6 Must-Have Tools for Your Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce is a complex mixture of art, business acumen, science, intuition, and a pinch of luck. On any given day, you have to wear many different hats, including customer service, social media and digital marketing, customer experience, loyalty and retention, data analysis, and more. But the good news is that for each of these roles, there’s a tool or app out there that can make your job easier, so today we’re going to go over the six must-have tools that will make running your ecommerce store a whole lot simpler.

1. Buffer

Buffer lets you schedule posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ in advance. With Buffer, you can roll up your sleeves, dedicate a block of time to your social media responsibilities, create and schedule your posts for throughout the week, and sit back knowing that you’ve taken care of business. The tool allows you to create a meaningful post and share it across all your desired social channels instead of having to jump to each page and share the same message several times over. Buffer allows you to set it and forget it – but don’t actually forget it because it’s still important to engage! 

2. MailChimp

You’re an email marketing master and love creating newsletters to reach your target audience, retarget abandoners, and reach out to potential clients, so why wouldn’t you use the best web-based email marketing service around? MailChimp has a number of things going for it, including:

• Direct integration to your product catalog on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and WooCommerce
• Customizable templates that let you create professional and unique newsletters
• Bulk email sending that are recognized as safe and privacy law adherent
• Advanced scheduling
• Marketing automation to ensure your emails get to the right people at the right time
• Advanced segmentation options

Not only are we obsessed with MailChimp’s quirky content and graphics, they showcase their tools’ prowess through a powerful email marketing presence themselves. Their templates are so easy to customize and they make creating beautiful, impactful emails a total breeze. You can easily connect with your store to showcase products and plugin your social channels so that current and potential customers and interact with you. What’s more is that they offer great analytics. What’s the point of great emails if you can’t tell if anyone is opening them? This allows you to monitor the heartbeat of your email marketing efforts and tweak accordingly.

3. Intercom

Intercom is an all-in-one platform that lets you live chat with customers, provides an integrated help desk and resource base for better customer support, and lets you send targeted messages to customers in the form of emails and in-app messages. It lets you take a (not so) revolutionary approach to customer service that prioritizes friendly and personal relationships between you and your customers. It also makes it fun. Intercom allows for usage of GIFs and emojis which can help to facilitate a fun, light-hearted customer service experience. Another great aspect is that you’re able to have hidden conversations within a chat with a customer. So if you want another colleague to weigh in on a customer service issue, you can ask them a question through the Notes functionality in Intercom, so they can see the conversation thus far and give insight. Pretty cool, right? You can assign conversations to certain team members and even save replies if customers frequently have the same question and you don’t always want to type out the same answer. Total. Timesaver. 

4. Unbounce

Looking to make targeted landing pages with ease? Look no further – Unbounce has you covered! With Unbounce, you can create, publish, and test landing pages without the help of an IT company. It’s seriously intuitive and allows you to create stunning landing pages in less than an hour. Who doesn’t love a drag and drop builder? We sure do. Easily A/B test your landing pages to uncover which marketing elements resonate best with your target customers. Unbounce takes landing pages a step further with dynamic text replacement (DTR), DTR swaps out select keywords to match what your prospects are searching. This makes your copy consistently relevant, boosts your AdWords Quality Score, and increases conversions. Also, Unbounce released an awesome new feature, Unbounce Convertables. What this allows you to do is launch targeted overlays on top of any web page, each with a dedicated call to action. Customizable triggers and targeting rules give you complete control over who sees your offers and when, so you can serve the most relevant offers to the right audience. Personalization is so key! 

 

5. Sweet Tooth

Just as sweet as it sounds, with Sweet Tooth you can create your very own loyalty program for customers, because who doesn’t love points cards and loyalty programs? By using this tool, you can increase customer retention—you know, the loyalty part of a loyalty program—increase sales, and increase the amount each customer spends. And the best part is that you can customize the program to suit the personality of your company and the needs of your customers. Give customers rewards for purchases, registrations, referrals, social sharing and even on their birthdays. Let’s face it: Everyone loves an extra gift on their birthday! With Sweet Tooth everybody wins 🙂 

6. Vantage

Last, but not least, Vantage. Vantage is your best friend when it comes to Facebook and Instagram advertising. We know you didn’t get into ecommerce to master Facebook ads or spend countless hours dissecting, analyzing and optimizing your ad campaigns to ensure they are providing a return. That’s what Vantage is here for –  to do it all for you and wrap all the necessary information in a nice bow on your dashboard. Vantage centralizes all of your store’s activity to help you understand how it is performing, and reach customers that are most likely to make a purchase with data-driven ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram. Our campaign builder is super intuitive with a drag-and-drop builder, suggested text and even suggested product images from your store. The best part? No more optimizing shots in the dark. Sit back and watch Vantage automatically optimize your campaigns. We shut off bad ads for you and re-allocate budgte to the best ads, placements and channels  for the best possible return on ad spend.  You can also create hundreds of variants of your Facebook and Instagram ads with just a few clicks. TTYN, Facebook PowerEditor! 

Now your arsenal is stocked with the essential tools for any ecommerce business and you’re ready to take on the Internet!

Running an ecommerce store is no easy feat, especially when you consider that there are anywhere between 12 and 24 million other ecommerce sites out there that you’re competing with. But with these tools, you can make your job easier, automate some of your responsibilities, reach more customers on a more meaningful level, increase your business, and set yourself apart from the competition, all while attracting and retaining more customers.

Good luck, and don’t forget we are always here to help!