The holiday season is upon us, and no doubt you’ve seen all manner of blog posts and guides to get your e-commerce store ready for the end-of-the-year shopping rush. And while we’ve covered topics from Holiday email marketing 101 to testing your website’s load speed, we thought we’d bring you a handy guide to some of the best apps to use in tandem with your Ecwid shop. Hopefully, they can help you get into prime selling mode!
We’ve broken our app picks into three main categories: apps to get customers to your site, apps to get customers to stay on your site and convert (buy things!) and apps that keep them coming back to your store to check out new inventory all year-round.
These apps aren’t just flashy little icons to sit on your phone screen or desktop. They are powerful marketing and selling tools that will help you drive traffic to your store and make the most of your selling experience.
Intrigued? Read on to get informed!
Why Apps?
We know, we know, we are constantly singing the praises of our streamlined selling process. In other words, we love that to sell with Ecwid, all you need is a single app (ours!). So why use other apps on your journey to selling success?
Think of these app partners as helpers for your already existing shop and brand. While Ecwid alone can take care of the processes of selling and marketing, sometimes adding a little extra manpower (or in this case, app power) can help super-size your selling potential. That’s where these apps come in. Each one is an effective tool that we think can significantly help up your selling game, along with the Ecwid app. They are by no mean a necessary part of the process. But they can definitely help make your holiday selling season easier and more effective.
As we mentioned, we see three main ways in which these apps can help: by getting customers to your site, by getting better conversion (we’ll explain, we promise!), and by turning one-time customers into loyal ones. So let’s dive into our step by step process to upping your holiday sales through Ecwid app partners.
Step 1: Getting Customers to Your Site
First thing’s first: a successful holiday selling season means getting customers to visit your e-commerce shop. Simple, right? Well, with a couple of extra tools at your fingertips, it can be! Even simpler: you can find them all in the Ecwid app market.
A primer on ads
Banner ads and pop-ups work wonders (more on that later), but growing a business means generating traffic from outside your site. That’s why the holiday season is a great time for advertising: people are more likely to be on the lookout for great deals, and adding potential gifts for friends and family to their shopping lists.
Using Google and social media ads will help you reach a broader audience of new buyers who are unfamiliar with your brand. Retargeting ads are helpful as well: these are ads that specifically target your products to those who have recently been to your shop.
If you are new to the ad game, focusing on high traffic sites like Google and Facebook through their ad services is a simple way to boost sales.
Still need help? We thought you might. So, we’ve compiled a couple of easy-to-use app market partners to help you get it all figured out.
Kliken: For Google and retargeting ads
We know you got into the e-commerce game because you are passionate about your brand and the products you sell, not advertising and marketing. So, you’re in luck. Our first app partner is all about making the Google ad experience easier and less of an all-out headache.
Kliken helps empower you to market your products on Google (as well as other engines like Bing and Yahoo) in a way that is quick and easy — and right from your control panel. In five minutes or less, set up effective retargeting ads that’ll have customers flocking to your site. Choose what product you want to advertise and then let Kliken do the work for you, helping you create effective ad campaigns that drive traffic to your website and shop, and revenue into your pocket.
How Kliken uses ads to help your business
And speaking of "which products": the holiday season is the perfect time to try out some holiday-themed ads: either by targeting holiday-themed products, or overall best-sellers. Learn more about getting your inventory holiday ready with our guide to holiday promotions.
Now that you have some great ads out, you’ll want to kick your holiday sales into high gear with an email promotion. But how?
A primer on affiliate marketing
The peak season for marketing starts right before Black Friday, when people are starting to keep an eye out for sales as they make holiday shopping lists. While it’s a good idea to announce upcoming promotions to your customers on your site (find out more about that here) with a robust email marketing campaign, affiliate marketing, run largely through social media, is fast becoming an important part of the equation for generating traffic to your site.
But what is affiliate marketing? To put it simply, it is the use of an "affiliate," often an influencer with an interest in the type of product you sell, to help get the word out about your inventory, and help potential customers envision how your products might fit into their lives.
Affiliate marketing is very popular during the holiday season, when customers are not only looking to shop, but often have some extra free time (in between mouthfuls of turkey and stuffing) to scroll around social media. That means it’s a perfect way to ramp up your holiday marketing and get new customers to see your products in action. Read more about the ins and outs of affiliate marketing with our article on the subject, and read on for our app market suggestion to make your holiday affiliate marketing dreams come true.
