Shopify is a big fish in the online retail world. As of April 2023, reports Demand Sage, 4.15 million online stores trusted it to get their products into the world. And no matter how much of the globe you’re trying to get your products to, the right Shopify marketing apps can help.
Naturally, not all marketing solutions are created equally. Your perfect marketing mix will depend on your growth goals and the functionality you’re looking for. Influencer and affiliate marketing? Email marketing? Free plans or paid plans? The list goes on.
There exist tons of options from which e-commerce businesses can choose to boost sales, maximize their product pages and landing pages, and more. That’s why it’s important to take advantage of the different tools available to help you create customizable experiences in your e-commerce store.
It's hard to overstate the benefits of product customizations in eCommerce, but knowing the applications that will benefit you can minimize the effort involved. Today, we’ll talk apps, pricing, templates, and more, so that you can find the right Shopify marketing apps to promote your business today.
A growing majority of Shopify business owners are looking for no-code, omnichannel options with reasonable pricing and good product reviews. The 12 listed here will help you nail activities ranging from sending welcome emails to boosting subscription sign-ups ... and beyond.
As we describe each of the following Shopify marketing apps, we will tell you what each is best for and what customers have to say about it. We will also let you know how much it costs.
Note that when an app’s pricing says “free to install,” that means you can start using it at a beginner level for no cost whatsoever. However, most apps limit either the number of products you can manage for free or the functionality to which you have access, or both. That’s not to say you’ll eventually have to pay for any of these, as many of them have high product limits and offer great base functionality.
A few of the apps below list prices as “based on ad spend,” which means they’re free to install, but you will have to pay if you want to market through them.
As you explore these apps in-depth and begin adding them to your shop, you’ll quickly learn which of them work for you at the free level and which you might wish to invest a little more in.
One of the main complaints that shop owners have is the lack of customizability that Shopify offers in its native dashboard. This makes it difficult to put up listings that have lots of options for buyers to customize products before buying – for instance, changing the colors of a product, putting words on it, changing fonts, etc. As a result, if you have a lot of different options for your products, you have to make separate listings for all of them, which new customers then have to wade through.
Product Options & Customizer fixes that, allowing small businesses and big companies alike to expand your brand with fine-tuned customization. Now you can turn what would have been dozens of listings into a single one, giving customers room to play with different ideas without having to switch to new tabs or scroll through your inventory.
Product Customizer also lets you upload files, use image swatches, pick from Google fonts, and use radio buttons and checkboxes. Its drag-and-drop features make it just as easy for a beginner as for a pro to deal with cart abandonment, upsell products, and set up real-time marketing automation and other marketing tools. You can even use conditional logic to show or hide options based on customer behavior. Feel free to check out the app reviews page or view a demo.
Ideal for: Product customization
Pricing: $19.99/month
Customer Review: “I purchased this app and contacted the customer service team who assisted me in setting up the various options I needed to suit my products. I was having difficulties creating the options, so a member of the team created these for me and then got online through a Google Meeting and showed me step-by-step how to create the options. Fantastic customer support. I would highly recommend this app as their customer support is fantastic.”
Email marketing is still one of the most important sales tactics in the known world. Shopify Email helps you communicate with customers right in their inboxes about your new products and services. They offer beautiful templates through a drag-and-drop editor, customizable to your brand colors, photography, fonts, and more.
Instead of boring, plain-text emails, you can now create a whole shopping experience there in the body of the email. With checkout links, products and prices, and coupons, you can basically recreate the current best of your store without them ever having to think to visit it. Plus, with a huge range of templates from which to choose, you’ll never struggle with how to create a beautiful email again.
Ideal for: Email marketing
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “We love this app. It is very user-friendly for they have templates which you can customize. We are able to customize our emails and even see what the statistics are. We have sent emails for our prelauch and launch and will continue to use it for other occasions. And the great part is: every month you get 10.000 e-mails for free. For us as a starting business, it is enough. Can highly recommend this app.”
If you’d prefer to marry your SMS marketing plan to your texts, you might want to try Klaviyo instead. It’s a flexible platform that offers templates for both traditional email marketing and text messages. Now you can let customers know about price drops, abandoned carts, coupons, recommendations, and more. Plus, you can personalize all of these communications through segmenting to ensure each customer gets only the information they need.
