Biz Tips: 34 of the Best Tools for E-commerce Growth

Biz Tips: 34 of the Best Tools for E-commerce Growth

Biz Tip:

34 of the Best Tools for E-commerce Growth

A Guide to Growing Store Revenue From the Top of the Funnel to the Bottom

There are only two ways to grow revenue for an e-commerce store…

Increase traffic or increase conversion rate.

(Okay, there is a third—increasing average order value/ lifetime value. But technically, you could put that under “conversion.” And while we’re at it, we should consider growing an email list the equivalent of increasing traffic, because that’s ultimately how it’s used.)

There are a ton of tools out there targeting business leaders like you. And no one has the time or budget to vet every single one of them.

So I’m going to save you a bit of time.

Below I explore the most powerful, tested and vetted, e-commerce growth tools designed to help you grow your business starting at the top of the funnel and working our way down.

I will compare similar tools to give you a few options and allow you to find what’s right for you.

Once you’ve narrowed down your list, I recommend demo’ing at least two tools in a category before committing it to your e-commerce technology stack.

Before we dive in, I must say…

Make sure you have the resources you need to execute a thorough strategy. Use the tools below as an extension of your resources, not a substitute.

The same way a person uses a hammer to hit a nail, you don’t simply buy the hammer, sit it on the table and expect it to drive nails on its own…

Prefer to watch instead of reading? Here’s the full breakdown.

[Top of Funnel] Viral Giveaway Platforms

When you’re looking for an inexpensive way to drive traffic, putting together a giveaway can make a lot of sense.

The basic strategy works like this:

  1. Gather a handful of brand partners that serve the same audience (you sell dog collars, they sell dog leashes, etc.).
  2. Everyone agrees to give away $200 in product (or any other mutually agreed amount). Each deal may vary slightly based on contribution level, reserve the right to share the email list with only your top contributors.
  3. You and your partners email your respective lists (and post via social media) to drive registrants.
  4. Optional: Run ads that drive attention to the giveaway.
  5. Announce the winner and sell product to the subscribers on the backend typically via an email drip.

There are a few tools that work really well for this type of strategy, any of which could be the right fit for you.

Here are a few viral giveaway/contest tools for e-commerce:

Viral Loops

What I like about them: Integrates seamlessly for Shopify to take advantage of features like coupon code creation; includes a lot of plug-and-play campaigns to get started right away.

Pricing: Free Trial; Starts at $34/mo

Features:

  • Multiple Giveaway Types
  • Landing Page Creator
  • On-site Widget

Wishpond

What I like about them: End to end solution for creating promotions, collecting emails, and emailing your contest registrants.

Pricing: Free Trial; Starts at $49/mo

Features:

  • Multiple Giveaway Types
  • Landing Page Creator
  • On-site Widget
  • Email Automation
  • Pop Up Tool
  • Referral Marketing Suite

Viral Sweep

What I like about them: Supports very robust campaign types and integrations; a long-time favorite in the industry.

Pricing:Free Trial; Starts at $49/mo

Features:

  • Multiple Giveaway Types
  • Social Media Integrations

[Top of Funnel] Referral / Affiliate Software

A few things to know before you launch an affiliate or referral program:

  1. You get out what you put in (most people put in nothing and then complain about the results).
  2. If your product or commissions suck, no one will want to work with you.
  3. Your goal isn’t only to get sales but to convert someone else’s audience into your own.

The bottom line: The deeper the relationship with affiliates and customers, the better an affiliate program will work for you. This strategy works best if you can have at least one dedicated person to affiliate marketing (or at least grow the role to one full-time person).

Now to the tools…

Refersion

What I like about them: One of the most popular affiliate tools and marketplaces. You can set up an account quickly set custom commissions, and join the marketplace to open up your offer to thousands of affiliates.

Pricing: Free Trial; Starts at $89/mo

Features:

  • Marketplace
  • Unique Commissions by product

Lead Dyno

What I like about them: Similar to Refersion with its own marketplace. Has great tracking and easy social sharing tools.

Pricing: Free Trial; Starts at $49/mo

Features:

  • Ad Integrations

Referral Candy

What I like about them: A great tool to encourage customers to get rewards for sharing and referring their friends.

Pricing: Free Trial; Starts at $49/mo

Features:

  • Industry Benchmarking
  • Fraud Protection

Share a Sale

What I like about them: More of a site than a software, but a very popular place for merchants to share their products and setup an affiliate account on. They have a network of affiliates, you simply post your product and allow others to share and make their commissions.

