It’s a question that’s crossed the minds of every Shopify store owner: How can I get more sales for my store?
Many will have attempted to answer this question by heading to the marketing section of the Shopify app store. If you’re one of these people, you’ve likely become overwhelmed at the sheer number of apps available. With all of them promising to get you more sales, it’s next to impossible to determine which ones are actually worth your time installing and setting up.
In the end, two scenarios are likely. Either you suffer from decision paralysis and simply leave the app store without installing a single app. Or you end up picking an app at random and hope that it does what you want it to.
There is a better way to go about this. That is to make a more informed decision so that when you visit the Shopify app store next, you know which app or apps to install.
In that spirit, we’ve listed our picks for the 10 best apps available to ecommerce stores on Shopify.
While not all of these apps will be relevant for your store, our aim here is to provide you with an overview of which apps you should start with to help grow your sales. If you’re looking for an app to solve a particular problem you have, then you may want to look elsewhere. But if you’re just getting started on Shopify or are stuck for ways to increase your sales, then this list is for you.
SmartrMail – Best Email Marketing App for Shopify
Email marketing is essential for every ecommerce store.
Not only does email have the best return on investment (ROI) of any online marketing channel, but it’s already an integral part of communicating with buyers.
While many new stores will pick MailChimp because of their free plan, the problem with this is that MailChimp was never designed with ecommerce in mind.
This makes running email campaigns essential for ecommerce stores, such as abandoned cart, product recommendation and customer winback emails, either incredibly difficult to set up or just simply something you cannot do on MailChimp.
Instead you need an email marketing solution built from the ground up with ecommerce in mind. That’s where SmartrMail comes in. While it might biased of us, we truly believe that SmartrMail is the best email marketing app for Shopify users.
SmartrMail makes it simple to set up advanced automations like abandoned cart reminder flows and welcome series emails. You can also segment your email list by relevant ecommerce factors such as purchase activity, browsing behaviour on your store and shopping cart.
The product autofill in the manual email composer also makes it quick and easy to send email newsletters.
With a free plan available for up to 1,000 subscribers, SmartrMail is also very affordable. Paid plans start at just $29/month.
- Price: Free plan available
- Free Trial? Yes (15 days)
Justuno – Popups
With tens of thousands of installs, Justuno is one of the leading Shopify apps for all your popup and email lead capture needs.
Justuno has an impressive array of tools ranging from simple popups to trigger based ones, email sign up bars, full-screen banners, and more.
All of these are highly customizable in terms of design and messaging letting you have complete control over important aspects such as the call to action. Many of these can also be A/B tested to help you convert even more of your visitors.
They also have a free plan available for stores just starting out which includes access to all of their features. The only limitation being that you can’t have more than 5,000 monthly visitors to your site. Pricing then scales up with the amount of traffic your Shopify store receives.
This combination of affordable pricing and amazing tools makes Justuno a natural choice for all types of ecommerce stores.
- Price: Free plan available
- Free Trial? Yes (14 days)
Kit – the Best Free Marketing App for Shopify
Kit is like your own virtual personal assistant that helps you manage your Facebook and Instagram ads for you. The chatbot is developed by Shopify themselves and let you set up dynamic ads that drive sales within minutes.
If you’ve ever gone into Facebook’s Ads Manager and been overwhelmed by all the settings and options available to you, then this is the perfect app for you. No longer are you forced to surmount the high learning curve to run simple ads on Facebook and Instagram – Kit does it for you.
Better yet, Kit is completely free. The only charge is the actual cost of running the ads on Facebook.
With Facebook and Instagram being the most popular social networks today, don’t let a lack of experience with social media marketing cost you sales. Install Kit instead.
- Price: Free
- Free Trial? n/a
Sumo – Conversion Optimization App
Sumo is one of the most powerful and popular apps aimed exclusively at boosting your on-site conversion rate and getting you more sales.
Whether it’s collecting more email addresses to grow your list, increasing the average order value of customer carts, or generating unique discount codes to boost sales, Sumo has a tool for your store.
The simplicity of the app also makes it possible to get effective marketing automations up and running within minutes.
