead capture and email marketing efforts in sync.
3. Crush.pics (for image optimization)
Ensuring that your images are optimized for the web is one of the easiest and most effective ways to boost the performance of your e-commerce store.
Traditionally, image optimization meant reducing the file size in image-editing software like Photoshop or Gimp. Crush.pics allows you to take a much more hands-off approach. Not only will it automatically compress images as you upload them to your Shopify store, it retroactively compresses existing images to your specifications.
There are two compression options: Lossless, which compresses images up to 30 percent with no loss in quality, and Lossy, which offers compression of up to 70 percent with minimal loss of quality.
If like most ecommerce sites, your Shopify store relies heavily on images, image optimization can have a dramatic improvement on the performance of your website. That, in turn, can make a big difference to your bottom line. According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less and 40 percent will abandon a site that takes over three seconds to load.
Not only does Crush.pics compress your images, it also aids in effective image management, making it easy to use file-naming conventions and alt-tags to facilitate search engine optimization (SEO). Page speed is also a factor in Google's search engine result page (SERP) rankings.
Using Google's free tool here, you can see how your page speed measures up before and after you use Crush.pics to optimize your images
4. Yotpo (for user reviews)
According to Vendasta, 92 percent of consumers now read online reviews and 63 percent are more likely to make a purchase from a site that offers user reviews. If you're not leveraging user-generated content like reviews to build social proof for your business, you're missing out on one of the most powerful marketing techniques.
Yotpo makes it easy for your customers to review their purchases by sending a review reminder email after an interval the merchant determines. Where Yotpo shines compared to similar apps is that it gives users the ability to write their review and select the star rating within the email itself rather than having to return to the site.
This has been shown to have a much higher success rate, which makes sense as it requires less effort on behalf of your customers.
Yotpo does far more than remind customers to review their purchases, though. You can use Yotpo to manage user-generated content across your social media channels. Yotpo can also generate Google ads that show average star ratings for your selected products.
Creating quality content is time-consuming. With Yotpo, you can put the content generated by fans of your brand to work for you.
5. ReferralCandy (for referral marketing)
Have you heard the word about word-of-mouth marketing? Conversion optimization platform Invesp states that consumers in surveys are 90 percent more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend. ReferralCandy reports in a video that 83 percent of consumers polled who are happy with a product or service are willing to give a positive referral. Despite this finding, only 29 percent of consumers take the time to do so.
ReferralCandy aims to correct this disparity, enabling Shopify merchants to take advantage of this most trusted source of marketing. It incentivizes your customers to recommend your products to their networks. Both the referrer and the referee are rewarded with either a discount, a cash payment or another reward determined by the merchant.
You can promote your referral program with pop-ups, via email or by embedding a link to the program in your website. Referrers can share their unique link via email, through social media or any other channel.
Related: 6 Steps to Building a Million-Dollar Ecommerce Site in 60 Days
Final thoughts
Apps for Shopify are what makes a good ecommerce Shopify store great. If you aren't putting them to use in your Shopify storefront, you're missing out on several creative ways to add value to your store. All five of the apps recommended here come with a free trial, as do others -- so you could get up and running with some of the best apps today!
