Shopify is one of the top 3 cloud-based ecommerce platforms, alongside BigCommerce and Magento. By 2020, more than 800,000  merchants have been using the Shopify platform to promote and manage their online products and services. 

One of the major reasons why the platform is so popular is its variety of apps. Why use them? — Because they help to attract new customers, retain the ones you already have and sell your products and services quicker. In this article, we’ve collected the best of the best Shopify apps in 2019. Some of them are 100% free, others provide free options.

Email Marketing

Such apps help you turn new buyers into regular customers. A pre-built library of automated emails keeps your customers posted. Here’s what you can enable with one click: 

  • Coming soon: Build excitement about your upcoming store.
  • Welcome: Welcome new subscribers.
  • Discount reminder: Remind subscribers of expiring discounts.
  • Abandoned checkout: Recover subscribers who abandoned a purchase.
  • New, repeat, and lapsed purchaser: Thank subscribers after their purchases and win them back if they haven’t bought anything in recent months.

What’s more, you can fully customize your templates to match your brand. 

The best Shopify apps for email marketing: Seguno and SmartrMail Email Marketing.

Marketing and advertising

Email dominance in the online market is over. Nowadays, 80% of messages are sent over Messengers, with Facebook Messenger being the most popular. There are apps that are developed specifically for this messenger and send order receipts and shipping notifications as well as marketing campaign messages. But, as they say, men don’t live by Facebook alone.
Shopify offers you proactive, artificially-intelligent assistants that are ready to communicate with your customers 24/7. They’ll send messages over SMS, Ping, Facebook Messenger, or other services to inform about a campaign launch or a special offer. And don’t worry, you won’t disturb your customers at night thanks to the “quiet hours” option.

Examples: Kit, SMS Bump, Facebook Messenger Marketing.

Loyalty and trust

This group of apps helps merchants generate more sales through referral marketing. The more your customers engage with your brand, the more valuable they become. These apps offer loyalty programs that give you an easy way to build emotional connections and customer engagement. The three most popular program types are:

  • Loyalty points program 
  • Referral program 
  • VIP program 

Some store visitors don’t convert into buyers simply because they are not sure if transactions are secure. Good news! There are apps that allow improving sales and conversion rates by displaying trust and security badges to your customers. Such badges are placed on product pages and emphasize the security of payment. 

If you feel that a loyalty-building app is what you need, take a look at these gems: Smile and Trust Hero.

SEO 

Do you know that Google is one of the most powerful promoters for your business? Of course, you do! If you don’t use SEO optimizers on the Shopify platform yet, hurry up to install these wonderful apps.  

SEO apps for Shopify help stores with product images. Such apps take just a couple of minutes to set up, and afterward, all your images on the platform will be optimized for Google Images.

Another type of SEO apps deals with texts. Intelligent keywords suggesters will work for you 24/7 analyzing search terms (keywords) from Google that relevant to your site pages that already have organic traffic. Instead of spending hours on finding the most widely used words and phrases, make a few clicks in the app and get effective combinations of words that will attract viewers to your website.

Checkout 

Many shoppers leave carts because the checkout is too complicated. Too many forms, ID proof, etc. “Good Lord! Can’t I do it in one click, please!?” – that’s what most shoppers think. Yes, they can! The instant checkout option tied to the Add to Cart button or the Buy Now button is a must-have for every merchant who wants to combat the high-cart-abandonment epidemic. One of such apps is FC (Fast One-Click Checkout). It’s extremely useful for attracting those who use their mobile phones to make purchases. The app uses a popup cart instead of the default cart page, which is adjusted to look equally perfect on desktop and mobile devices.

Final thoughts

All the apps described above are easy to install and take a couple of minutes to set up. They do all the routine work and allow store owners to focus on the quality and diversity of their products and services. Yet, they can’t cover all the needs of a particular online store. That’s why instead of using 10 off-the-shelf apps, it’s sometimes better to get a custom Shopify app with all the required functionality.