Top 5 Shopify automation tools that work

Shopify is one of the world’s leading e-commerce platforms. In fact, according to their website, they provide online shopping services to millions of online retailers and account for 10% of total e-commerce activity in the United States. 

But, many retailers still need to figure out how to optimize the solution to reach their full potential. That’s why we decided to unpack the best ways you can increase sales through different strategies and add-on applications. 

It’s all about automation

All of the strategies and apps we will cover have one thing in common: they all aim to automate various processes for you. That means less manual work and more time focusing on growing your business.

Particularly if you’re new to Shopify, there are a few automation strategies you should start experimenting with. 

Personalization

Among its many tools, Shopify allows you to segment your audiences and send personalized messages based on their behaviors and preferences. For instance, you may notice a cohort of customers who always buy a certain brand of cosmetics from your store. You can then segment this audience and target them with special discount offers or messages about new product launches for their preferred brands. 

Related reading: Mastering e-commerce personalization

Abandoned cart recovery

As an online retailer, you heavily invest in marketing to attract customers to your store and optimize the shopping experience to encourage sales. But just when you think you’ve closed a new sale, a customer can sometimes få kalla fötter (which means “get cold feet” in Swedish) and abandon their cart. 

Shopify recognizes this behavior and provides tools that automatically encourage customers to return to the store and complete their purchases. More on this later. 

Product recommendations

This feature is a must-have for every e-commerce business. Based on a user’s browsing and past purchasing history, the Shopify platform can automatically recommend the top products a user may be interested in. Think of this feature as a sort of digital retail concierge for your customers. 

Loyalty programs

Repeat customers are often your most valuable audience, making rewarding their continued loyalty important. However, creating and managing a customer loyalty program can consume your time, especially if you run a lean operation. 

Luckily, Shopify can help automate these programs by sending discount codes to customers who meet certain milestones and more. 

Social media integration

As a retailer owner, you have many priorities on your plate, which means managing social media profiles regularly often falls by the wayside. It’s a real shame, too, since global sales through social media platforms were estimated to reach $992 billion in 2022 alone, according to HubSpot. 

For those retailers running Shopify, though, social media couldn’t be easier. The platform allows you to automatically push new product launches across your social media platforms, share product updates, update your audience on new promotions, and more. 

Analytics and reporting

Unsurprisingly, this is one of our favorite automation strategies at Funnel. After all, we love marketing data reporting. Shopify data automation makes gaining a better perspective of your store’s performance incredibly easy. 

Then, when you match this data along with your other marketing data in Funnel, you can take your business to the next level. 

A/B testing

We love to highlight the importance of testing — whether that means your ad creatives, marketing messages, landing pages, etc. Your e-commerce storefront is no different. Shopify automation helps to remove the leg work from A/B testing by letting you set up different subject lines or calls to action in your email newsletters and more. 

Customer feedback

No business can improve without listening to its customers' opinions. How else would you know if you're providing a sub-par product or experience — or, conversely, if you are making waves with your best-in-class service? 

Shopify provides automation to gather this valuable feedback through surveys and reviews, allowing you to easily gain insights into what’s working and what’s not. 

Pre-packaged automation or third-party apps? 

To achieve the automation strategies above, you generally have three options: 

• Roll with the automation that is pre-packaged in the Shopify platform 
• Search out third-party integrations 
• Implement a mix of both. 

While existing Shopify tools may sound like the obvious answer since they are ready to go, they can lack the robustness of third-party apps. At the same time, those third-party tools rely on API integrations to work with the Shopify platform. That means they could break at any time if not well maintained. 

With all that said, let’s look at the different tools you can use. 

The top five apps for Spotify automation

Below, you’ll find various apps that can quickly and easily automate some of the most important processes for your Shopify store. 

1. Keeper

This app is focused on preventing the perennial problem of cart abandonment. This customer phenomenon happens more often than you think. The average cart abandonment rate is about 70%. Yikes. 

Keeper aims to bring this rate down. If a user abandons their cart on mobile, the app automatically remembers the cart’s contents across all the user’s devices. This makes it incredibly easy for the customer to complete their order, especially if they get distracted during checkout. 

2. Plug-in SEO

It’s one thing to own and manage a digital storefront, but it won’t do you any good if your customers can’t find your store in the first place. Great SEO can help with that, especially for niche retailers. The great part of this app is it reduces the often-steep learning curve traditionally associated with SEO. It is a great tool to help you quickly rank for highly relevant keywords to attract that high-intent traffic. 

3. Funnel

One great way to automate Shopify is to connect it to your Funnel account. In just a matter of clicks, you can merge your store data with performance data from all of your other marketing platforms. This helps you gain a better perspective on your overall performance and make better data-driven decisions. 

Plus, with our free plan, you can connect to Shopify along with two other platforms (say, Facebook Ads and Google Ads) to get you started on your journey toward data maturity. 

4. SMSBump

Staying in touch with your existing customers can be tough. The go-to tactic for most e-commerce retailers is often email marketing, but it is getting harder every day to break through with this tactic. An alternative to traditional email outreach is SMS. 

If you’re providing ongoing resources and upsell opportunities for loyal customers, SMS can be a great way to deliver personalized, highly effective messages. 

5. Shoplift

No, this is not a tool to prevent online retail theft (I’m not even sure how that might work…). It’s actually a great way to automate your A/B testing. Before you begin, it’s important to understand the best use cases and limitations of A/B testing. After all, it’s not the magic solution many marketers make it out to be. 

But if you have the traffic volume required to reach statistical significance, Shoplift is a great way to easily test messages across landing pages, email newsletters, and more. It will even provide you with recommended tests if you need inspiration to get going. 

Leverage the power of Spotify without the manual labor

Shopify is an extremely powerful platform for e-commerce businesses. Depending on your specific niche, it can help you to effectively reach and grow your customer base. However, it can be a lot to handle — even for experienced e-commerce marketers.

Luckily, there is a suite of automation tools that can help you kick your Shopify performance into high gear. The apps we highlighted above are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Many different solutions and integrations are available to suit nearly any niche. 

If you’d like to learn more about Shopify automation, check out our latest YouTube video. While you’re there, be sure to like and subscribe to our channel so you can start up-to-date on all of the best tips and tricks to make you a more data-driven marketer.