The Best Shopify Plus Marketing Apps to Scale Your Ecommerce Store (and Make Your Life Easier)

What are apps? Do you need to use them to get the most value out of Shopify Plus? Or is Shopify Plus ready to use out of the box?

Shopify Plus provides an enterprise-grade commerce platform with everything you need to run an online store. You don’t need to spend time or money on security, scalability, bugs, payment integrations, etc. like you normally would with an in-house solution.

So, yes, Shopify Plus is ready to go from day one!

But the real power of Shopify Plus is how it enables you to easily grow and market your store using apps. You can add incredible functionality through top-tier Shopify Plus apps with just a few clicks. And when you’re no longer tied up with technical concerns, you actually have the time and resources to focus on growth.

Here are some of the best Shopify Plus apps we keep in our growth toolbelt and frequently use to improve store performance.

The Best Shopify Plus Apps for Marketing

We’ve chosen our favorite Shopify Plus apps and broken them down by marketing category.

As you read, remember, apps are just tools. To effectively grow your store, you’ll need to develop a clear strategy for using them.

Email Marketing: Klaviyo

There’s no shortage of email marketing platforms to choose from, but in our opinion, Klaviyo is the best Shopify Plus app for ecommerce.

Klaviyo is incredibly user-friendly, has tight integration with Shopify, and offers excellent reporting. You can segment based on almost any Shopify data, and the advanced segmentation options provide a powerful tool for campaign targeting.

Pro tip: When sending any email, remember to maintain a clear connection between the email and your website or landing page. If you offer a promotion via email, for example, ensure that the same promotion appears prominently on the page where you send your campaign traffic.

Reviews: Yotpo or Stamped.io

When it comes to review apps, Yotpo stands out as the cream of the crop and one of the best Shopify Plus apps for social proof. With tight integrations across nearly every channel for review distribution and excellent review aggregation technology, Yotpo is a powerful tool for leveraging customer feedback.

Positive reviews are one of the biggest drivers of sales. Potential customers trust what other customers say about your brand more than they trust what you have to say about yourself. Strong social proof draws potential customers along the sales funnel, so be sure to have reviews as a part of your site and to display them prominently.

Pro tip: While Yotpo is the gold standard for review apps, Stamped.io offers a great budget-friendly alternative. Although Stamped.io’s integrations are less robust and its review management is slightly more challenging to navigate, it still provides a solid solution for those looking to incorporate customer reviews without breaking the bank.

Pop-Ups: OptiMonk and Privy

Because the technologies for triggering pop-ups vary, we use a combination of apps to cover our bases.

For desktop popups, OptiMonk is our go-to Shopify app. It’s great at creating entry models offering first-time visitors coupons in exchange for email addresses, as well as exit-intent pop-ups that appear when a visitor moves their mouse to close the browser. These exit-intent pop-ups typically include a limited-time offer to motivate visitors to stay on the site and finish their purchase.

For mobile pop-ups, we prefer Privy. Unlike desktop browsers, mobile browsers don’t have a mouse cursor to indicate when a visitor is about to close the window, making exit-intent pop-ups more difficult. Privy’s technology, however, effectively handles mobile exit-intent pop-ups, making it an essential tool for engaging mobile users.

While OptiMonk and Privy both offer mobile and desktop functionality, using them in tandem allows you to take strategic advantage of each app’s strengths.

Pro tip: How do you avoid annoying your customers with too many or irrelevant pop-ups? The key is to deliver valuable information at the right time to the right audience. When used well, pop-ups can be a powerful tool for engaging customers and driving sales.

Transactional Emails: CM Commerce

When it comes to transactional emails, CM Commerce (formerly Conversio) is our top pick. This app offers ready-to-use email sequences for abandoned cart follow-ups and receipts, making it easy to optimize customer communication.

While Shopify will send out receipts for you, we recommend using CM Commerce instead. Receipt emails have the highest open rates of any type of email, offering a golden opportunity to engage with your customers. With CM Commerce, you can easily add cross-sells for additional items or incentivize customers to refer their friends to your site for a reward, maximizing the value of receipt emails.

To use CM Commerce for abandoned cart emails, we recommend setting up a three-email series. Start by sending a reminder email one hour after a visitor abandons their cart, and ask for feedback in case a problem on your site keeps them from completing their purchase. Follow up again 24 and 48 hours later, offering a limited-time discount code to incentivize them to return.

Pro tip: A visitor who goes to the trouble of filling up their cart is already fairly interested in your product. They’re low-hanging fruit compared to new visitors, so do everything you can to close these sales.