Affiliatly: Affiliate marketing, simplified
While the concept of affiliate marketing might still seem daunting, have no fear, Affiliatly is here! This little app packs a punch and can help increase site visits and sales in no time.
Once you’ve chosen the right influencer(s) for your brand’s needs, Affiliatly can help you keep track of promotions and affiliates, generating coupon codes, QR codes and more. Basically, it’s your one-stop shop for organizing and implementing affiliate marketing, something that is extra useful as we go into the holiday season, but no doubt helpful year-round.
Affiliatly dashboard
Step 2: Getting Customers to Stay and Convert
It’s one thing to get new eyes on your beautiful shop filled with wonderful and compelling products. It’s another to get them to stay to take a look around, and convert.
But what is conversion?
We’re glad you asked! Conversion is a marketing term used to describe a recipient of your message (whether an email, Google ad, etc) taking the action you wanted them to take. In this case, we’ll use conversion to talk about a person who visits your site and eventually buys something from it. In this case, they are converting from a site visitor to a customer.
But how do you get conversions to your shop? We have some handy apps up our sleeve that can help with just that.
Poptin: A pop-up life saver
Poptin is an app that uses "smart website popups" (hence the name!) to help engage your customers while they are browsing your shop. It also uses handy exit intent popups to hopefully direct people who are about to click away from your site to do some more exploring.
It’s important to remember, the longer a potential customer stays at your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Poptin is a great tool to use along with some email marketing (see above) to help bring customers back to your shop with reminder emails about items they might have left in their cart.
A pop-up made with Poptin
Tidio: Bots to the rescue
If you’re an online shopper yourself, you’ve no doubt come across a live chat service like Tidio. Simply put, Tidio enables customers to chat, in real time, with a chatbot, (which is an automated system which can be pre-programmed to answer frequently asked questions). The chatbot can also guide them to new products and do some basic troubleshooting. Think of Tidio as the virtual equivalent of a salesperson showing your customer around your store.
Tidio says that their software can increase your conversion rate by one-fourth. It boasts great reviews on the app store, and integrations with several platforms, including, you guessed it, Ecwid. Sounds like it might be worth checking out!
Sample notification from Tidio’s live chat bot
Tidio not your thing? Luckily, live chat apps are popular these days. Feel free to check out other options like Facebook Messenger Live Chat and Live Chat as well.
Step 3: How to Keep Customers Coming Back (into the New Year and Beyond!)
You’ve successfully directed traffic to your shop, and even turned lookie-loos into purchasers of your awesome merchandise. But your journey doesn’t stop there! Ideally, you want your customers to come back to your shop — whether next week or next year — to check out new merchandise, and stock up on favorite products.
How might you keep customers coming back for more? You guessed it, with a little help from some more handy app market friends. Check out the best tools for keeping customers hooked, below:
ROI Hunter: Search for revenue with social and Google ads
ROI stands for "return on investment." So an ROI hunter is a tool that looks for ways to maximize that ROI.
Specifically, ROI hunter helps attract new customers with a variety of ads (through familiar names like Instagram Stories and Facebook), and uses retargeting ads to help keep your store fresh in your customer’s minds as they browse the internet. That way, your store is never more than a couple of clicks away.
ROI Hunter’s intuitive interface makes set-up easy
Gratisfaction: Reward customer loyalty
One of the best ways to court repeat customers is to start a loyalty program for your brand. This way, customers will see repeat purchases as a pathway to extra rewards, and build up their brand loyalty along the way.
But loyalty programs, outside the brick and mortar punch-card tactic, can be complicated and time-consuming. This is where Gratisfaction comes in. Automate your loyalty programs, and woo customers with giveaways, events, and more, all in one app.
Grastification in action
In Conclusion
We hope this guide to helpful apps that work with your Ecwid e-commerce selling experience was useful, and inspired you to up your selling game even more in time for the holiday season. The end of 2020 will surely bring some surprises, so let yours be your best selling season ever! Need more tips to kick off your selling season? Check out our merchant guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
All apps are available in the Ecwid App Market.
Find a winner in one of these apps? Let us know in the comments below!