Pricing: $100 Setup Fee; 20% Transaction Fee; $35/mo (unless minimum is met)

Features:

  • Marketplace
  • Unique Commissions by product

GetAmbassador

What I like about them: When you need more than just affiliate marketing, GetAmbassador has referral, influencer, and partner software all geared towards leveraging other people’s audiences to grow your own.

Pricing: None disclosed on website. Demo required to view pricing.

Features:

  • Unique Commissions by product
  • Fraud Protection

[Top of Funnel] Influencer Marketing Software

This method is the third cornerstone of good referral marketing: the influencer.

In all three of these examples, we’re using other companies existing audiences to drive traffic to our own.

(By the way, that’s all Facebook ads are doing. Facebook is simply very, very big influencer, and they have an organized way to bid for their audiences attention.)

Influencer marketing comes in three flavors:

  • Product in exchange for a review/social post.
  • Money in exchange for a promotion. This could be for $500 or $500,000.
  • Endorsement, typically of the celebrity type, for a 1-year+ contract. (Most e-commerce brands don’t do this.)

Carro

What I like about them: For getting product reviews from your existing customers, I really like Carro, which helps you identify influencers that are already following your brand. They also have a tool that allows influencers to shop on your site, select what they like, and then request the products from you, so that you’re shipping/logistics is taken care of the same way as any other customer (if you’ve ever had to ship 100 influencers a product, you know it can be time consuming, so this helps).

For larger promotions and more upmarket solutions, there are a few platforms that can help you find and manage influencers…

Famebit

What I like about them: Now owned by YouTube. You simply post what you’re looking for and influencers can claim your offer and agree to work with you.

Pricing: Self-service; 10% Service Fee Based

Influencers on Platform: 65,000

Features:

  • YouTube

Upfluence

What I like about them: A true management platform with its own network of influencers, they have detailed stats on each influencer, account size and growth, demographic, etc. For those who have a sizeable influencer marketing budget and want to take their program seriously.

Pricing: Starts at $95/month

Influencers on Platform: 3 million

Features:

  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Benchmarking
  • Managed Services

Traackr

What I like about them: They have a benchmarking tool for comparing influencers vs their equivocal peers and industry standards.

Pricing: $499/month+

Features:

  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Benchmarking

AspireIQ

What I like about them: Previously known as “Revfluence,” they have an influencer marketing platform, and help with content creation or will do managed services for you.

Pricing: Hidden

Influencers on Platform: 500,000

Features:

  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Managed Services

[Middle of Funnel] Improving the Product Detail Page

Once a user visits the site, you only have a few seconds (maybe a minute) to get the right information in front of them, to convince them to stay long enough to purchase.

The only way to really know if you’re improving your site, and your product detail pages, is to split test—A/B test. You can do test on individual pages or across all product detail pages. And any site doing over 25,000 visitors/month or $50k/month should invest in spending the time and money on split testing, as it really helps with long-term growth and improving the overall customer experience.

Fera.ai

A great tool for conversion rate optimization and split testing.

Fera.AI is a flexible platform that can create urgency, pop-ups, banners, social proof widgets, and over 100 other “skills” that you can use to improve page design and UX based on a users behavior, location, etc. Most importantly, Fera allows you to A/B test your pages and figure out which changes are actually improving conversion rate.

Other sections will contain some more specific opportunities for increasing on-site conversion rate and improving your product detail pages.

[Middle of Funnel] Social Proof

Showing happy customers is an instant trust builder. Now, a 5 star review isn’t all that exciting these days, but a picture or video review explaining the real “why” behind the value of the product, that will move product.

Collecting social proof is a mandatory part of your post-purchase sequences. Displaying it on site, in ads, and anywhere else you can is the art to increasing conversion rate.

Sidenote: The “testimonial” page is dead, don’t make a boring page of all your happy customers, incorporate testimonials into your homepage, category pages, and product detail pages.

Here are some of the more popular social proof tools for e-commerce.

Judge.me

What I like about them: Advanced functionality for collecting picture and video reviews, and integrates with most major loyalty programs for providing the customer with bonuses and incentivizes for completing their review.

Pricing: $0 – $15/month

Video Reviews: Starting at $15/month

Features:

  • Dynamic Coupon
  • Email Marketing

Loox

What I like about them: Very similar functionality to Judge.me. They have been focused on photo reviews since the beginning of their platform (and now video reviews).

Pricing: $9.99 – $99.99/month

Video Reviews: No

Features:

  • Dynamic Coupon
  • Email Marketing

Stamped.io

What I like about them: Another great solution for collecting and displaying reviews. They also have a Net Promoter Score tool for gauging overall product and company feedback, separate from the public review system.

