The CX Side of Shopify Essentials
THE TOPIC OF THE ARTICLE | April 26, 2022
Since the early days of Ecommerce, marketers have invested countless time, money, and effort into building an effective and on-brand customer experience. With the adoption of new digital tools and systems, these efforts have grown exponentially over the last decade.
The result, however, was less than ideal. Ecommerce has gained a sad reputation of stagnant and homogenized customer experiences (CX) that customers can’t differentiate from one another. So how can you set your brand apart from the competition and grow your customer base?
The answer lays in amazing tools and creativity
Shopify has made it easier than ever before to create an amazing customer experience for your Ecom store. In the past, customer service was reserved for brick & mortar locations. We’ve all had a pleasant experience with Nordstrom before and have surely noticed the difference when we walk over to Macy’s right after. With more shoppers than ever taking their money online, merchants have adopted these in-person methods to their virtual stores. Customers want the simplest and most efficient ways to contact you and have their questions answered. Luckily for us, Shopify has hooked up with some amazing 3rd party platforms that can take your CX game to the next level.
Gorgias
Gorgias is a super-powerful helpdesk app that services your customers across multiple channels. The powerhouse of this platform lays in its email capabilities. You can link a support or contact email to Gorgias and all of your customer inquiries will be routed there. You can also connect your social media platforms, outbound email supplier, and text numbers to Gorgias to make this app a CX command center for your shop. One of our favorite features of Gorgias is the ability to save multiple response templates (called Macros) to handle your everyday FQA’s (Frequently Asked Questions) simply and at the click of a button. These pre-built email responses can be made for any situation that could occur and Gorgias allows you to auto-connect different plug-ins to fill out the body of the email that corresponds to each individual order number. See the image below for an example:
With the help of Shopify, Gorgias will pull this information from the macro and add it automatically into the email, helping you avoid the monotonous copy/paste rinse, was, and repeat.
Yotpo
Yotpo is leading the way for unique loyal programs that help reward your customers for their returning support. You can create tiers to separate your customers into groups determined by “rules” that you decide upon. Most people opt to use Total Spend or Yearly Spend to decide which customers are granted special abilities on your website or app. You can create as many tiers as you would like, but Yotpo suggests keeping it to 3 or 4 (New, returning, loyal, super-fans). The organic engagement that these tiers create is absolutely invaluable. Customers really enjoy moving up a level and finding all of the new benefits that come along with their new rank. But it’s not just the customer that benefits here. Once you have your tiers set up and customers are starting to fill them out, you can use these tiers to create market segments. Say you want to release a special sale on a new item only for your top tier, you can gather that info from Yotpo and create a text/email marketing campaign to let them know. The promo code that you use to create this discount can only be eligible for the tier you select. Just like Gorgias, Yotpo has so
me amazing integrations that will help you keep your customer info altogether and market to them accordingly. In today’s market, it’s not enough just to have a loyalty program, it also needs to be interactive and on-brand. With Yotpo, everything is customizable to make your loyalty program really feel like YOUR loyalty program and cranks up your CLV (customer lifetime value) to never seen before heights!
Attentive
89% Of customers prefer texting over email or phone calls. Attentive allows you take full advantage of this statistic with its mobile marketing capabilities. Attentive is the most comprehensive text message marketing solution, driving 20.5% of total online revenue for businesses by creating thoughtful SMS experiences. Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive makes it possible for businesses to automatically send engaging text messages to each subscriber. Just like Yotpo, you can easily segment your customers in unique groups allowing your marketing efforts to be laser-focused instead of the old spray and pray methods. They are very careful about being compliant with text marketing laws and will cover you so that you are always in the clear and never bending the rules. Their customizability offers a unique message every time and you can choose the image or GIFs to accompany the text. They also offer a customer support team that can respond to customer inquiries if one of your targeted numbers decides to text back. This conversational marketing is relatively new and still in Beta but a few of our clients have seen some early success while utilizing this feature (and without sparing extra manpower or hours from the core team). The unique flows that can be built with Attentive can span your entire customer journey, ensuring that you stay customer-facing and supportive every step of the way!
GRIN
If your brand utilizes influencer marketing and UGC (User Generated Content) look no further than GRIN. This platform makes it simple to keep track of all of your influencers, create campaigns for them to take up at their own convenience, get down to the specifics of the idea/copy you are trying to get across and get them paid. Create new campaigns on the fly and set the dates that you need posts fulfilled by. See which influencers are bringing the best ROI home for your brand and create a solid working relationship with them. GRIN gives you the capability to turn your influencers into your biggest marketing tool.
Stamped.io
When used correctly, reviews can be a great selling tool. Some companies shy away from posting negative reviews and understandably so, but we believe even the 1-off low star review can be helpful (this is especially true in fashion retail to help with returns on sizing).Stamped.io makes it simple to gather customer reviews on items recently purchased and publish that information to your website’s PDP (product Display Page). This is a great way to build trust for your brand and also give your customers even more information about your products and services without feeling like you’re talking AT them.
We’ve just barely scratched the surface on the extent you can take your CX levels to with Shopify but this should serve well as the bare essentials, a starter pack if you will, for getting down the customer experience flow. If you are looking to up your CX, UX, and UI, schedule a consultation with us we can help build your customer journey roadmaps and set up the platforms your brand needs to stay top-of-mind, every time!
