_{The best customer engagement apps and tools for Shopify stores.} 

You can acquire customers through marketing and advertising campaigns, but how do you keep them? 

How do you convert them into loyal customers? 

Customer engagement is undoubtedly an integral element for growth in eCommerce. We often talk about how important customer acquisition is, but customer engagement has always proven to be a more cost-effective strategy showing better ROI by enabling retention of buyers. 

Knowing how it’s easier to sell to your existing customers than to new ones, customer engagement is a practical and profitable business strategy. 

If statistics are to be believed, a brand is 60-70% more likely to sell to an existing buyer, while the probability of selling to a new customer is between 5% and 20%. But this happens only when you keep customers engaged, working on increasing the number of interactions they make with your brand. 

But with the overwhelming competition across eCommerce industries, keeping customers engaged is getting harder and harder. For many industries, the average customer engagement rate remains below 20%. 

To better implement customer engagement strategies, you need to set up smart automation to fuel your campaigns, and that’s where having the right set of tools comes in. 

Best Shopify Apps for Customer Engagement 

These are some of the best customer engagement apps and tools available for Shopify stores. With the right goals and business objectives in mind, you can choose the apps that you need, and radically improve the way you stay in touch with customers. 

LimeChat

Reaching customers from where they are is an ideal strategy. But when customers today are scattered across channels, your strategies for reaching them should also adapt and expand to all these channels. But when going for an omnichannel strategy for enhancing customer engagement you need an app that can do more than just enable the use of multiple channels.

LimeChat can help you set up automated customer engagement campaigns through all the major channels- email, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram while providing conversation automation and personalization with the power of AI. 

Using Level-3 AI automation and chatbots, LimeChat has managed to simplify omnichannel conversational marketing, greatly, while enabling eCommerce brands to increase sales and conversion rates through a data-driven approach. 

LimeChat’s Level-3 AI has helped brands increase conversion by 15% while showing three times better customer engagement. With the right implementation and proper utilization of its arsenal of customizable workflows and automation, the app can bring up sales by 10%!

LimeChat lets you: 

• Provide human-level chat experiences using powerful AI 
• Access customer data while allowing you to manage queries and provide customer support across different channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger 
• Automate almost 70% of your customer engagement campaigns across all communication channels
• Assess data and understand consumer behavior to further optimize your marketing campaigns 

Appstle Subscriptions

A subscription-based business model is a great way to strategically gain recurring sales and engage buyers in a more meaningful way. While this has a lot of benefits, making use of those benefits and fully leveraging the subscription model requires more than simply setting one up in your store. Appstle offers the right solution for eCommerce brands that are looking to reinforce their subscription strategies.

Appstle Subscriptions is a subscription app that lets you provide customers with products and services at regular time intervals. It is an end-to-end recurring billing and payment solution provider that offers some great features and amazing customizations. With Appstle in place, customers can self-manage their subscriptions from their customer portals; edit or change delivery dates, skip deliveries, renew subscriptions and more.

Some of the major strengths of the Appstle Subscription app are: 

• Ability to set up different types of ecommerce subscriptions model 
• Self-serve subscription management platform for customers 
• Customizable subscription models and customer interface 
• Set up integrations with Shopify for recurring order management 
• Set up automated communication for customer engagement 

In short, the Appstle Subscriptions app for Shopify allows you to provide your consumers with a seamless purchase experience with recurring self-managed subscriptions. With great analytics and features for powerful subscription management capabilities, it is definitely another “must-have” app for eCommerce brands.

Flits

As you gain customers and grow your business, the importance of appealing to your existing customers increases even more. How is your brand rewarding the customers who have stuck with your brand loyalty despite the heavy competition? This is where you need a good customer loyalty program app like Flits.

Flits help you set up a customer loyalty program within the customer account page – where customers are offered store credits as rewards for actions such as product reviews, purchases, signing up, sharing on social media etc. With easy-to-earn convertible credits for these simple actions, customer loyalty gets a major boost. Using Shopify store credits, customers can be proactively engaged and they are more likely to conduct repeat purchases.

By including reward-winning actions like inviting friends or sharing on social media, Flits allows you to expand your customer base seamlessly with referrals. This way you are succeeding in engaging existing buyers while gaining new ones in the process.

Some of the key strengths of Flits are;

• It allows for a great rewards program with convertible Shopify store credits
• With referrals you can turn customers into brand advocates
• Lets you reward a great number of meaningful actions 
• Integrates the loyalty program with the customer account page to boost engagement rates 

Rise.ai

Another major loyalty strategy to engage customers is the use of gift cards. Gift cards have an incredible impact on improving revenue and customer loyalty, that is if it’s rightly employed.

Rise.ai lets you build enhanced Gift Card programs on every Shopify plan. Customers can send out branded gift cards and vouchers digitally via IM or Email. Gift cards are a great way to reach new customers and drive sales but only a smartly crafted, smooth experience can guarantee this. With the best strategies for handling gift cards, you can boost retention, customer satisfaction and membership.