Pricing: $0 – $199/month

Video Reviews: Starting at $69/month

Features:

  • Dynamic Coupon
  • Email Marketing
  • Net Promoter Score
  • SMS Requests

[Middle of Funnel] Collecting More Emails

Not everyone wants to buy from you right away…

There is a portion of your website traffic that’s convinced enough to join the tribe / start believing in the brand, but they aren’t ready to buy just yet. This audience benefits most from some form of a newsletter, discount, or other lead magnet piece of content, where they can give their email address (or phone number or Messenger opt-in) in exchange for a perceived benefit.

From there, you can nurture these leads, and you’ll see a portion of them convert into customers, increasing your overall conversion rate, and building a large audience pool for long-term nurturing, retargeting, and brand building.

Here are some of the most popular pop-up tools for e-commerce:

Privy

What I like about them: They now incorporate their own email marketing automation and sequences into their tool, which allows for an increased abandon cart recovery rate of up to 500%.

Pricing: $0 – $500+/month

Features:

  • Email Automation
  • GDPR Compliant
  • Geo-Targeting
  • SMS Capture

JustUno

What I like about them: Now incorporating their own cross-sell and upsell features, powered by AI. They also can do push notifications within their own platform.

Pricing: $0 – $583+/month

Features:

  • GDPR Compliant
  • Geo-Targeting
  • Push Notifications

Listagram

What I like about them: A “spin-to-win” pop-up tool that helps engage and convert visitors.

Pricing: $0 -$299/month

Features:

  • GDPR Compliant
  • Interactive opt-in forms
  • Advanced triggers and segmentation

[Middle and Bottom of Funnel] Displaying the Right Shipping (Landed) Dates

I had to dedicate this section to one really great tool that I haven’t seen anything quite like: FenixCommerce. Now, while that is my favorite tool for solving this specific problem, it may not be practical for your store, due to pricing, integration restrictions, or your specific shipping situation, so I’ve listed a few alternatives.

FenixCommerce

FenixCommerce answers one burning question that every customer has:

“When will I actually get this product in my hands?”

This tool takes in your shipping information, inventory (amount in-stock and warehouse location) information, the user location information, and even the weather and seasonality is taken into account… And it turns all that into a predictive answer to the question:

What I like about them: Truly predictive landed date.

Pricing: $199+/month

Accuracy: Very High

Seasonality and Weather: Yes

Features:

  • Accountability
  • Partner Integrations
  • Shipping Upsells

Delm

What I like about them: They don’t use your data, just delivery zones which you have to set up manually.

Pricing: $14.99/month

Accuracy: Medium

Seasonality and Weather: Manual

ShipperHQ

What I like about them: This tool covers some of the shipping side, making sure you are charging the right amount for shipping and upselling shipping options, but none of the predictive landed dates.

Pricing: $50+/month

Seasonality and Weather: No

Features:

  • Accountability
  • Partner Integrations
  • Shipping Upsells

[Bottom of Funnel] Upsell / Cross-selling

If you have a core product that sells really well, you should be able to find a complementary product that some percentage of your customers will buy, increasing your overall average order value, lifetime value, and profit. Put another way, if you don’t have an upsell/cross-sell funnel, you’re leaving money on the table.

Quick definition: An upsell is when you get someone to buy more of one thing. Like going from 1 lb of coffee to 2. A cross-sell is when you get someone to buy something else with their purchase. Like buying coffee filters with 1 lb of coffee. Most of the time, you’re looking for cross-sells, unless you’ve got products like coffee, that are consumable and people can easily get more of the same.

Product Recommendations with:

Limespot

What I like about them: They use the data from all of their stores combined, to optimize each of your users recommended products and purchase paths for a truly personalized experience.

Pricing: $10+/month

Features:

  • A/B Testing
  • Segmentation / Personalization
  • Upselling

Nosto

What I like about them: Expanding from on-site product recommendations to in-email, pop-up, and more.

Pricing: $850+/month

Features:

  • A/B Testing
  • Segmentation / Personalization
  • Email Personalization
  • Content Personalization

Bold Upsell and Brain

What I like about them: Perhaps a simpler tool for understanding which of your products are typically bought together, then you can easily create bundles or pre and post-sale upsell/cross-sell offers. They don’t do the full-fledged product recommendation engine, but they do allow you to create your own pre and post-sale pop-ups and suggestions for increasing average order value and conversion rate.

Pricing: $9.99+/month

Features:

  • True Upselling/Cross-selling
  • Upsell Funnels
  • Smart Product Recommendations and Bundling

[Bottom of Funnel] Abandon Cart / Checkout Retargeting

There are a lot of different ways to hit your prospects with abandon cart messages, and it has been proven that the more channels you have to communicate with them, the more likely you will get them back to purchase.