Sumo’s free plan also means that you only get charged after the apps starts to generate sales for you. Once you make over $500 a month in revenue the app has determined it generated, you’re moved onto the paid plan of $49 per month.
- Price: Free plan available
- Free Trial? No
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Benchmark Hero – SEO Site Audit
Search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be a consideration of every ecommerce store owner.
Good SEO means that your store and product pages will move up the rankings in Google search results. In turn, this brings more quality leads to your store, some of which will convert into paying customers.
The problem however is that identifying and rectifying SEO issues on your site is out of reach of most people just starting out in ecommerce. That’s where apps like SEO Site Audit, Benchmark Hero help. The app identifies issues on your site that’s affecting and offers actionable insights into how you can improve your site’s performance.
Considering that the app is completely free, unless you’ve already got your SEO needs covered, there’s no reason you wouldn’t add this app to your Shopify account.
- Price: Free
- Free Trial? n/a
Tada – Interactive & Gamified Pop-ups
Tada gives your Shopify store that little extra push it needs to boost sales.
Tada’s interactive pop-ups allow your visitors to play an interactive game on your site and win an attractive discount in exchange for their email. By creating a fun interaction between your store and your customers, Tada increases your number of subscribers and sales.
Tada integrates with multiple email marketing platforms and it also comes with a smart dashboard that allows you to fully control your customers’ journey.
The free plan that offers up to 5000 monthly impressions. If you max that out, paid plans start at $9.99 a month.
- Price: Free plan available
- Free Trial? Yes
ReferralCandy – Referral Programs
Word-of-mouth is an ecommerce marketer’s best friend (assuming it’s positive!).
When a friend, colleague or family member recommends a product to us, we become 4 times more likely purchase it than we would otherwise. Customers acquired this way are also more profitable with them having a higher customer lifetime value.
This is why getting your existing customers to refer you to their friends and family is absolutely essential.
While your product should stand for itself, ReferralCandy helps get the ball rolling by incentivizing your customers to refer their friends with a unique referral link. You can then determine what reward is given to both parties. From there, the app handles everything else including reward delivery, reminders, and referral tracking.
Coming in at $49 a month, the app isn’t on the cheap side, but with a 30 day free trial you have time to see whether it will be able to pay for itself or not.
- Price: $49/month
- Free Trial? Yes (30 days)
GrowthHero – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can help you generate sales through partners that become your distributed salesforce. To achieve the best results from your affiliate marketing campaigns, you need the right Shopify app.
GrowthHero provides a flexible tool that allows you to manage affiliate, referral, and multi-level-marketing campaigns. It offers advanced customization options so you can easily design a partner portal that matches your brand identity. The support team is ready to help you get started quickly and achieve the best results even if you don’t have prior experience with affiliate marketing.
- Price: $39/month
- Free trial: yes (14 days)
Yotpo – Social Proof
If Shopify Product Reviews doesn’t provide enough functionality to add the required social proof to your store, then Yotpo represents the next step up.
Yotpo moves beyond just product reviews to include widgets, Q&A pages and the ability to moderate the reviews you receive. The app also provides integrations with other platforming such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.
All these extra features come at a price though. While there is a free plan available, if you want access to all the features, you will need to reach out to Yotpo to set up a plan.
- Price: Free plan available
- Free Trial? n/a
OSI Affiliate – Affiliate Marketing App
Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool for ecommerce stores, however managing it yourself is just going to give you a massive headache.
Omnistar offers an integrated solution to all of your affiliate marketing problems. The entire process from finding influencers and affiliates, tracking the sales they bring your store, to managing their payments is managed from within the app.
This avoids you from having to learn anything technical like custom coupon generation for reward programs or setting up conversion tracking code.
Omnistar comes with three pricing tiers: basic professional and premium. There’s also a 15 day free trial for new users.
- Price: $47/month
- Free Trial? Yes (15 days)
The Top 10 Shopify Marketing Apps for 2019
Now that we’ve gone through our top ten recommendations for Shopify marketing apps, we hope that there’s some that you’ll be able to take advantage of right now.
Of course, there are plenty of other great apps out there. If you have any particular apps you find invaluable, feel free to mention them below in the comments.
Looking for automation apps? Check out this list here.