As Shopify marketing apps go, this is one of the best to help you with referral marketing and push notifications. With the app, you can sync all your data to keep track of information such as site activity, catalog, coupons, and tags. Predictive analytics makes bucketing people easier than ever before, so you can market effectively and do away with the old blast models that lead to massive unsubscribe rates.
Ideal for: Email marketing & SMS
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “Definitely the ‘gold standard’ in e-mail marketing. Klaviyo's automation is top-tier -- it's quite intensive and a little intimidating at first, but the growth team's superb webinars and extensive help resources make it easy to master. Highly recommend Klaviyo!”
Omnisend is yet another option for email list marketing and SMS campaigns. What makes it stand out from the other options on this list is how intently it focuses on interactive marketing techniques. With it, you can engage with customers through spin-to-win widgets, exit-intent popups, email templates, and a huge range of signup form options.
It also offers more traditional email marketing and SMS templates, letting customers know about abandoned carts and sales, for instance. Best of all, it comes with ready-made automations, so you can personalize your customer outreach without having to do a lot of work or understand any coding. For the busy shop owner who doesn’t want to learn a bunch of new skills in order to succeed, this is ideal.
Ideal for: Email marketing & SMS
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “We've been helped by Blayne and Luiz and they're both so great! We always receive responses very quickly and they always work quickly to find us helpful answers (even to hyperspecific questions). We love Omnisend so much especially after transitioning from another email platform, it's extremely intuitive and they always take suggestions for further developments into consideration.”
As far as apps for reaching the younger set go, TikTok can’t be beat. It’s among the best options for current social media marketing, allowing you to get your products right onto one of the world’s most popular video-sharing apps around. Customers on TikTok aren’t just watching videos, either. Many of them are open to marketing campaigns to help them find products they’re looking for.
With the TikTok integration, you can now leverage retargeting, messenger, and analytics, all through TikTok-style videos that the Shopify app will help you build in minutes. Now store owners can expand their advertising beyond Google shopping and Google ads, with a social platform that provides equally profitable results.
Ideal for: Social media marketing
Pricing: Based on ad spend
Review: “I love this app! Would highly recommend to others! Great way to connect and stay connected with the rest of the world! Has a little bit of everything for everyone!”
Dropshippers, unite! Now you no longer have to stress about how to process dozens or hundreds of orders at the same time. DSers‑AliExpress Dropshipping lets you sell more, prints lots of labels at the same time, manage your inventory in bulk, and automatically track all your orders and packages.
Plus, it’s an excellent tool for finding new products and suppliers. As a dropshipper, you must always be finding and listing new inventory to keep your shop fresh and vibrant. With the search tools this plugin offers, you can make sure that happens and see more engaged customers as a result. At the same time, the search function will help you find the cheapest options for products so you can keep more of your profits.
Ideal for: Dropshipping
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “Absolutely awesome app! Easy to use and lots of unique products. The customer service is GREAT! My customer service rep Via was absolutely terrific. She responded right away, and not only solved my problem but gave me lots of useful tips and information to help my store improve. Very good app for beginning drop shippers, lots of support.”
No one needs to tell you how useful Pinterest can be for Shopify’s visually based marketplace. Getting your product images in front of customers is never easier than when you can integrate with Pinterest. Not only is it beautiful and beloved, it is actually a huge search engine in its own right. When people are searching for specific trends or products on Pinterest and pull up your product, they’re likely to head over to take a look.
That’s where the Pinterest for Shopify app comes in. It allows you to connect your Pinterest account, publish Product Pins, track your performance with the Pinterest Tag, and update your catalog daily. It’s free to install, but if you want to purchase ads to increase your marketing reach, you can.
Ideal for: Social media marketing
Pricing: Based on ad spend
Review: “One of the biggest benefits of the Pinterest Shopify app is the increased visibility it gives your products. With over 400 million active users, Pinterest is a powerful platform for driving traffic and sales to your online store. By creating Product Pins for your Shopify products, you can showcase them to a wider audience and make it easier for potential customers to discover and purchase your products.”
Helping customers get what they need can feel like a taxing task indeed, especially if you don’t have the right Shopify marketing apps at your disposal. With LiveChat, that’s no longer a problem. This tool allows you to engage with on-site visitors by inviting them to chat, seeing what they have in their shopping cart, communicating in real time, suggesting complementary products, and more. When they need help, the Help Desk function lets you quickly troubleshoot their issues and send them on their way.