Loyalty and Rewards: Smile.io

Increasing customer lifetime value is the best way to sustainably grow an ecommerce store, which makes rewarding your best customers and incentivizing repeat purchases crucial.

Of the many rewards and loyalty platforms available, Smile.io stands out for its seamless integration with Shopify Plus, making it easy for customers to earn and redeem rewards.

Pro tip: Keep your rewards program simple. Complicated reward strategies aren’t effective because customers struggle to understand them.

Search: Smart Search by Searchanise

Out of the box, Shopify Plus’s built-in search functionality isn’t bad. In fact, it works for most stores. But if you want more advanced features like smart search or autofill, you may need a more powerful solution.

Smart Search by Searchanise is one of the best Shopify Plus apps for the deceptively difficult task of high-quality search. It does a great job of supporting autofill suggestions, dynamically filtered results, and the ability to search within specific product attributes or filters.

Pro tip: Upgrading your ecommerce store’s search capabilities can be a game-changer, especially for stores with extensive product catalogs or complex navigation structures.

Pre-Orders: Pre-Order Manager by Amai

Often, when stores run out of an item, it’s temporary. Maybe they didn’t order a new product on time, or maybe manufacturing was delayed, but new inventory is coming. Until then, the product typically displays as “sold out” or “unavailable,” or your store hides it entirely.

But most ecommerce stores would prefer to continue selling out-of-stock products as back-order items to be shipped later.

To accomplish this, we use a Shopify app called Pre-Order Manager. It allows you to create pre-order products or automatically convert out-of-stock products to pre-order items. The app then takes credit card information during the order process and charges the card once the item ships, providing a seamless experience for both customers and owners.

Pro tip: Pre-orders are simple in concept but complicated in execution. Taking advantage of a platform that streamlines and de-stresses this valuable process is worth it.

Subscriptions: Bold Subscriptions

Subscription businesses are trending right now, and rightfully so. Who wouldn’t want monthly, recurring revenue?

Out-of-the-box Shopify doesn’t do subscriptions, but Bold — a top app development company — does. Their app, Bold Subscriptions, is the best Shopify Plus app for turning any product into a subscription product.

Pro tip: Subscriptions don’t fit every brand, but we challenge you to consider how subscription products could fit into your business model.

Pre-Checkout Upsells: Bold Upsell

Upsells and cross-sells often appear in the cart or on product detail pages when customers click “add to cart.” They’re great ways to increase the average order value for your store.

Bold Upsell allows you to set up intelligent offers based on the items a user has in their cart.

Pro tip: If you currently present cross-sells or upsells in the cart or at checkout, consider whether they might be distracting customers from completing their purchases. If you discover they are, reposition your efforts to your product details pages or post-purchase communications.

Post-Checkout Upsells: Zipify OneClickUpsell

Post-checkout upsells and cross-sells can effectively increase a store’s cart value.

Zipify OneClickUpsell is one of the few (and best!) Shopify Plus apps that lets you upsell after a customer inputs their payment information and clicks the “purchase” button. A pop-up appears before the confirmation page, offering a better product or additional products at a discount.

If the customer says yes, OCU automatically adds the upsell to the order and completes the purchase. If the customer says no, they simply proceed as usual to the confirmation page.

Pro tip: If you go this route, use intelligent upsells; you don’t want to offer customers something they’ve already purchased. Also, be prepared for increased customer service issues. Some customers will click “yes” when they meant to click “no.”

How Much Do the Best Shopify Plus Apps Cost?

Most of the best Shopify Plus apps run on a monthly subscription fee, ranging from free for basic plans to a few hundred dollars per month for advanced features (with a few pricier enterprise options).

Pricing is typically pay-as-you-go without long-term contracts. So, if you install an app that doesn’t work for you, you can cancel at any time. Remember to pay close attention to your apps’ ROI and only keep those that move the needle on your site.

One note of caution: Some apps modify your theme code. Back up your theme before installing a new app so you can revert if needed.

Choosing the Best Shopify Plus Apps AND Strategy for Your Store

The apps covered here are some of the best Shopify Plus apps available and can add powerful capabilities to your store. But it’s important to be strategic. Remember to:

• Focus on apps that support your key goals and use cases.
• Pay attention to app ROI and prune anything that doesn’t move the needle.
• Maintain continuity when sending users to your site via apps.
• Keep loyalty programs simple so customers understand them.
• Be prepared to handle any customer confusion from post-purchase upsells.

With the best Shopify Plus apps in your toolbelt AND a solid strategy for using them, you’ll be well on your way to stronger — and more streamlined — ecommerce performance.

What are your favorite Shopify Plus apps? Let us know in the comments!