Nathan Resnick — February 5, 2018 — February 5, 2018
With the start of a new year comes a great opportunity for businesses big and small to look back at what they accomplished in 2017 and make plans for improving their profitability in 2018. But how can you ensure that you’ll actually meet your online store’s ROI goals in the year to come? It should come as no surprise that utilizing key tools and apps can make a big difference for your profit margins.
With the right tools in your arsenal, you can automate or streamline many essential tasks that will help your store run smoothly and provide a better customer experience. Here’s a look at seven tools that you should consider as absolute must-haves for 2018.
1) Traffic Booster
PPC and Facebook advertising can be some of the best ways to drive new business to an online store, but advertising the right products in front of the right shoppers can be a tricky proposition.
This is where StoreYa’s Traffic Booster comes in. This intuitive tool creates customized PPC campaigns for Google and Facebook that optimizes bids in real time and matches ad keywords to relevant pages from your site. The result is a significantly lower cost per click that simultaneously drives higher-quality leads to your store.
2) Sumo List Builder
Email marketing is another crucial part of getting new and returning customers to come to your online store. Unfortunately, building an exhaustive email list that you can use to nurture leads isn’t always easy.
Sumo’s List Builder app ensures that each visitor who comes to your site has the potential to grow your email list. Their tool helps you create professional pop-ups that can be timed based on user behaviors and fully customized to match your branding. Whether you offer a discount or a newsletter subscription, these attractive pop-ups are an effective way to collect emails.
3) Crazy Egg
Getting customers to visit your site is one thing — but if your web content isn’t up to snuff, you’re not likely to make many sales. Crazy Egg gives you direct insight into what visitors do when they arrive at your store by creating heat maps to track customer activity.
This visual reporting mechanism makes it easy to identify which parts of your site work well, and which are potentially keeping people from making a purchase. With this information in hand, you can perform crucial updates to make your store more appealing.
4) Helio
Once you’ve identified areas where your online store isn’t quite working for your target audience, the next step is to update your website design. But how can you be confident that your new changes will be effective?
Fortunately, this is where Helio makes its grand entrance. Helio allows web developers to get feedback from real customers throughout the design process to make the site as visually appealing and conversion-friendly as possible. This helps you avoid wasting time and money due to a small mistake during the design process.
5) Woopra
Do you know how individual customers are interacting with your website content? Do you know the last time they interacted with your marketing? For online stores that allow customers to create their own accounts, Woopra provides a comprehensive look at each individual’s activities.
By syncing activities and tracking data based on their interactions with your store and marketing materials, you can better segment customer groups and identify who is most likely to convert. With real-time notifications, you can personalize your marketing and improve retention rates.
6) Pingdom
Site speed can have a big impact on whether or not an online store is successful. In fact, one survey found that 71% of e-commerce executives blame slow loading times for missed conversion opportunities. With Pingdom, you can quickly check your load speed and identify any issues that could be slowing down your store.
Better yet, the tool will offer tips on how to correct the problem — so whether you need to compress images or optimize CSS delivery, you’ll know what needs to be done to improve your site.
7) Producteev
From redesigning your website to preparing a new product for launch, there are countless tasks that your team will need to complete to ensure the lasting success of your online store. Producteev is an easy-to-use task management app that will help your team prioritize their time and stay on track.
With the ability to set deadlines, make assignments, create subtasks, and even send push notification reminders, keeping everyone on-target will ensure you accomplish your goals for 2018.
Prepare for Massive Growth
Allocating extra space in your budget to use these and other tools might seem like it will reduce your profitability, but the truth is the exact opposite. As you use these valuable resources to improve your online store, you’ll be able to attract more customers, increase your sales and experience massive growth in the coming year.
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