The 10 Best Sales and Marketing Apps in Shopify

With all the competition out there, you need a lot more than an online storefront to make it in the e-commerce world. Setting up shop is the easy part. You can do that in about 15 minutes. Driving traffic to your store and converting browsers into buyers is where it starts to get tricky. To help, I've gathered the most effective sales and marketing apps to help you strengthen your brand, expand your reach, and grow your business into the powerhouse brand it was always meant to be.  

SALES APPS

The right combination of sales apps will help you to motivate purchases and increase order value both through upsells and buying incentives. Sales apps can also help you recover abandoned carts, make smart recommendations, and create affiliate programs of your own. Here are my top sales app recommendations:  

Product Upsell

 As the name implies, Product Upsell gives you the ability to offer relevant upsell products during checkout, based on the contents of the customer's shopping cart. You can also offer BOGO (buy one, get one) sales using the app. If you're not offering upsells on your website, then you're missing out on a huge amount of extra sales that you could be adding to every single order.  What's nice about this app: 

• It's popular: Listed as one of the Top 5 Most Popular Apps and recently named as the #1 Recommend Shopify App.
• It works: Average customer conversion rates are 22% higher.
• Simple to get started: It's easy to install and quick to set-up. Have your upsells up and running in minutes.

Sales Pop

 Sales Pop creates trust in the online buying experience by bringing a brick and mortar feeling to your site. Built with the concept of social proof, the app helps to display purchase activities on your store via real-time notification popups. When customers can see that other people are buying on your store, it creates influence and motivates them to complete their purchase.  What's nice about this app: 

• Highly customizable: Create messages, choose positions, and display time in your specific parameters.
• Create your own custom notifications to create a busy sense for your store.
• Easy to use: One-click installation, no coding or special skills required.

Consistent Cart

 Consistent Cart helps reduce the abandoned cart rate and supercharge your sales. It saves all items in their cart for when they return later, automates abandoned cart emails, and is one of the few apps that lets you send push notifications to customers.  What's nice about this app: 

• It shows every cart ever created in your store.
• It completely automates abandoned cart emails and push notifications.
• It comes with an 'Add to Cart' popup which helps to increase conversions by up to 30%.

Product Reviews Add-On

 Product Reviews Add-On automatically emails a review form to your customers allowing them to conveniently leave their reviews directly in the email without having to go to an external website. App users claim to have experienced 300% more conversions in reviews received and seen an increase of 30% in Sales conversions. Pretty impressive stuff.  What's nice about this app: 

• Instagram Curation: Create gallery of Instagram images and showcase them in crucial conversion pages.
• Facebook & Instagram Dynamic Products Ads: Target recent visitors to your store and showcase positive reviews in their personal social media feed.
• 7 different widgets: Showcase your reviews on crucial conversions pages.

Recurring Orders

 Subscription boxes are all the rage these days and demand for them is growing daily. Recurring Orders is a Premium Shopify subscription box app. Your customers select how often they want their order to recur, and then every month (or time period they select) the app automatically charges the credit card and generates the order directly in your Shopify order admin.  What's nice about this app: 

• Allows subscriptions on individual products, a mixed cart, or an entire cart.
• Access to exclusive power features: Give dynamic discounts, convertible subscriptions, bulk discounts, expiring subscriptions, gift subscriptions, build-a-box and more.
• Whitelabeled: Your customer sees only your branding, not theirs.

Marketing Apps

The job of marketing is to attract new visitors, entice your right people, drive traffic to your store, and ideally, increase sales. Shopify has a number of effective marketing apps to help optimize your pages for search engines, engage your audience, and even send notifications for new products and upcoming sales. Each app has it's own special features so be sure to check them out to see which is the best fit for you. Here are our top app choices for the marketing your storefront:  

Privy

 Privy provides users with a free suite of email capture tools, including exit-intent driven website popups and banners. It's designed to help you grow your email list right from your Shopify store, social media channels, and mobile devices. Best of all, there are no coding or development skills needed. This popular app is trusted by over 100,000 businesses to capture and convert website visitors. Their integration with Shopify lets you set up your account in seconds and get your first campaign live right away, all for free.  What's nice about this app: 

• Effective, high converting popups: Including fun gimmicks like spin to win.
• Trigger your popups: Choose what makes it pop from exit intent to time on site and more.
• Run split testing: Use their A/B test campaigns to see what's converting best.

SEO Image Optimizer

  SEO Image Optimizer addresses a huge need of most online shops- a need most of them don't even know they have. This handy little marketing app helps you name your images so they show up in a Google Image Search, ultimately bringing more traffic to your store. It's an easy way to boost your SEO for free in just a few minutes.  What's nice about this app: 

• Easy to install: No coding or special tech skills necessary.
• It's free.
• It's proven: Over 50,000 Shopify stores use it, it has 3,000+ 5 star reviews, and they've got 10 years of e-commerce experience.

Refersion

 Create an affiliate program for your own offerings and watch your traffic and your sales soar. With the Refersion app you can set up your own branded program in a few clicks. Each affiliate is automatically provided with their own dashboard, just like you. There they can access their unique link, update details, run reports and grab creatives to assist with marketing efforts. They offer affiliate coupon code tracking, full end-to-end affiliate tracking, andthey even calculate the total commission due.  What's nice about this app: 

• Super easy to install and use: No technical knowledge or coding skills needed.
• Fun fact: Several of their entrepreneurs have been featured on ABC’s Shark Tank.
• They offer a started guide to help you connect your cart, add branding and adjust your account settings in 7 minutes or less.

Points, VIP, and Referral Program

 As a shopper, I love the idea of a rewards program. There's just something so nice about feeling appreciated. Points, VIP, and Referral Program app from Smile.io helps you show your buyers how important their business is to you. Reward your customers for things like purchases, referrals, birthdays and other milestones, social shares, social follows, and more. Start your own branded rewards program in just a few minutes and give your customers a reason to come back again and again.  What's nice about this app: 

• It's highly customizable: Develop a totally branded rewards program using custom imagery, color, and your own logo.
• It's the real deal: They've got over 5 years and 15,000 merchants worth of experience under their belt.
• Tier your programs: VIP tiers allow customers to earn additional rewards and earn points faster based on revenue or points.

Plugin SEO

 SEO has the distinction of being about the least sexy thing about owning an online business. But nevertheless, it's oh-so necessary. PlugIn SEO will help you determine instantly if your store has issues with search engine performance that are worthwhile to fix. All of the essential areas of search engine optimization are checked including page titles, headings, meta descriptions, speed, blog post structure, content freshness and more. Get big improvements to your SEO out-of-the-box, plus the most powerful control of your SEO available on Shopify.  What's nice about this app: 

• It stays fresh: The app is constantly updated as search engines change.
• Efficient title and description editing including templates, special pages, and bulk editing.
• It never sleeps: The app constantly checks your shop and alerts you by email when there are any issues found.

   This is just a small sampling of what's available to you as a store owner on the Shopify platform. You can view the complete list of what's available in the App Store.  Ready to get this party started? How about if we kick in a discount? Click here to get our exclusive Mogul Mom reader discount and have the shop of your dreams ready to launch by the end of business today.    If you think Shopify is as awesome as we do, but you've already got a Wordpress platform in use, you can now use Shopify’s new Wordpress Plugin to turn any Wordpress site into an e-commerce site.  What are your favorite apps? Drop them in the comments below.