20 Useful Ecommerce Tools You Should Try
Ecommerce is more than Magento and Shopify — there are loads of different tools that deal with everything from loyalty schemes to exit intent popups out there to be played around with. This article examines some of the tools that you might not have heard of or be familiar with, but might just fit the needs of your ecommerce website perfectly…
Best Ecommerce Recommendations Engines
Customers who shop online recognise when they are being offered a personalised and unique shopping experience — this increases an ecommerce site’s value to them and makes them more likely to return in the future. Recommendation engines can be utilised to serve users unique content, offers and products based on their preferences by analysing their purchasing behaviour.
Salesforce/ExactTarget Predictive Intelligence — this leverages the profile of each customer to deliver shopping experiences that are unique to them. It analyses individual behaviour, location, recent search terms and more, to deliver real-time content and purchase suggestions, in addition to delivering general personalisation.
Barilliance — every step of the shopping and purchase journey is personalised to the user, including features such as cart abandonment emails and product recommendations.
IBM Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) Product Recommendation Solution — maximise conversions with real-time listening, delivery and learning through improved online business capabilities and enhanced marketing and merchandising insight, flexibility and control.
PersuasionAPI — a SaaS application programme interface for ecommerce marketing teams which helps retailers to increase the value of individual customers and keep them coming back.
Best Tag Management Tools
Tags are snippets of code that are designed to enable third-party tracking, analysis and reporting within a website — there might be multiple scripts running on each page of an ecommerce website, but a tag management system allows them to be collated inside a “master” tag. This saves technical resources, reduces loading times on the site because only the necessary scripts need to be fired.
Ensighten — allows users to optimise customer experiences, budget allocation decisions and overall marketing agility with an open platform which orchestrates data, content and marketing technologies. This keeps customers engaged by delivering the right message through the right channel at the right time.
Tealium — helps brands to integrate siloed applications and data so they can drive profitable interactions across multiple digital touch-points with open platform for tag management and data enrichment.
Tag Commander — allows technical resources to focus on managing projects rather than tags, improving site performance and uncovering key user insights.
Super Tag — focuses on the data that is important and implements best practice methods for media attribution, merchandising, testing and optimisation to understand customers and their needs.
Best Exit Intent Tools
When every ecommerce website needs to maximise its conversion rates in order to maximise profit, it needs to take every chance to convert a visitor into a paying customer. Exit intent tools give a website one last chance to secure a customer by sensing when they are trying to leave the site without having bought anything. When this happens, a pop-up engages with a message designed to obtain a conversion.
Picreel — this service doesn’t require any knowledge of code to create last-chance offer pop-ups, with built-in analytics showing users the best areas to target.
Justuno — available with advanced features for those who are able to code but equally simple to use for novices, Justuno’s features include promotional pop-ups for returning customers and cart abandonment emails to entice them back to complete a purchase.
OptinMonster — OptinMonster is a lead-generation plugin for WordPress that allows users to create attention grabbing optin forms (among other features, such as A/B testing) with the aim of increasing conversion rates.
ExitIntent.io — implementable with WordPress, Magento and other ecommerce and content management platforms, ExitIntent provides different templates designed to retain exiting customers that can be included within a website in the form of a line of JavaScript, which tracks user movements to see when they’re likely to leave the site.
Best Loyalty Platforms & Tools for Ecommerce
One of the most effective ways for businesses to gain repeat customers is by offering a loyalty scheme. Some platforms have taken the idea a step further by offering incentives to customers who introduce new people to the business, review products, share their purchases on social media and so on. Loyalty schemes are evolving, and may soon become as important to ecommerce websites as the products they sell.
Loyalis.co — users can recognise and reward loyal customers who are making frequent purchases and interacting with the company in other ways by offering them chips to be redeemed against future purchases.
Sweet Tooth Rewards — currently integrating with Magento, Shopify and Bigcommerce, Sweet Tooth allows brands to create powerful point-based loyalty programs that significantly increase customer retention and sales.
Badgeville — offering gamification platforms with a strong business focus, Badgeville helps companies of all kinds get more out of their existing web, mobile and enterprise applications by revolutionising the way that customers use them.
ReferralCandy — a referral marketing tool that gets users more customers by incentivising referrals and keeping the programme running in the platform without users having to think about it.
With the ecommerce industry changing all the time, there’s no telling where the focus of the next big innovation will lie and how much it will affect the way we buy and sell online. What is clear, though, is that the options already available offer a far greater level of flexibility and control than the options of a couple of years ago.
Originally published at www.roughagenda.com.
