Deanna busy at her desk.

At Rosewood Marketing, we use the e-commerce platform Shopify to build beautiful and effective online stores. Shopify has a robust toolset that allows it to create stores for businesses of various sizes and types. For small and large businesses, it supports online product sales, brick and mortar locations, service-based businesses, and even subscription models. Shopify also has a wide suite of plugins called apps, that increase your online store’s functionality even further. Most of these apps are free to start and include scaling subscription fees for extended functionality. There are tons to choose from, so to help you find the best, here are our favourite Shopify apps and why you should love them too.

Frequently Bought Together

Upselling is one of the simplest ways to boost sales. We love Frequently Bought Together because it provides immediate and smart product recommendations to those shopping for products on your store. It’s simple in concept yet powerful in practice. It has a wide set of customization tools, comprehensive stat trackers, and you can even create bundled discounts. All of these make this app an easy favourite .

Klaviyo

Klaviyo has swiftly become one of digital marketing bests. It provides an advanced suite for email and SMS marketing that is hooked directly into your Shopify store. Klaviyo provides a wide set of templates that allow for beautiful, branded communications with advanced HTML features. That comes along with a wide set of email and SMS automations that connect directly into your Shopify store. These allow for audience segmentations, abandoned cart reminders, product recommendations, and win-back campaigns that help drive sales.

Privy

Privy is an all-in-one app for your store’s digital marketing. This ecommerce omni-tool provides your online store with on-site popups, email marketing, and SMS messaging. Privy’s email and SMS messaging has similar functionality to Klaviyo, but with limited functionality and support for fewer contacts. It’s better suited to smaller scale communication. It also integrates directly with MailChimp. However, its on-site popup functions are where Privy particularly excels and earns our love. Popups can motivate users to sign up to your newsletter, click on cross-sells, or spin a contest wheel. 

Sales Popup 

Popups help drive conversions by making online shopping more convenient. Sales Popup excels at social proof and creating urgency. It can inform users about a product’s recent sales and amount sold as proof of wider interest. It can also notify a user about limited stock or show a sale to motivate purchases. Just be sure not to overwhelm your shoppers with too many popups. This will make shopping on your online store stressful or agitating, rather than exciting or thrilling.

Zipify Pages

Just like in a physical store, you want to welcome customers when they arrive to your online one. Zipify Pages is perfect for creating elegant landing pages that greet and guide your customers. Along with an easy builder, Zipify allows you to A/B split test different landing pages, create call-to-action sticky buttons, display product carousels, and highlight cross sells. All of these features help a user know they’ve come to the right place.

Smile

Loyalty programs are effective for customer retention. 84% of consumers say they are more likely to stick with a brand or business that offers a loyalty program. We love Smile as the perfect Shopify app for adding a loyalty program to you online store. After an easy setup, Smile can add loyalty points, referral rewards, a VIP program, and more to boost brand loyalty. All of this helps with customer acquisition and retention.

Google Customer Reviews

Customer testimony is important for helping build consumer trust and your brand’s authenticity. 89% of users read online reviews before purchasing a product or service, and 59% of buyers use Google reviewsGoogle Customer Reviews is a Shopify app that adds Google review functionality to your store. It can add a seller rating badge to your website, display product and store ratings on Google shopping listings, and automatically request and collect customer reviews. This specific app doesn’t have a subscription fee. Instead, it only costs a one-time $25 dollar charge to add to your store.

Product Reviews

Shopify also offers their own Product Reviews app. This app adds a review system directly into your store so customers can easily view and leave purchase reviews on items and services in your store. It also includes tools to easily review, publish, or hide reviews. They can even be exported into a spreadsheet. Plus, as a bonus, since this app is developed by Shopify, it’s completely free to add to your Shopify store.

Just the Start

These apps will provide a wide slew of features to your online store that increase its potential to drive sales. You don’t need to start adding all of them now. Consider what features are most essential and beneficial for the moment. Build those up before you find your store loaded with partial features.

There are even more great apps to consider. Shopify’s wide feature set and these powerful apps make it perfect for every kind of business. If you’re Interested in developing a Shopify store, want some help picking your perfect apps, or taking your ecommerce to its highest functionality, contact Rosewood’s web design team. If you need help with Klaviyo or another email service, our marketing team can provide you with stunning email communications. 

An influencer happy in her relationship with a business

You probably have found and started a relationship with an influencer for your business’ social media marketing. Maybe you followed our recent advice about the benefits of micro-influencers for small businesses. Like any relationship, those with influencers require maintenance. You want to manage and maintain that relationship properly because influencer marketing is valuable for your business and expanding your reach on social media. At least 61% of people’s trust in a brand grows because of an influencer’s recommendations. That value only increases over time as your partnership with your influencers and their audience strengthens. The more an influencer trusts you, so will their audience. Here’s Rosewood’s guide to influencer relationships to keep that partnership with your influencers strong and productive into the long term.

