When it comes to the world of ecommerce, optimization is the name of the game.
You optimize every single part of your organization's operations: from your website to any external media that reaches your audience. This is all in the attempt to reach a wider audience, increase conversions, and cultivate the most pleasant experience for any and all interactions.
Now, here’s the thing: optimization should be a continuous process. You’re not looking to optimize your website once, be satisfied with your higher conversion rates, and call it a day. (Well, you could do this, but that makes it that much harder to grow your revenue and hit your first $1M).
Instead, optimization is something that’s always top of mind. After you’ve added exit pop-ups to your website, think about improving your product reviews. After you’ve optimized your product reviews, think about adding UGC. On and on it goes.
The good news? You don’t have to build these things from scratch. there are many tools that you can use to do the heavy lifting.
In this article, we share 10 tools that will help you optimize your ecommerce business, so that you can generate more revenue. Let’s get your shop to its first $1M!
Email marketing tools
Why it’s important: Email marketing might not sound as sexy as the newer types of marketing (such as influencer marketing), but the numbers don’t lie. According to research, companies make an average of $36 for every $1 they spend on email marketing, making email marketing one of the most profitable channels.
Tool to use: Omnisend, which is an email marketing tool specifically for ecommerce businesses. With Omnisend, you can create automated emails and drip campaigns, segment your users to craft more personalized campaigns, and easily integrate your emails with SMS.
Affiliate marketing tools
Why it’s important: Affiliate marketing is a low hanging fruit that helps you generate more sales with minimal effort on your part. All you need to do is calculate the numbers and figure out how much you can pay your affiliates (i.e., how much you can afford to shave off your margin), then sit back and let them bring in sales for you.
Tool to use: CJ.com Home & ShareASale are affiliate marketing platforms that allow you to place your advertisements across the internet in order to increase clicks and sales across a wider audience. They work by giving a portion of the sale to the affiliate that used their platform to advertise your campaigns.
Instagram marketing tools
Why it’s important: With a proper Instagram marketing tool, you’ll be able to drive clicks to your website, figure out what posts drive the most sales, and track ROI from your Instagram account. The goal is to refine your posting strategy, in order to generate more revenue.
Tool to use: Later, with this tool, you can create a mini web page that’s built into your Instagram profile and make your content clickable and shoppable.
Push notification tools
Why it’s important: Who wouldn’t want to have constant access to their customers, and remain top-of-mind? With push notification tools, you can increase customer touchpoints, and create notifications to promote your campaigns and/or products.
Tool to use: iZooto, which allows you to create web, mobile apps, and messenger push notifications. Don’t wait for your customers to come to you, go to them instead!
Analytics tools
Why it’s important: You’ll want to analyze product performance and conversions across all devices to get a better sense of what your customers like, and what they don’t. This helps you to refine your product line and drive more sales.
Tool: Metrilo, which comes with a KPI dashboard, revenue breakdown, product performance and marketing channel reports, so you can monitor your store’s performance in real-time. Metrilo also comes with a customer database feature where you can apply 30+ filters to identify suitable segments for retargeting and other campaigns.
Live chat tools
Why it’s important: Live chat leads to a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour, and 40% of customers who use live chat have higher chances of making an online purchase. If you don’t already have this installed on your website, it’s one of the simplest things you can do to boost your ecommerce store revenue.
Tool: LiveChat, which comes with all the features you need to provide your customers with a great live chat experience. With LiveChat, you can reach out to customers while they’re browsing on your site, recommend them products, and even get them to complete pre-chat surveys.
Exit pop-ups tools
Why it’s important: An exit pop up is essentially a pop-up that’s displayed when the user attempts to navigate away from the page, with the purpose of convincing them not to leave. Exit pop-up tools help to decrease your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate. Of course, you’ll need a decent offer to convince your customers to stay. Most ecommerce stores use coupon codes.
Tool: StoreYa, which has an “Exit Pop” tool that helps recover abandoning visitors and turn them into paying customers. Exit Pop comes with a statistics panel to help you keep track of your sales and allows you to conduct A/B testing to figure out which of your exit offers is the most compelling.
Website upsell tools
Why it’s important: Upsell and product recommendations are every ecommerce store’s bread and butter. This helps to increase your Average Order Value (AOV), which in turn, bumps up your total revenue.
Tool: Bold Upsell. This Shopify app is a nifty way of offering product upgrades or complementary products. You can use in-cart and post-purchase upsells, as well as cross sells to boost average order value.
Review tools
Why it’s important: Would you purchase something online, without looking at product reviews? Most folks won’t. Reviews help to build social proof, which improves your conversion rates and drives more sales.
Tool: Stamped.io. With this tool, you can send out automated review requests to your customers, instead of emailing your customers manually to ask for reviews. Stamped also makes it easy for you to moderate and analyze reviews, and showcase reviews on your landing pages, product pages, and your Google Shopping ads.
Digital asset management tools:
Why it’s important: Every day, marketers waste countless hours organizing, finding, approving, and sharing content. We believe this mindless work gets in the way of the creative process. Digital asset management tools automate these tasks, giving creators back time to do what they do best: create.
Tool: Air.inc. Maintain a living record of whether or not your content has been approved for use, by whom, on what date, and for what platform. Track asset approval right on the assets, in your Air workspace. Assign custom fields to assets or boards. Set permissions on a public board to allow guests to change any custom field. Follow a board to receive notifications when any asset or comment is added. Maintain a bird's-eye view.
Product feed optimization tools:
Why it’s important: Effective product feed management tools allow for overall optimizations and huge improvements to the quality of any imported feed. The most important part is that when exporting to other marketplaces, it ensures that all the requirements of each sale and marketing channel are met and that the feed is regularly updated and optimized.
Tool: GoDataFeed.com. GoDataFeed simplifies how merchants connect to marketing channels like Amazon, Google and Facebook. As an all-in-one product feed tool, it eases compliance, speeds up optimization, and automates feeds and orders to save merchants time and remove roadblocks. That's why 2,000 merchants use GoDataFeed to submit 50 million SKUs to more than 200 channels.
User Generated Content (UGC) tools
Why it’s important: UGC is basically any content that comes from your customers. If your customer snaps a picture of your product, and you feature it on your website, that’s UGC right there. UGC helps to build social proof and authenticity and gives you an opportunity to shine the spotlight on your customers. This is extremely important to millennials and Gen Z consumers, who are big on authenticity.
Tool: Yotpo. This tool allows you to easily showcase customer photos, videos, and reviews with a visual marketing platform that offers customizable display options. With this platform, you can engage customers more effectively, and drive more sales for your brand.
A final word on generating more revenue with ecommerce tools
If you’re making 4 digits (or even low 5 digits) in ecommerce revenue right now, $1M can seem like a stretch.
But here’s the thing: the ecommerce pie is huge. According to research, ecommerce sales amounted to 4.9 billion USD in 2021, and this number is set to grow by over 50% within the next four years.
Plus, you can also rely on all these tools that we’ve shortlisted above. These will help you improve every part of your funnel, from driving more traffic to your website (Instagram marketing tools) to improving your website’s conversion rate (live chat).
The bottom line? There’s plenty of revenue to go around. So, start optimizing your website and marketing, and watch as your revenue grows.
