Top Shopify Apps: 6 Most Useful Apps to Fuel Shopify Growth

Kazi Nazia

Content Editor

six-best-shopify-apps

There are over 6,000+ apps available in the Shopify App Store. You can tell there's no shortage of options.

Whether you want to boost email marketing ROI, advertise your products on Facebook, obtain in-depth data, there's an app (in reality, way many apps) for each category.

But having every one of these apps that you find fancy will not overhaul your store's growth.

In fact, unnecessary apps will increase your operational costs and extend your site's loading time. Which also means bad UX for your customers.

So it's important only to download the ones that can support you and increase your site's efficiency.

Good Shopify apps should do two things.

1. Increase conversion and 2. Scale your sales.

However, it's not easy to figure out the best ones from a sea of options. We hear you.

And to help you get your Shopify business on track, we've listed down the 6 best Shopify apps that you can use to fuel your business.

You must be wondering...

Why We Suggest Only 6 Apps

You'll find tons of articles on the internet that will suggest 10 to 20 Shopify apps for your store.

While the apps themselves can be great extensions to boost efficiency, installing them is not a good course of action.

And here's why we say that.

According to Greta Van Riel, the founder of four multi-million dollar Shopify stores—"Downloading too many apps for your Shopify store can end up increasing your site's loading time. This is because the apps place JavaScript throughout the site. And this causes the website to take longer to load".

If your site has a fast loading time, your conversion rate can increase up to 2X. So you need to arrange your store so that the load time isn't affected.

In fact, hundreds of Shopify merchants end up spending $10,000+  just to decrease their site load time. So it's definitely something you shouldn't be neglecting.

And the most convenient approach for it would be only to install the apps you need the most.

6 Apps Every Shopify Owner Needs

As we mentioned before, we vouch for quality over quantity. It pays in the long term. That's why in this article—we are breaking down the most comprehensive and reliable apps—for your Shopify store to boost your business growth.

That being said, here are our top 6 picks for Shopify apps.

MyAlice

How do you manage 500+ orders coming in from multiple channels? It would make you frustrated switching from one channel to another to keep track of customer orders.

Not to forget how crucial customer support is for eCommerce businesses post Covid-19. MyAlice makes it incredibly easy to manage your customer orders by bringing all your social channels in a dashboard. MyAlice is completely free to sign up and if you are an eCommerce store owner, we recommend you test out their all-in-one customer support platform.

MyAlice ensures you can automate the order creation and confirmation process within a minute.  Send product and order information of your e-commerce store directly inside chats within a few taps.

MyAlice live chat reduces the pressure of responding to customers in real-time with a touch of personalization.

That means—no generic bot-sounding messages—and your customer support agents will not go bonkers replying to the same questions over and over again.

Payment plan

Free trial: Available

Monthly price: starting $15

Klaviyo

No, email marketing isn't dead yet because this assumed-to-be-dead marketing channel brings you the highest ROI and a huge reach.

According to research, email marketing can generate $38 in ROI for every $1 spent. Davie Fogarty, founder & CEO of Davie Group, claimed— they made over 6 million dollars through email marketing. That too, just in a month!

So if you want to drive more sales in your e-commerce business — get the most out of email marketing — Klaviyo is a better option to go for.

Here's how Klaviyo helps you.

You can reach more customers with the power of automation. Drip campaigns, abandoned cart reminders, and sale promotions can drastically improve your sales. It provides dozens of in-built, fully customizable essential flows ready for any type of email or text.

Segmenting customers is one of the effective ways to single out high intent customers. And you can re-engage them with special offers. Klaviyo also helps you reach your customers at any stage of the customer journey and enables you to retarget them based on their buying behavior.

Klaviyo comes with a data analytics dashboard that displays all your needle-moving metrics of your business on a single screen.

There are many other ways you unlock the power of email marketing with Klaviyo to convert emails into sales.

Payment plan

Free trial:

  • Email limit - 500 emails up to 250 customers
  • SMS limit -  150 SMS messages to 50 SMS contacts each month

Monthly price: starting 20$ for email / 5$ for SMS

Smile.io

Be it a whopping 50% discount from your favorite clothing store, or a free cup of macchiato from your go-to coffee shop, we all love getting loyalty rewards.

It makes us feel extra special. So most often than not, we find ourselves going back to these stores.

Your Shopify store should have the same effect on your customers. Give your customers a reason to come back to your store over and over again.

The best way to do it is by using a loyalty reward program. Everyone nowadays has some sort of loyalty rewards program. And one of the most popular and effective ones is smile.io.

With this app, you can navigate different types of customer expectations. It becomes a lot easier because you offer multiple ways to reward your most loyal customers.

Improve loyalty through point referrals and VIP programs. It uses interactive pop-ups, points to motivate actions, and campaigns to boost your customers' engagement to get incentivized for their loyalty.