There are 3 typical “abandon” sequences that you want to enable:

  • Abandon product view – this is where the user simply browses a product and you want them to go back to that product to purchase. They weren’t interested enough to buy, so this is the lowest intent audience.
  • Abandon cart – they added a product(s) to their cart, and life got in the way, they didn’t check out.
  • Abandon checkout – they started to purchase, but maybe they didn’t have their credit card nearby, or they just got distracted before completing the transaction. This is obviously your highest value target.

The larger your store, the more time you should spend segmenting your efforts and using different copywriting and discounting for each segment (and different ad campaigns as well).

Now remember, the most import parts to a great abandon cart tool are:

  • Showing the image and price of the products they viewed or added to cart.
  • Being able to give a dynamic discount code (time-sensitive offer customized to that user).
  • Being able to track whether or not they purchased and automatically disabling the sequence once they purchase.

If you have these 3 functionalities, you can create urgency, be specific in your messaging, and capture more value with price sensitive offers (time decay discounts).

One of my favorite tools for abandon cart is Omnisend, which currently does email, web push, and SMS. And I’m sure they will have more channels available soon. Omnisend is great because you can coordinate all of these activities from one campaign flow, which improves your time efficiency and reduces the ‘noise’ that can be caused when each tool operates independently.

But switching your email service provider isn’t always practical, and if I’m being honest, Omnisend doesn’t have the depth of features on each individual tool (but they are getting better every day).

For that reason, here are some other great tools that will likely plug into your email service provider and help reduce abandon cart rates, and provide additional post-purchase retention value as well:

Push Notification Retargeting

PushOwl

What I like about them: One of the leading platforms for Push Notifications. They have slick opt-in tools and out-of-stock notifications, and make it easy to share images and GIFs in your push notifications.

Pricing: $0+/month

Features:

  • Abandon Cart Sequences
  • Custom Pop Up
  • Back in Stock Alert
  • Dynamic Coupon Code Generation

PushNami

What I like about them: A large player in the push notification space but not originally created for e-commerce, they have AI backed personalization components which help scaling businesses increase conversion rate.

Pricing: “Enterprise” only

Features:

  • Abandon Cart Sequences
  • Back in Stock Alert – can be built
  • Machine Learning Optimization
  • Managed Solutions Available

Smart Web Push

What I like about them: A free web push retargeting tool that does only what you need it for – getting the visitor back to the site to checkout.

Pricing: $0+/month

Features:

  • Abandon Cart Sequences
  • Back in Stock Alert
  • Dynamic Coupon Code Generation

Messenger Retargeting

OctaneAI

What I like about them: Now does Messenger and SMS, with advanced cart abandonment sequences, campaign and bot flows, Messenger list growth tools.

Pricing: $9+/month

SMS Integration: Owned

Features:

  • Abandon Cart
  • Comment Response
  • Advanced Automation
  • Shipping/Delivery

ShopMessage

What I like about them: Has great pop-up technology combined with sophisticated Messenger flows.

Pricing: $9+/month

SMS Integration: Integrated

Features:

  • Abandon Cart
  • Smart Sense Pop Up
  • Advanced Automation
  • Shipping/Delivery

Recart

What I like about them: Abandon cart sequence, shipping and purchase notifications, and retention. Also, they charge based on tracked revenue generated, not users or messages, which is a really cool way to be billed, because, if you pay them anything, you always know you made money from the deal.

Pricing: $29+/month

SMS Integration: No

Features:

  • Abandon Cart
  • Shipping/Delivery

SMS Retargeting

As mentioned above, Omnisend and Octane do SMS marketing as well, but here are a couple of the main SMS-only tools in the space:

SMSBump

What I like about them: One of the market leading tools for SMS in e-commerce. They have robust compliance tech to make sure you can SMS in 100s of countries without breaking any laws.

Pricing/Pricing Model: $0+$.0149/SMS (USA)

Opt-In Integrations: Yes

Features:

  • Dynamic Coupon Code Generation
  • Advanced Segmentation
  • A/B Testing

Postscript

What I like about them: Perhaps a slightly more upmarket solution.

Pricing/Pricing Model: $50+/month – $.0333/SMS

Opt-In Integrations: Yes

Features:

  • Dynamic Coupon Code Generation
  • Advanced Segmentation

SMSLive

What I like about them: A newer tool with less functionality (but that’s changing quickly). They are great for just the basics, and they take a marketer-centric approach to their dashboards and feature roadmap.

Pricing/Pricing Model: $47+/month

Opt-In Integrations: Checkout Only

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