Rise.ai can do a lot more than your average eCommerce gift card program. Some of its benefits and features are: 

• Allows free re-platforming and migration of your gift cards
• Works with subscription apps and supports external checkout
• Supports sending bulk gift cards and conducting bulk discount campaigns
• Allows you to offer gift cards across multiple channels 

Lifetimely

No growth and customer retention can happen if you fail to understand your customers or to study how the customers react to your strategies. You have to know; data is key for engagement. Customer analytics will help you better understand your customers, and learn about their purchase behavior, preferences, interests etc. With deeper insights into customers, you can plan your campaigns better.

An app like Lifetimely understands this and lets you track your growth and calculate profits with ease. You can track profits in real-time by setting up an easy Profit & Loss report which can integrate with external accounts. By analyzing data on your customer Lifetime Value or LTV, you can identify higher-value customers, and modify your strategies accordingly. 

Lifetimely even allows you to benchmark your KPIs with other industry competitors so that you can always keep track of how well you are doing against the competition.

Some of the major strengths found in the Lifetimely app and its analytic toolkit are: 

• AI-powered accurate predictive LTV model, with advanced filters to discover differences in LTV 
• Customizable analytics dashboard for anything from high-level metrics to campaign-level marketing data 
• Industry benchmarks that let you compare your metrics with competitors 
• Automated Profit & Loss reporting that can be set up in no time 

Plobal Apps

Most of your shoppers are more likely to approach you from mobile devices. In this age, if your Shopify store is not designed properly for mobile, your chances at higher engagement are slimmer.

Plobal Apps helps you build a mobile app and it does so while eliminating all complexities. Mobile commerce has grown greatly in popularity over time, owing to its ease of use. By designing an app for mobile, brands will be able to maximize engagement by providing a simple and accessible way to shop.

Customers who buy on mobile, and in-app are 30% more likely to remain loyal customers. Mobile apps can further improve repeat purchases and see 5 times more checkouts than from the mobile web store. With the ability to send notifications at any time, brands can always grab customer attention easily and stay on the customer’s mind.

With Plobal Apps you can: 

• Design your store into a sleek mobile app
• Develop great app install strategies
• Send automated and personalized notifications, product recommendations, abandoned cart alerts etc
• Monitor and analyze your app performance with insights on average order value, retention, conversion etc
• Seamlessly integrate with other major Shopify Apps 

Ako Retargeting

One of the most important factors behind effective eCommerce business is gaining customer attention. Retargeting ads help businesses stay on top of the customer’s mind and hence contribute greatly to boosting engagement.

Ako Retargeting lets you maximize your sales and return on investment, by optimizing conversion rates with advanced Facebook Instagram Google retargeting ads. You can easily retarget visitors to your homepage, those who viewed your blogs or product pages, with ads that can turn them into purchasing customers.

With smart retargeting, you can acquire high-value and high-potential customers and increase traffic, revenue and retention.

These are some of the key benefits and features of Ako Retargeting: 

• It supports sequential ad formats and ensures customers are not bombarded with the same ad repeatedly 
• It automatically syncs your Shopify Products with the Facebook ad system via Facebook Product Feed
• Has multichannel support and allows for custom placements
• Set up does not require any coding skills and can be done within minutes
• Has a rich variety of ad formats including video, cover images, carousels and collections.
• Segments your visitors into groups so that they can be retargeted with appropriate ads 

Pushowl

Web push notifications with offers and discounts rarely go unnoticed and are a great way to keep people engaged. PushOwl is another incredible engagement app for Shopify that lets you recover abandoned carts, send promotions and fetch better results with web push notifications. You can even attempt to bring back anonymous shoppers who have abandoned products in their carts with automated push notifications.

Push notifications ought to be more than just flash sales and discount alerts. You can use automation to alert buyers about back-in-stock products, recommend based on browsing and more. Pushowl is slightly more cost-effective than FB retargeting ads and also integrates easily with other Shopify apps. 

PushOwl comes with some very handy features needed to boost engagement like the ability to segment subscribers, send out personalized campaigns, send optimized delivery notifications and custom reporting.

With web push notifications, you can collect store visitors and convert them into subscribers, with ease. Some of the benefits of PushOwl are: 

• Has an easy, intuitive dashboard
• With its Campaign Creator, users can set up web push campaigns easily in no time.
• Automated abandoned cart recovery
• Designed perfectly for Shopify Plus scale and connects perfectly with top-rated Shopify apps
• Lets users personalize their marketing and provide proactive customer support 

Choose The Right Apps for Proactive Customer Engagement 

For assuring growth and success in eCommerce, proactive customer engagement is key. The customer is central to any improvement that you want to see in your business, be it revenue or overall growth. Only with highly engaged customers can a business remain on top of its competitors, survive and thrive.

Thus, having the right apps to enhance your strategy is of paramount importance. You should only install the apps that are of absolute necessity and choose only the ones that work the best for your brand. When starting, we recommend that you start with an app that can streamline conversations across all your channels. LimeChat helps you do this with its exceptional multichannel support and conversation automation along with personalization.

Book a demo of LimeChat today!