The best parts are — it's easy to set up, alter, edit and control everything.

For customers, nothing triumphs getting special treatment every time they shop. Make the most of your customer acquisition efforts by converting transactional sales into brand champions.

Payment plan

Free trial: 30 days

Monthly price: starting $49

Loox

When it comes to the quality check for any product, nothing is more trustworthy than customers' product reviews.

So why not create an opportunity to have this trustworthiness from your customers?

And the best way to do this is by using Loox, a product reviews app. This allows Shopify store owners to collect a large amount of photo feedback from happy customers. The best thing about Loox is they're not just text-based reviews; they also come with photo reviews.

When potential customers are browsing through your website, they want to see other customers' experiences with your store.

Loox enables you to use the power of  UGC (user-generated content) to win visitors' trust in your business... This makes it one of the best Shopify apps to increase sales and drive growth for your e-commerce business.

One of the significant benefits of Loox is importing reviews from any source.  It gives you the ability to manage which reviews are to be posted, lets you interact with reviews, and much more.

And if you are worried about not getting voluntary reviews. Loox also has a solution for that too. With Loox, you can send automatic review request emails to customers asking for product reviews.

Payment plan

Free trial: 14 days

Monthly price: starting $9.99

Lifetimely

The lifetime value of a customer is a really important metric for eCommerce businesses. Because without a sensible number for CLV that you can agree on, you really don't know what you should be spending on digital advertising to bring new customers.

Sure, you may be getting initial leads without assessing your customer's buying behavior. But you can't qualify every leads as a potential customer.

If you know, you can drive hard quality customers down the other end or incremental revenue, allow those leads to go down.

This is where Lifetimely comes into the picture. With frightening accuracy, Lifetimely uses AI to help you figure out how much you can anticipate making from your clients.

It measures the value of your Shopify store's customers over time — predicts customer lifetime value, understands KPIs and daily analytics to aid overall growth. Then, using that data assists you in predicting future customer behavior.

Lifetimely makes CLV calculation fast and easy. Not all of us are good with excel or can calculate CLV manually.

With the help of Lifetimely, you don't need to worry about either of these things; instead, concentrate more on your customers.

Payment plan

Free trial: 14 days

Monthly price: starting $19

Smart SEO

39% of all global e-commerce traffic comes from SEO. If you want to bring in more traffic to your Shopify store, you need to get it SEO optimized.

SEO can help you get more visibility on the search engine results and the customers you need to scale your business.

And just being recognized by google won't do the job. The top three Google searches get 75.1% of all clicks. Only 0.78% of Google searchers check the second page.

So if you want to make more traffic and sales from the Shopify store, you're going to need to drive at least 40% of all your traffic from SEO. You will need to be listed in the top three results for important keywords.

Plus, you need to rank on the number 1 page. And the best way to do that is by using an effective app like SmartSEO, which is also affordable on the budget.

SmartSEO is the best tool for creating meta tags, alt tags, and JSON-LD structured data on the fly.

All you have to do is pick a template, and SmartSEO will take care of the rest.

SmartSEO claims to be the only Shopify tool that automatically handles meta tags. Most of its competitors need you to wait for hours, if not days, to generate meta tags. SmartSEO, on the other hand, completes the task in a matter of seconds.

It also has another unique feature: multi-language meta tag support (as well as its JSON-LD structured data). This is very useful for multilingual e-commerce business owners, as it's simple to write meta tags for each language.

Payment plan

Free trial: 7 days

Monthly price: starting $4.99

Although this list doesn't include every top Shopify app, it definitely includes apps you need to increase conversions and scale your business.

In essence, this list will assist you in recognizing the optimization potential that these programs provide. Check out their customer reviews and product features.

Do you find yourself chasing down new customers because current customers aren't sticking around, and you need to keep your eCommerce business afloat? Is it a sustainable strategy to run your eCommerce business?

We hear you saying no because it actually isn't. It's time you need to focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

In this competitive narrative, you can't really go far by keeping on investing in getting NEW customers rather than keeping your OLD customers. What you really need to concentrate on is maximizing your revenue from your present customers. And this is where customer lifetime value comes into play.

According to Tim Cameron Kitchen - CEO of Exposure Ninja, "In order to increase your customer lifetime value, you need to pull two levers. One, increase the number of purchases. And two, increase the purchase value of each customer. And of course, a good business will have a combination of both of these levers."

We want your business to have high customer LTV. So we noted down a series of pointers that you could follow to increase your customer lifetime value and higher profits. Before we dive into the strategies, let's start with the basics.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?


According to Omniconvert, "customer lifetime value (CLV) shows how much revenue a business can expect from one customer compared to how long the company predicts that customer will stay."

Customer lifetime value is an important metric for eCommerce brands to measure the average accumulating total of their purchase for some time.

Lifetime value helps you determine if your business will scale the ROI from marketing. It also helps you evaluate the retention strategy depending on how low or high your LTV is.