Plus, the app lets you easily browse your store’s inventory so you can suggest the best products, coupons, and deals without having to plan a lot beforehand. The customer will feel more supported and you will get more bang for your buck while they’re on your site. Whether you’re a one-person shop who just wants a better way to engage than Shopify’s native functionality, or need a good solution for your team, this is it.
Ideal for: Live chat and help desk
Pricing: $19/month
Review: “We've been up & running on LiveChat for a week now and are very happy! This is a powerful app and underlying platform.”
Slow load times are a huge problem for many store owners, but they don’t know what to do about it. If that’s you, Avada is here to help. Built specifically to address slow load times, the app works to increase your shop’s functionality by pre-loading pages as soon as a visitor hovers their mouse over a link. That way, when they do click it, they’ll get to their intended destination much more quickly. This reduces the chances of exiting or abandoning their carts.
Plus, Avada is also made to optimize images. As with pages, slow image loading can mean bounces, which you want to avoid at all costs. Speeding up those images and links can do a ton for your SEO as well, and so can the other optimization features from Avada. These include meta tags, local business information, Google structured data, broken link detection, page redirection, and more.
Ideal for: SEO
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “I recently started using the AVA SEO app and I am truly impressed with its performance. Not only has it helped me optimize my website's SEO, but Hana of the support team has been exceptionally fast and responsive in assisting me with any questions or concerns I had. I am genuinely grateful for her prompt assistance. The app itself is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy for even a novice like me to navigate and make the most of its features. I've already seen improvements in my site's search rankings.”
If you’re looking for an email and SMS campaign optimizer in both English and French, SMSBump is an excellent option. Not only will it help you market to audiences in both languages, it offers the ability to A/B test campaigns for both email and text to see which works better. Now you can engage with shoppers in real time and make the most of interactions with all customers.
Additional perks of this app include a considerable library of proven SMS templates and automation flows that respond to customer actions based on conditional logic. This makes it easier to bucket your customers, market to them based on their unique traits, and engage more of your audience overall.
Ideal for: Email marketing & SMS
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “Super great customer service. Jeff helped me to go through activating my account. I mistakenly updated the policies in the wrong place and could not see them. He guided me to the right place and waited patiently for me to do the corrections. Customer service is perfect. Thank you!”
Often considered a gold standard of email marketing, Mailchimp has been around for more than two decades. In that time, they’ve gone from a small business marketing machine to a global provider of email services. Now you can integrate it with hundreds of other applications, including Shopify, which gives you a lot more flexibility to engage with your customers over email.
Now you can access your creative assets through their Content Studio to make reusing old content easier across a wide variety of channels. With AI technology, you can improve copy and images without breaking a sweat, but leverage insights from across your own campaigns – and millions of others in applicable industries. The last is perhaps the most impressive functionality, as it allows you to make use of intelligence gathered from a huge range of Shopify marketing apps and data.
Ideal for: Email marketing & SMS
Pricing: Free to install
Review: “We were very happy to learn that Mailchimp had created a Shopify app. We've found it to be very easy to use and seamlessly sends new email sign ups from our website to our Mailchimp account. It was simple to install and embed into the website. Clients seem to have no issues using it and it is successfully capturing email addresses. Thank you for creating this app for Shopify!”
Although most people think of Shopify as a purely online phenomenon, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, many people use the platform to provide local goods to their communities. That’s where an integration such as Local Delivery can prove helpful. It allows you to manage your deliveries, optimize your routes, avoid snags, and access driving directions right from the app. With manual and automation route planning, you can combine the best of both depending on the needs of the day.
Plus, it offers easy contact functionality with your customers. You can send them automated delivery updates so they know exactly where their product is. Order status updates sync to your admin dashboard, so you can track where you’re at with your deliveries as well.
Ideal for: Local delivery
Pricing: Completely free
Review: “I personally love this app. I recently switched from another website hosting provider to Shopify and Shopify offers a lot of tools, support and resources to help make your order fulfilment smooth and organized. Highly recommend this app if you offer local delivery.”
When all is said and done, there’s no reason not to add a robust mix of Shopify marketing apps to your site. Doing so can improve the customer experience, drive sales and retention, increase functionality, and gather and analyze metrics for your online store. Tons of widget options make your site more appealing to customers, ranging from discount codes and product recommendations to customer support and beyond.
By putting just a little more effort into your optimization and workflows, you can measurably improve your conversion rates and see more profits. Hands-down one of the best places to start is with an app that helps you customize each listing to the max, minimize clutter in your inventory, and help customers find exactly what they need with mix-and-match technology.