Communicate regularly

For any relationship to continue and thrive, you need to maintain open communication. This is no less true for the your business’ influencer relationships. Regularly and openly communicate with any of your influencers, so that you both have essential information. If you are sending them products, are launching a new product or service, or have some advice for reaching your own audience, you will want to update them. Maintaining this open line of communication will also allow you to ask questions and receive key information. Similarly, if they have questions about your business and its products, services, or values, answer them promptly. 

Check on what they need

It might not always be clear what an influencer needs from your business for a certain campaign or to create content. Regularly check if there is anything they need. They might require some more information, product details, brand statements, certain products, content materials, etc. They may expect an affiliate code or link to provide their followers. Rosewood’s sites, such as those built on WordPress and Shopify, have plugins that make affiliate programs easy to manage. Inquire with influencers to see what resources they need to produce content that will engage their audience for your business. Asking will help maintain open and constant communication with an influencer so that your partnership can have lasting results.

Clear objectives and strategies

Your business’ objectives and strategies are essential information for influencers to create effective campaigns for your business. Provide them with them this information as they start a campaign or create content in association with your business. If they are providing content about certain products or services, be sure to provide them with any key details you want them to highlight. If there is certain branding information you want emphasized, make that clear to your influencer. Just like you need this information to strategize advertising, so do influencers to create impactful campaigns that benefit your business. Giving them those essentials will prolong successful influencer relationships.

Feedback

It’s useful for influencers to know how effective their campaign or content has been for your business. Provide them with insights about performance. Statistics like number of conversions and how many times their affiliate code or link has been used after a certain series of posts or campaign are informative metrics. Provide feedback for what worked, what did not, and any clarifications. When articulating this information, focus on the results. Celebrate successes and don’t assign blame for any disappointing outcomes. Again, trust they are knowledgeable about their work. Influencers can use good and bad results to improve future campaigns. They just need that information.

Trust their expertise 

Don’t let your communication with an influencer turn into oversight or micromanagement. Trust their expertise and listen to their input. Remember this is a partnership created on their established platform. They’ve built their substantial and engaged following precisely because they understand how to create impactful content. Influencers understand what their audience likes and how it will resonate with them. Their job relies on understanding the intricate and mutable workings of social media. That knowledge is precisely why an influencer relationship and partnership is valuable to your business. When an influencer provides your business with information or their insights, be sure to listen.

Compensation

Influencers will expect compensation. From the start, communicate openly with them how much and what kind of compensation they expect, and you can provide. Some might expect payment, while others may also want to create an affiliate link from which they derive commission. Remember that this aspect of the partnership will develop over time, especially as you start measuring results from each. Make sure to keep compensation an open discussion.

Influencer Marketing Software

When starting your influencer relationships, we recommend contacting and managing them the old-fashioned way. Eventually, you will likely have multiple influencers providing their services for your company and will want to keep track of all of them. Fortunately, there is software that helps you manage your relationships, discover new ones, and manage content. These programs also track important data like budgets, spending, and provide reports and analytics for performance and ROIs. Some of the best include GRINLTK Connect, and Influence.co.

It’s a Relationship

Influencers are effective because they play a prominent social role. Agreements with influencers are partnerships and reciprocal relationships. Those take time and clear communication to develop. Keep those channels open and properly manage and maintain these relationships with influencers, benefiting your business in the long run. Need more information about managing relationships with influencers or maybe you are looking to start? Speak with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. They can help you find the right influencers and use their own social media expertise to effectively collaborate with your business’ partnerships. If you haven’t gotten to this point already stay tuned for our upcoming blog on hiring your own influencers.

Person golding phone in front of laptop on desk

This week’s blog is an introduction to email marketing. With the rise of social media, some believe email is “dead”. In reality, email is still essential, and there are over 4 billion email users daily and most customers prefer to receive communications from brand by email. Email marketing is an incredibly important tool for reaching and communicating with your audience, community, customers, or clients and keeping them engaged. We’re going to provide you with some essential starting tips for effective email marketing. 

Email Marketing Platforms We Recommend

If you have any experience with email marketing, you’re familiar with email marketing platforms. These help you create emails and campaigns, manage your audience, set up automations, and more. They make email marketing possible and effective. The best ones have toolsets to create visually impressive and gripping emails and tailor specific parts of your audience. Today, there are countless services out there and most offer comparable functionality so here are our top picks. We ultimately recommend testing out the email builders and automation tools in each to see which you prefer. Those listed here are all free to try with advanced functionality behind premium plans. 

  • MailChimp 
  • Klaviyo 
  • Drip

Create Templates

Every email marketing platform will let you create templates. These provide a basic structure for you to insert content. With these as a foundation, you will significantly cut down on the time needed for making emails. If you regularly send different kinds of emails, build a template for each. Use some variety to prevent them from being identical but ensure each also matches your branding for visual continuity and recognition. Consistent templates will also improve that recognition between your emails. 

