8 Shopify Apps to Help Grow Your Online Business

E-commerce has become a major part of the economy in today’s digitalised world. Even brick-and-mortar stores are working hard to boost the growth of their online businesses. E-commerce saw unexpected growth during the coronavirus pandemic when the entire world was locked indoors and resorted to online shopping. Though people are now going back to traditional shopping, there’s nothing that seems to restrict e-commerce. Online business continues to flourish.

Though creating a store has become easy with Shopify, sustaining a business is an uphill battle. If you are new to the e-commerce world, you may find it difficult to grow your business. For merchants on Shopify, there are multiple apps that can help market your brand and reach new customers.

Below we have listed eight Shopify apps that store owners can leverage to build customers and reach the target audience:

1. Seguno

Seguno is an email marketing application that aims to connect Shopify store owners and their customers via a channel of communication. By constantly staying in touch with your buyers, you can turn them into loyal customers.

With the help of Seguno, you can send different types of emails, ranging from welcome emails to thank you emails. You can even send new product alerts and inform customers about the limited availability of stock via email. This in turn will help you maintain your customer base by ensuring that they remember you. Below are some of the top features of this Shopify app:

1. Automated and quick welcome and thank you emails for customers
2. Seguno also offers recommendations for abandoned carts
3. Generates discount codes

2. Plug In SEO

Plug In SEO helps merchants improve their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and makes it effortless for new customers to find their brand. As soon as the app is installed, it automatically detects each and every SEO aspect of the e-commerce store by integrating with it. It takes care of keywords, blog content, and broken links among others, and helps improve page views, search rankings and conversions.

Plug In SEO guides merchants through solving site issues and reviewing improvement reports from time to time. This Shopify app saves a lot of time and effort as there is no need for store owners to monitor each page individually and thoroughly. As far as the pricing of this app is concerned, basic scanning is for free. However, to avail of premium features, one needs to pay a fee of $20 per month. Below are the salient features of Plug In SEO:

1. The app sends alerts via email on detecting an SEO error
2. Gives free guidelines, like code snippets to fix search engine optimisation
3. Help increase organic traffic by improving SEO

3. Cloudinary

Pictures and videos play an important role in the success of e-commerce websites. Cloudinary helps merchants to streamline media management and enhance the user experience by automatically delivering pictures and videos.

Store owners can also make use of the automatic media optimisation and editing options available in the app. With the help of this Shopify app, merchants can now reduce image size by up to 50 percent and even compress video. This in turn enables the page to load quickly for a better customer experience, thus boosting sales. Below are the main features of this application:

1. It helps store, transform, optimize, and deliver all media assets with easy-to-use APIs
2. Merchants can integrate with upstream and downstream applications in their tech stack with the help of extensible APIs and webhooks or built-in integrations.

4. Fondue CashBack

Fondue CashBack is a Shopify app to help merchants replace coupon codes with CashBack, thus driving toward profitable growth. This in turn helps in increased conversion and profit. According to the company, CashBack is a stronger converting purchase incentive than discount codes.

Brands such as Duradry, Steve Madden, and Birthdate Candles are using Fondue. The app offers a 30-day free trial and later charges $19.99 per month. Below we have listed the major features of Fondue CashBack:

1. Compatible with tools that are already being used by the merchants
2. Works anywhere a brand is using a discount, for example- site popups, winbacks, ads, influencers and more

5. Smile

Smile comes as a handy tool that helps boost sales. It is an app for loyalty and reward that promises to turn a guest visitor into a loyal customer. The app allows guests to both earn and even redeem points, thus paving the way for additional and big purchases. With the reward programs, merchants can increase their sales and encourage shoppers to make repeat purchases thus saving on acquisition costs and boosting brand loyalty.

With more than ten years of experience, Smile is used by over 60,000 Shopify brands. Smile is a freemium app, which means initially it can be used free of cost but as the business grows, one needs to opt for packages starting at $49 per month. The top features of Smile are as follows:

1. The app allows merchants to design points, referrals and VIP-based loyalty programs
2. Store owners can even check results with the help of Smila analytics
3. Reward launcher, panel and emails can be customised to represent the brand aesthetic
4. Merchants can even remind shoppers of their earned points and referral link with Nudges
5. The entire loyalty program can be auto-translated to one of the six preset languages

6. Outfy

Outfy is a social media marketing app that helps Shopify store owners effortlessly market their products. With Outfy, merchants can create and promote content on all social media platforms, both manually and automatically. It also generates hashtags that can be included in your posts.

The app also provides recommendations to enable merchants market more productively to reach a larger audience. The top features of Outfy are:

1. The app allows you to manage six social media platforms at once
2. You can share posts both in real-time or even schedule days, weeks, or months in advance
3. Multiple shops can be attached to a single Outfy account
4. Outfy offers a “pay for use” pricing concept. Merchants can purchase credits and then use them within the time period they are comfortable with
5. Their preset templates can be used for sale announcements or promotion

7. AfterShip Returns Center

AfterShip Returns Center helps merchants manage the ‘inevitable’ returns in a better way. AfterShip makes the return process effortless by automating gift card refunds and cash, offering exchanges, generating and printing automatic refund labels as well as controlling the return process by creating automated rules.

With analytics, merchants can better understand the return process performance. This in turn will help them plan inventory better and even improve the offerings. AfterShip Returns Center is available free of cost for three months after which the pricing plan starts at $11 per month. Below are the salient features of the AfterShip Returns Center:

1. With branded returns page, merchants can engage customers with a self-service return experience
2. The returns management portal will help store owners looks into all the returns in one place
3. Return notifications and updates to maintain customer loyalty
4. Smart routing rules to ensure that products are returned to the right place at minimum cost

8. PushOwl

Abandoned carts are where businesses lose revenue. For customers, it is scary if their favourite product goes out of stock. Remember there is a “fear of missing out (FOMO).” With the help of PushOwl, merchants can send web push notifications to encourage customers to complete the shopping process.

Messages like “almost sold out” or “last few pieces remaining only”, motivate buyers to make purchases. The promotional notifications are sent directly to the device of shoppers, thus ensuring higher visibility. Merchants can easily send updates via notifications such as “back-in-stock” to boost sales. Below are the major features of PushOwl app:

1. Tailored campaigns and reminders for abandoned carts
2. Reports to help merchants analyse the performance of their automated notifications and campaigns
3. Shoppers can be targeted based on their purchase history, behaviour and location, etc. Later, promotions can be personalised to increase conversions.
4. Remind shoppers who showed interest in a particular product and transform their interest into a purchase