When picking apps for your Shopify store, there is no regulatory boundary to how many you can. However, other factors serve as limits to it. An obvious one is the amount of money you spend on acquiring these app services. You can’t go above your budget. One other factor that isn’t so apparent is how these apps affect your website’s performance.
Even where all apps are free, the fact that an increasing number of integrated apps affect how fast your Shopify store loads is worth considering. This means, for the sake of your customer experience, at least, your choices are limited.
There is no optimal number of apps assuring you fast website load times, as this depends on your website and each app. Now, you are stuck wondering about the best Shopify app categories that ensure your most important Shopify store features, eCommerce activities, and strategies are covered. This article aims to present information on this, as you can’t be left wondering. Let’s get right in.
Best Shopify app Categories For A Sufficiently Equipped eCommerce Store
For a perfect balance of apps meeting your marketing, promotional, conversion, customer support, and fulfilment needs, some of the best shopify app categories include:
- Product Review Apps for Shopify
- Email Marketing Apps for Shopify
- SEO Apps for Shopify
- Loyalty Apps for Shopifyover 250% more likely
- Shopify Search App
- Analytics App for Shopify
Product Review Apps for Shopify
The importance of reviews within your Shopify store cannot be overstressed. Customers are over 250% more likely to purchase a product where there are at least 5 reviews of it available. Customers are additionally enticed to spend 31% more where these reviews are beneficial. Having a review app to display this special information on your products is effective for so many reasons.
First, it easily builds trust in the product. Customers believe in reviews 12 times more than they believe in marketing and promotional materials put out by you. This is because they relate with fellow customers more and know businesses say anything to drive sales.
Product reviews help with SEO for Shopify, as customers make use of a lot of keywords, and also aid your customers in making decisions on purchases, improving their experience within your eCommerce store. Having a review app is also helpful to you as a Shopify store owner. You easily gather feedback on products and customer experience, allowing you to make improvements where necessary.
Considering the benefits reviews offer to your Shopify store and sales revenue generation, ignoring them proves counterproductive.
Email Marketing Apps for Shopify
Email marketing is the practice of communicating with your customers through email, with activities aimed at increasing brand awareness, retaining an interest in your products, sending out promotions, and, eventually increasing sales, among others. It is one practice that offers you a chance to kill multiple birds with one stone.
Compared to other marketing mediums, on average, email marketing generates better ROI. This is according to a Nielson report. For every $1 spent, you are poised to make $40 in revenue from your email marketing activities. There are reasons for this.
A lot of individuals that see email marketing materials choose to see them. This is especially so where email addresses are collected through forms on your Shopify store. These forms also open up opportunities to easily and effectively improve your marketing strategies. Effective segmentation is made possible, which involves you sending out personalized content based on demographics, customer behavior, and customer choices.
The best Shopify app for email marketing even allows you to perform A/B testing on your campaigns and implement games features to increase the number of email addresses you collect. You have access to a lot of other integrated features you would’ve been forced to get by integrating more apps with your store.
SEO Apps for Shopify
In addition to email marketing, one other marketing strategy that remains cost-friendly and provides high returns is SEO. SEO for Shopify involves making improvements on the textual content of your Shopify store, with a focus placed on keywords and link management and an objective to rank high in search engine search results.
Organic visits contribute over half of the website traffic and also have the potential to contribute over 40% of your eCommerce store revenue. SEO for Shopify helps you generate this organic traffic to your Shopify store, the type of quality traffic that is interested in the content you provide to them. Properly optimizing your website content also means you provide your brand with more visibility through search engine result pages.
Through tracking, SEO apps understand your visitors’ preferences, the best practices for your website, and provide you with specific information to make improvements. SEO apps are important to any eCommerce store and are not to be abandoned.
Loyalty Apps for Shopify
Loyalty programs for Shopify involve offers presented to your customers to keep them greatly interested in your products or services. For your Shopify store, there are loads of benefits to reap.
Customer retention and repurchase rate are kept high as strategies typically involve making purchases to build points and using these points to retrieve rewards. When done right and through the best Shopify app, you ensure your customer retention is kept at a level where recurring revenue is assured.
Loyalty programs for Shopify may also be channeled through affiliate marketing, with this offering an additional benefit to you. Through referral programs, you decrease your cost of acquiring new leads and customers while using existing customers and keeping them close to your business.
The best Shopify app for implementing loyalty programs provides you with all these important features and comes integrated with several external platforms for even improved customer reach.
Shopify Search Apps
Now, this is one app category important for Shopify stores with a large catalogue of products or large websites. How do your customers find products fast? You don’t want them scrolling through pages and, even though Shopify provides a default search function, you don’t want a plain search function that negatively affects customer experience within your store.
Integrating advanced Shopify search apps like Sparq with your Shopify store is beneficial to you for a lot of reasons. In addition to making the search for products easier, you engage in product merchandising (merchandising), make searches more accurate, and decrease the length of your conversion funnel. Through analytics, most advanced Shopify search apps even offer you a chance to study your customer behavior within your store and make appropriate improvements where necessary. A look at these shows you stand to gain a lot with an all-in-one search app like Sparq - view our demo here.
Analytics Apps for Shopify
This refers to analytic apps for the whole website. These prove especially important in understanding user behavior and identifying the areas of your website and conversions funnel that need improvement. You know your entire traffic, conversion rate, and average order value from different parts of your website, among others.
After considering all these and adding them to your Shopify store, you then check to see how your website performs. Where there is a chance to add more apps, some other important app categories include fulfillment and inventory management apps, social media marketing apps, and discount promo apps, among others.
Remember, there is no optimal number of the best Shopify apps that guarantee you the results. Nonetheless, ensuring you have integrated applications fitting these listed categories puts you on the right track.