Piquing Subject Line

Most inboxes receive a torrent of emails daily, with a large portion of those going right to the trash. For effective email marketing that gets clicks, you first need opens. That means you need an enticing subject line. Effective email marketing uses subjects that create urgency and kindle curiosity to encourage opens. Using words and phrases like “still time”, “expiring”, “last chance”, or enticing questions will quickly generate more opens. Be careful about certain other words like “Winner”, “Cheap”, “Satisfaction”, or “100% Free”. These can immediately trigger spam filters. 

Personalization

An extremely effective way to generate opens is to personalize emails. A personalized subject line can increase open rates by 50%! When having people signup to your newsletter or audience, try to collect their first names in a website popup or signup in your website’s footer. If your email marketing platform is hooked into your website’s back end, it will be able to then add their names into the subject line or email body to create a more personalized touch. 

Call to Action

It’s great if you are getting good open rates on your marketing emails. You need to ensure those generate into clicks and, even better, sales. Include call to actions in your email that incite readers to follow through to your website, store, forward the email to others, and complete any other action you are hoping they perform. Simple commands or buttons with “Order now” or “Read More” will direct readers to your desired outcome. For promotional emails, include product or service images that are clickable. 

Link Everything

It’s great if your email has call to action that encourage readers to go beyond and visit your business’ social platforms or website, shop for products/services, or subscribe to more emails. However, any call to action also needs to be quick and convenient, else readers are unlikely to follow through. Provide visible and accessible links for readers to easily click and act. Don’t just link text either; add a URL value to any of the images you include in your email. A dead link is a missed opportunity. A logo at the top should link to your website’s home page. A product image or blog image should link and open their respective landing pages on your website. The goal is to make it as easy and convenient as possible for your reader to follow your call to action. Show some restraint though, and do not flood your email with links. Too many URLs in an email will trigger spam filters.

Email Automations

Email automations are useful, and if you have a moderate to large-userbase, completely necessary. They automatically contact your customers and users at certain triggers without you needing to manually write and send them yourself. They can update customers about shipping information, provide product suggestions, and reengage old customers. Without email automations, this would be an infeasible amount of work. If you want to learn more about email automations and the kinds you should start with, check out our blog post here.

Manage Your Audience

Email automations are also a perfect way to manage your audience. At some point, certain members of your audience may become disengaged. They receive but don’t open your emails and haven’t for months. While a larger audience number seem more impressive, a disengaged audience impairs your open and click rates. Users immediately deleting your emails or even marking them as spam can also impair your sender rating, affecting your ability to reach the engaged members of your audience. It’s a good idea to actively try and reengage this disengaged audience. If they still don’t open your emails, remove them entirely. This kind of list cleaning should be done once or twice annually. You can use email automations to do this regularly.

It is also valuable to section off your audience for specific communications. Email marketing services hooked into your store’s backend can create “personas” according to your users’ purchase and browse history to identify their interests. You can then tailor emails to these sections. For example, if you provide various services, you may have some clients who should receive emails about service A while other clients will be interested in emails about service B. This ensures users are receiving communications that matter to them.

Email Marketing Law

Canada’s anti-spam legislation limits to whom you can send emails and what you must include. You specifically need consent from any user to send them emails. For newsletters, this means readers need to be subscribed. However, automated emails like product recommendations or an abandoned cart have consent so long as user purchased or visited your site within the past year. However, there’s still a limit to how many communications you can send, and all emails need to include unsubscribe links so that users can revoke consent at any time. All your emails also need to provide alternative contact information such as your physical address or phone number.

Email Marketing Key Performance Indexes (KPIs)

Lastly, you need to track how your emails are performing. These are tracked with primary statistics called “Key Performance Indexes” or KPIs. An email marketing platform will provide you plenty of data to parse, but not everything might be pertinent and each needs to be interpreted differently. These are the essential email KPIs:

  1. Clickthrough Rate – The percentage of readers that follow a link in an email.
  2. Conversion Rate – The percentage of emails that turn into sales or other activity.
  3. Bounce Rate – The percentage of emails that don’t reach the targeted inbox. 
  4. List Growth Rate – The rate at which the email audience list grows.
  5. Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate – The percentage of emails that are forwarded or shared to others who did not receive the original email. 
  6. Overall ROI (Return on Investment) – The financial return generated from an email campaign. The simplest formula is: ROI = (Gross Return – Cost of Investment) ÷ Cost of Investment
  7. Open Rate – The percentage of emails opened.
  8. Unsubscribe Rate – The percentage of readers who unsubscribed after receiving an email.

More to Learn

There’s plenty to learn with email marketing, but for now we’ll stop the lesson here. If you’re practicing these essential tips, you are already most of the way there. If you have questions or are looking to improve your email marketing, contact us at Rosewood. We’re email experts and provide a variety of email services for any stage of the email marketing process whether your business is ecommerce or service based.