Top 10 Must Have Software for Your eCommerce Business

If you own a successful eCommerce business you already understand how brutal, cutthroat and competitive the eCommerce industry can be.  Within the last few years, multiple different firms have begun making inroads into every possible retail sector.

It’s unfortunate that only a small number of these firms have been able to make a real mark on the industry, though.  The one key area where they are dropping the ball is in customer service and experience.

Creating a great, memorable customer experience and providing reliable, fast customer service can be hard to do, but it is definitely not impossible.

In the eCommerce industry, scaling a store and sustaining the growth requires a large toolbox, which many store owners fail to realize exactly how important that toolbox can be.

You may be wondering exactly how the right set of tools can help you scale and sustain your growth.  I’m about to show you how, and what 10 of the most essential tools are for growing your eCommerce store over the next few years.

#1 – Optimizely

When it comes to growing your store, you are going to have to consistently test and tweak different parts of the store to help boost your conversion rates.  This is one area where Optimizely comes in and is incredibly handy.

You can use the tool to create new tests, run the tests, and then analyze the results from those tests to determine which one performed the best and continue running with it in the future.

Running A/B split tests, checking new product placements, content types, and even the colors of the webpages on your store is possible with Optimizely.

#2 – BuzzSumo

Creating content for your blog can be a huge problem for most store owners.  Heavy competition and trying to stay one step ahead of them can make this process even more difficult.

However, if you want to grow your store and make sure your traffic is scalable, you’re going to need to focus your efforts on content marketing.

BuzzSumo is one tool that makes it easy to come up with new ideas for content, and help find new opportunities to promote the content that you have created.  On top of this, BuzzSumo makes it easy to find new influencers and other users who have shared content on social media platforms.

#3 – MailChimp

When it comes to scaling your store, nothing works better than bringing your existing customers back to purchase again, and again.  For that task, email marketing is one of the best strategies you can implement.

If you are sending regular emails, product updates, company news, and blog post announcements, MailChimp is an excellent piece of software that can help you automate your marketing strategies.

You can do everything from create basic email marketing campaigns to offering special coupon codes, and keeping your existing customers up to date on what’s hot with your product lineup.

#4 – Moz

Moz has quite a few different tools, all designed to help marketers extract more from every strategy and campaign they implement into their business.

One of the features of Moz is the ability to easily track different keyword rankings and monitor the SEO performance of your eCommerce store.

With it, you can compare both desktop and mobile website performance, locate new linking opportunities, and monitor the traffic coming into your store.

You don’t want to find yourself among the eCommerce stores that are failing to address their SEO performance.  If you are ready to take SEO into your own hands and monitor how well you’re obtaining top rankings, Moz will help you find and fix the leaks in your strategy.

#5 – Instagration

It’s hard to deny how powerful Instagram is for eCommerce store owners.  Building a loyal brand following and massive fanbase on Instagram is a real possibility, no matter how big or small your store is right now.

Instagration is one tool that helps you tap into the power of Instagram and integrate it into your marketing efforts to help you generate even more product sales.

With Instagration, you can create advertising campaigns to start driving traffic to products already in your store, and products that you decide to launch in the future.

#6 – Qualaroo

If you don’t know exactly who your customers are, you are wasting a lot of time and money trying to get your marketing messages in front of them.

Making sure that your buying experience is incredibly seamless and memorable is how you’re going to stay fresh in your customer’s mind, and is becoming more and more important as each year passes and the industry becomes more competitive.

Qualaroo is a tool that helps you figure out exactly who your messages are getting in front of by using quick surveys that are introduced to your store’s visitors as they move through your website.

Spending the time and money to figure out who your customers really are, and what they want from you can make it easier for them to buy from you, and easier for you to choose new products to sell to them down the road.

#7 – Canva

If there’s one thing that successful eCommerce stores require, it’s high definition, attractive product photos and visuals.  If you aren’t offering compelling visuals for your customers, then you are missing out on a huge chance to increase your conversion rates.

With a tool like Canva, creating these stunning visuals is substantially easier than what most other tools currently offer.

While designing the store may require technical expertise, Canva can help those beginners and non-designers build the compelling images they need to run advertisements that get attention, and create product descriptions that maintain the attention the ads gathered.

#8 – Facebook Ads

Without traffic, your store won’t grow and you won’t ever get the opportunity to convert a visitor into a paying customer.  When you’re looking to drive traffic to your eCommerce store, you’re going to have a hard time finding a platform that can drive nearly as much traffic as Facebook.

Once you have figured out exactly who you are trying to sell products to, Facebook Ads make it incredibly easy for you to get those high-quality images you built in Canva in front of the perfect audience, quickly growing your store in the process.

In 2017, it’s hard to find someone who isn’t on Facebook, which means the ability for you to grow your eCommerce store is just going to get better and better as we move into the near future.

If you’re not using Facebook Ads, you are missing out on an incredibly profitable source of traffic.

#9 – Zirtual

For most eCommerce store employees, multitasking is going to be a huge requirement for their job. Managing all of the tasks that need to be done, though, can be incredibly frustrating.

That’s where a tool like Zirtual comes into play.  Zirtual makes it easy for your employees to keep tabs on everything that needs to be done, and gives them the benefits of having a personal assistant without having to actually hire one.

With Zirtual, you can schedule meets and manage your own personal errands, while keeping an eye on your email inbox at the same time.

This gives your employees the ability to help you move the business forward without having to stress about everything that needs to get done at the time.

#10 – Wigzo

If you want to sustain the growth that you’ve managed to gain while build your eCommerce store, you are going to need to rely on email marketing.

With Wigzo, email marketing becomes far more manageable and less stressful.  The tool helps you automate the workflow of your email marketing campaigns by focusing on helping you create and send different campaigns.

Through Wigzo, you can personalize the email messages that you send out based on the behavior of your visitors, making it a near one-on-one form of communication.

You can also use Wigzo to create product recommendations based on what you think will add the most value to your customer’s lives.  Profiling your customers based on what they buy and how they interact with your store is key to increasing your conversion rates.

Are You Using These Tools?

Knowing your customers and understanding exactly what they want and how you can keep your store in front of them is the key to growing your eCommerce store in the future.

With the 10 different tools I’ve just laid out for you here, gaining the insights you need to deliver on those goals becomes a lot easier and more manageable.