Agency X Podcast: Best Marketing Apps On Shopify

For each application, there is a quick summary of the best features the app provides its users. There are plenty of marketing tools out there, but this list hones in on the apps that are most worth your time and your brand’s money. Listen to the full episode here!

Klaviyo

John 4:30

You're able to gather all your customer data, you can keep your SMS and email campaigns all within the same system. There's so much you can do with Klaviyo and especially for CPG brands or brands that are doing subscriptions, having some unique flows and automations that really save you time and more importantly, generate revenue. So email marketing is still really huge. SMS is growing even though it's been around for a long time. Klaviyo is a real moneymaker for a lot more merchants and some of our clients that are currently using it. Wolf & Shepard, we actually manage their email marketing campaigns are killing it on Shopify Plus and Klaviyo. Kith was a longtime client of ours, I've worked with them in a bit, but when we did, they were using Klaviyo. And still are. Some other brands, oneblade shave, which we just recently launched on Shogun front end, which is a headless website. They're using Klaviyo as well.

Yotpo

David 7:26

Yotpo's got everything from loyalty, SMS, and UGC. I would say it's probably the most famous. It might even be one of the first major review platforms where (one of the best things about them is) they have this special technology that when they send review outreach emails to customers (and you can set up automated flow outreach) the user can actually leave a review right within the email. They don't have to click through it and they don't have to go to the actual site itself. And that really increases the conversion rate of leaving a review. Other solutions do you have that, now you're starting to see that a lot more. But Yotpo was one of the first they're still really great.

Gorgias

David 15:03 

If you've got people that are reaching out to you on Instagram, through email, SMS, that's a lot to keep track of. And as your brand scales, that's gonna be harder to do. But with Gorgias, you can manage that communication really all in one platform, which is great. You can respond to it, you can follow up, you can have special flows for these different sources. And not only does it help save you time and make things more efficient, but by automating the responses to a lot of common questions that you get, you can spend more time for serious involvement if someone's really complaining about something or someone has a very specific niche question or concern, especially if the category is maybe more health-related, then you want to make sure that your customer service team is dedicating time to those and isn't bogged down by where's my order.

Nosto

David 19:15

If you're driving traffic, especially through paid media, and you're paying for that traffic, you want to make sure that you're maximizing your cost of customer acquisition, or CAC, as we love/hate to say. So to do that, you want to make sure that what the user is seeing the content they're viewing, whether it be a banner or specific products, you want to make sure that it's relevant to them. And the way you do that is by creating these personalized segments, and they do so through cookie tracking or third-party data through the browser. And it's a great way for making the actual experience more relevant, more personal. I think that's where Nosto stands out. The second thing about Nosto I really love is how we actually implement it. So Nosto doesn't work where you can only use their special sections. They're actually code snippets that are injected into the content and sections that you build. That's great for us when we're designing, when we're doing very different or robust designs for clients, it helps things keep very on-brand, it makes them look unique and not uniform. Because for certain apps, or solutions, you do have to use their out-of-the-box widgets or styling. Nosto is really adaptive in that you inject the code into your sections, and then it functions as is and that's why we really like them. 

Hotjar

David 28:20

On Hotjar, we often look for phantom clicks or clicks on areas that there's nothing to interact with. We've actually seen this with one of our clients where on the homepage there was this model, the circular model, where it would go through the different steps. And people were clicking on this because it was a very visually engaging section. So we took that and we actually implemented URLs in it so that the client could update those sections to put a URL that the user could then click through to get somewhere. And that's helped direct the flow of traffic, versus them getting frustrated clicking on something that isn't working, or they think it might be broken and going somewhere else. We're trying to optimize it for what the user wants to do. And that would be an insight that we'd have no, I would have never thought people would click on that unless we were looking at Hotjar. 

Grin

John 34:45

Grin helps with discovery and recruitment, so being able to find the right influencers based on data. So it's actually a discovery platform to be able to find the right influences for your industry, and actually contact them more than just sliding into their DMS, you're able to actually search for influencers that align with your brand, you can recruit those influencers, similar to some of your top performers. Let's just say that you're working in fitness or in fashion, and you have some top performers that are really bringing a lot of traffic to your site and helping you increase revenue through influencer marketing through their channels, you can find other influencers that are similar to your best-performing influencers. And so you're having to manage all of this and monitor analytics, so it really puts a stamp of professionalism and a lot more organization on influencer marketing, which is not new. But it's still something that is super important. And I don't feel like there are any other influencer marketing platforms in the industry that are doing it as well as Grin.

Listen to the full episode here: Agency X