This blog is all about retention- we love talking about customer retention, improving retention, and connecting with your customers. But retention cannot happen without acquisition.
Customer acquisition consists of a lot of things- advertising, product and offer, store optimization... We can talk about all of these in a future post, but in this one, we will focus on improving your store's conversion rate.
If you are using Shopify as your online store CMS, and you're just starting out and want to optimize your store for conversions, without spending a bunch of money on developers or expensive apps, we've got the 6 best apps for conversions- for free!
We give you, the 7 best free Shopify apps to increase sales:
1. SMS + FREE Facebook Messenger Bot by Tobi
With this app, the name pretty much says it all- Tobi combines the two powerful strengths of SMS and Facebook marketing.
Tobi is completely free to install and offers all of it’s Facebook messenger features for free. You will only have to pay per message if you start sending SMS messages.
You can use Tobi’s growth tools like customers chat, pop up or the opt-in checkbox to collect subscribers into your list. You can then market to these customers using instant campaign messages, or automatic message flows like abandoned cart or order fulfillment.
This app positions itself as a Facebook messenger bot for Shopify, but it doesn’t offer an automated messaging flow as other Facebook bots do.
Tobi’s big advantage for Shopify store owners is it’s seamless integration with the platform- allowing you to use Facebook marketing with 0 technical skills necessary.
2. PushOwl Web Push Notifications
One of the most effective ways of communicating with your customers is through push notifications- it provides the opportunity to send messages that will pop-up in their device, with no dependency on them being logged into a specific site.
Push owl is the biggest push notifications app on the Shopify app store, with a whopping 1371 reviews (at the time of writing this post).
This app lets you send instant push campaigns, as well as automated messages, meant to bring past and potential customers back into your store. With things like cart abandonment messages, back in stock notifications, price drop notifications and more, you cover most scenarios.
Push Owl offers a free plan until you reach 500 impressions, which should easily get you started until you start seeing revenue from the app, and it will start paying for itself.
3. Judge me Product Reviews
One of the best ways to increase trust in your store and your products is by displaying social proof. Namely, product and store reviews.
Researches show that customers are more likely to trust user-generated data than the data that you, as a business, put forward. They will trust customers’ testimonials about your products much more than your descriptions of them.
Judge.me is one of the leading review apps on the Shopify app store- it offers a free and paid version (which is pretty affordable at $15/mo).
With the free version, Judge.me lets you not only display your product reviews on your thank you page but also display ratings in a Google SEO friendly snippet or a reviews carousel, as well as in-email reviews forms to make the reviews collection process as easy as possible.
With the paid version you get a bunch of other powerful features, like photo reviews, Facebook integration, and more. But the free version should be more than enough to get you started.
4. Free Persistent Cart App
Most customers go through at least two devices on their purchasing journey. As merchants, you want to keep their experience consistent and easy- which is what this app helps you do.
Free persistent cart is completely free, and its functionality is pretty explanatory in the name- it allows you to keep the cart that your customers build between devices.
For example, a customer browsing through his phone and adding products to cart, only to come back to your store a few hours later via his laptop, will see the same items already in the cart, and be able to continue shopping easily.
Setup for this app is as easy as it gets- just install it! So there’s really no reason not to have something like this on your store.
5. Free Shipping Bar by Hextom
Announcement bars are a great way to let the customers know about special discounts, free shipping, sales, etc. A basic announcement bar is available in most Shopify themes, but Hextom provides a much more advanced bar.
This app allows you not only to display an announcement bar but also gives you full control over it.
You can control the color and text, including progressive messaging to encourage customers to add more products to the cart. Have full control over location and page targeting, and get insights through analytics on each bar’s performance.
The Free shipping bar by Hextom has a paid plan allowing for an unlimited number of bars and advanced targeting ($9.99/mo), but the free version offers a more than good enough experience on its own.
6. Cart notifications
This app offers a pretty unique take on getting customers back into your store- if a customer added a product to his cart, the app will add a blinking dot next to your favicon, reminding the customer to come back while he is browsing other sites.
This is a great complimentary app to all of the other conversion-boosting techniques mentioned in this article- in its simplicity, it allows you to gently remind customers about your store, to keep them from closing the site without a second look.
Cart notifications is free, with 2 paid plans available (the priciest one stands at $9.99), enabling you to have greater flexibility with the design and behavior of the favicon reminder.
7. AdNabu for Google Shopping
Creating an approved Google Shopping Feed & running profitable Google Shopping Ads is a multi-step process. AdNabu’s Google shopping feed app not only helps you create a google shopping feed fast but also Improves your Feed to succeed in Google shopping.
With AdNabu you can:
Claim your store in Merchant Center & add Shipping & Taxes to Merchant Center automatically.
Get product-specific suggestions and tips on how to improve performance in Google Shopping
Meta fields support, multi-currency support, product review integrations, and more!
AdNabu also provides awesome customer support and the team is always there to help you get set-up and achieve your goals with the app. The app integrates seamlessly with Shopify and it only takes about 5 minutes to set-up.
It's free for a one-product Shopify store, and if you're selling multiple products the price is super-reasonable.
In Summary
These are our 7 favorite apps to boost conversions in your Shopify store. But it is important to remember that not only apps improve your conversions.
Don't forget to optimize your store as a whole- starting with product pictures and description, store design, and using trust-building techniques.
Whatever you're trying to do, Shopify apps are a wonderful tool to add a variety of capabilities to your store in an effective and non-expensive way.
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