How To Increase Customer Lifetime Value

You can increase your customer lifetime value by either increasing your Average Order Value or Average Purchase Frequency. An increase in either of these metrics will rise Customer Lifetime Value. Apart from that, let's take a look at the other ways to increase CLV.

Improve Your Customer Support

Treating your customer right is the core to increasing customer lifetime value. According to Tim Han, an international speaker and author from success insider - "treating your customers like family is the key to recurring customers."

Now we're not telling you to turn a blind eye to their red flags and keep on supporting them. But we definitely recommend you to go a bit above to give them special treatments. In fact, according to research from PWC,  86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. So enhancing your customer support is an absolute must.

A solid customer support strategy includes attention to the customer pre, mid and post-sale. Your customer support should cater to your customer at every stage of their buying journey. A great way to make sure your customer's queries are always answered in no time is by using an AI-powered chatbot. Having a live chat available can turn a customer question into a sale or complaint into a resolution. We recommend you check out MyAlice as their chatbot can actually automate your entire selling process from start to finish. And the best part is, MyAlice is completely free to sign up!

You need to make sure your customers are returning again and again for the delightful experience you provide.

Send out occasional gifts

Who doesn't like free stuff? Especially when it comes as a surprise from a place you shopped from. We find ourselves leaning towards shops that offer great discounts or free goodies in most cases. And that's because this is a psychological trick that all of us fall for.

Lippincott's creative consultancy provided a scientific and psychological-based study called the "Happiness Halo" - proving exactly that. In the "Happiness Halo," the author stresses, "Appeal to customers' reason and they're yours for a day. Appeal to customer's emotions, and they're yours for a lifetime."

And nothing is more solid than sending gifts to appeal to your customer's emotions. It shows them that you care about them more than just a means of getting some sales.

We're not telling you to send out gifts 365 days a year to every customer for every purchase. But rather, identify your loyal set of customers and potentially loyal customers, and then send out occasional gifts to show them you care.

Nudge Your Customers into Subscriptions

One of the most popular ways (that works) of increasing the number of purchases of your customers is by bumping them into subscriptions. They're one of the new trends of e-commerce. And they can be lucrative enough that we even see big names like GoPro getting into the subscription realm they previously didn't opt for.

You can nudge them into a subscription by displaying a subscription-biased pricing option of your product.

This basically means you will show the pricing option of a one-time purchase on one side. And on another, the pricing option is based on subscription. However, you need to show your customers how the subscription pricing will be more effective and profitable.

This will incentivize them to opt for the subscription rather than going for a one-time purchase.

Another way of getting your customers into subscriptions is by showing the subscription as the default purchase method. And if customers want to go for a one-time purchase, they need to click on that purchase method.

You can do to level up the subscription game by giving them an option to allow your customers to customize the time frame and the amount of product for the subscription. This way, they will not have too much stock of the product based on their lifestyle. And they are less likely to cancel the subscription altogether.

Integrate Add-ons and Upsells

Another great way to increase the average order value of your customers is by adding add-ons and upsells. Big names like GoDaddy GoPro have been using this pricing strategy for years now, which has helped them generate more sales.

Everything that you throw at your customers before and after purchasing the products is for one thing - increasing the order value.

And therefore, there's an increase in customer LTV. Some of your add-ons and upsells features may seem annoying to your customers. But it's a genius idea for your business.

Since you are competing in a very competitive and price-sensitive space, If you want to maximize your customer acquisition, you need to maximize the value of every customer you get through the door.

By doing so, you can save the money that you would have otherwise spent on getting new customers. So you can now invest it in other business activities. Like - marketing. Which will help you build market share without increasing the price of their core product.


— Introduce Premium Versions

Introducing a line of premium versions of the same product can incentivize your customers to opt for better options. But, you need to make sure you can present it in a manner that demonstrates why the premium versions are better than the regular ones.

That way, customers who always want the best of everything are more likely to opt for the premium purchase. The pricing of the premium product will also be higher than the regular, which may be a problem for some of your customers. In such a case, you can introduce split pay for that.

Now split pay is absolutely everywhere and another massive trend of e-commerce over the last few years. One of the biggest players in the split pay market -Klarna, claims to increase the average order value by up to 58%.

Split pay will help you get more sales for your premium products and end up increasing the average order value for your customers.

Drawing Conclusion: Loyalty Brings Revenue

The right customer lifetime value model can boost your company's growth and progress in many ways. It puts more money in your business's wallet by lowering customer acquisition costs and saving money on marketing and sales activities.

Delivering a great deal of value, understanding the customers being in their shoes, prioritizing customer service are what they need to come back to you again and again.

Learn More:

  1. How Customer Service Can Help Sustain Your E-Commerce Business
  2. How To Get Repeat E-commerce Customers: Encourage Them To Return For More

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