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Six Must-Have Technologies to Build the Best Ecommerce Tech Stack

Hot air balloons flying over a road in Cappadocia represent a captivating sight.
  • With so many technologies available today to help businesses create the best ecommerce tech stack, it’s tough to know where to begin
  • Six Shopify Plus Partners collaborated to produce Power Up Plus, an educational series exploring tools to increase conversions and enhance site performance
  • Access the chapters at your convenience to gain new insights that will enhance your brand’s ecommerce success

Ecommerce businesses have access to an endless array of technologies that enable you to transform the customer experience throughout their shopping journey.

The problem is … having so many options to “power up” your platform can make the task of choosing the best tech stack for your ecommerce store an overwhelming process.

Whether you’re re-evaluating your ecommerce tech stack, or are building one for the first time, you’ll find useful tips via our educational series, Power Up Plus, which highlights the cutting-edge technologies you should prioritize to increase conversions and performance on your ecommerce store.

Created in collaboration with six subject matter expert Partners across the Shopify Plus ecosystem, the series enables you to download each chapter to discover the best tools and strategies to deliver your brand’s ecommerce success.

To give you a sneak peek at what you’ll learn from each of the chapters, here’s an overview on …

How to build the best ecommerce tech stack to power up your sales and performance:

  1. Power Personalization with Data-Driven Customer Experiences
  2. Automate Email Marketing to Meet Your Audience’s Needs
  3. Increase Conversions via User-Generated Content
  4. Boost Brand Advocacy with Reward Programs
  5. Optimize Your On-Site Search Experience with Smart Search
  6. Enhance Your ERP Integration with Full-Scale Automation

Want the full guide?

Nosto collaborated with experts across Shopify Plus to highlight in full the technologies to use to get the most of your conversion rate and performance.

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Unlock the chapters here, including complete breakdowns of …

  • Why Automation is Key to Email Marketing
  • The Rise of User-Generated Content
  • What Reward Programs Mean for Brand Advocacy
  • How to Achieve a Better Search Experience

Access the full guide here

1. Power Personalization with Data-Driven Customer Experiences

As the world of ecommerce continues to evolve, retailers face mounting pressure to deliver more relevant consumer shopping experiences. In fact

~81% of shoppers want brands to understand the products they like, anticipate their needs, and know when to approach them.

Shopify Plus Partner Nosto, the world’s leading ecommerce personalization platform, provides data that reveals personalizing content across the entire store experience can lead to …

  • An average of 1.3X higher conversion rate
  • An average 18% higher average order value
  • An average 2X increase in customer time spent on your site

Due to advances in Artificial Intelligence, the possibilities are now endless for delivering 1:1 personalization to your customers across every touchpoint, device, and stage in their shopping journey.

And as retailers worldwide are using powerful data and insights to personalize how customers navigate their brand, this site functionality is no longer a “nice to have,” but rather a “must have” to keep up with your competitors.

In this first chapter, Shopify Plus and Nosto explore:

  • The value of data in powering personalization
  • The influence of customer segmentation in the buying funnel
  • Examples of personalization in practice across key pages (and stages) in the buying journey

Get more powerful personalization tips

2. Automate Email Marketing to Meet Your Audience’s Needs

With every email marketing campaign that you send out, you put your brand’s reputation on the line. Your customer’s inboxes are already inundated with marketing and sales offers.

Why should they open your message? And what’s stopping them from unsubscribing?

You can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers through personal, data-driven email messages and campaigns. There are many tools available to automate this process and optimize common customer lifecycle campaigns, which takes repetitive, time-consuming tasks off your plate.

Shopify Plus and Bronto’s combined email marketing solution provides …

1. Seamless data integration: A best-in-class integrated solution for generating revenue with targeted email marketing campaigns.

2. Rapid implementation of your email marketing solution: With Jumpstart for Shopify, your email marketing program is up and running in 30 days.

This chapter will explore what to consider when crafting an automated email campaign, including:

  • How you can further refine the content to meet your audience’s needs
  • How to utilize email automation to convert more of that target audience
  • The importance of revisiting your automated email campaigns on a regular basis to ensure the strategy behind them hasn’t gone stale

Start automating emails with ease

3. Increase Conversions via User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) — in the form of customer reviews, on-site Q&A and shopper-submitted photos — is a powerful way to connect with consumers and get them to advocate for your brand by channeling the authentic, trustworthy voice of your customers.

The power of social proof is massive, and according to Yotpo, customers “are 161% more likely to make a purchase, on average, if they see on-site UGC, including reviews, photos, and Q&A, versus if they don’t.”

And on-site customer content greatly influences conversion rates. For example, once Shopify Plus and Yotpo customer UNTUCKit increased its order-to-review response rate by 53% and got upwards of 10,000 reviews in a year, the company showcased its reviews alongside customer photos curated from its Instagram.

As a result of this strategy, shoppers that engaged with UNTUCKit’s on-site customer photos had a 20% higher conversion rate than those that didn’t.

So, how do you influence your customers to generate both quality and a high volume of UGC to convince others to buy with your brand?

In this chapter, you’ll learn:

  • Why user-generated content is a “Power Up” must-have for modern brands
  • How to get more valuable content from your customers
  • Ways to leverage UGC across the omnichannel buyer journey
  • What results you can expect from using UGC in your “Power Up” toolkit

Begin generating better UGC now

4. Boost Brand Advocacy with Reward Programs

Building a meaningful and emotional relationship with your customers online is a tough challenge. The good news is that a rewards program is a powerful way to foster that loyalty between your brand and your best ecommerce customers.

Using tools like Smile.io to deliver rewards programs like points, VIP tiers, and customer referrals, you can create an engaging and dynamic brand experience.

Better yet, the ability to delight customers with rewards in exchange for making purchases or signing up for exclusive opportunities will motivate customers to join your program by inspiring feelings of joy, belonging, and trust.

They’ll also be inspired to continue to engage with your brand and share it with others — forming the backbone of a thriving community that fosters brand advocacy and connects with new customers.

Brand loyalty rewards best tech stack Power Up Plus chapter

This Power-Up chapter will explore the strategies and tools you should use to build and expand your advocate community, including:

  • How rewards help you build more brand advocates
  • The three steps for building a community
  • The five strategies you can start today to jumpstart your brand’s sustainable growth

Gain tips to foster and reward brand advocates

5. Optimize Your On-Site Search Experience with Smart Search

Since users who complete a search within an ecommerce site search bar are almost two times more likely to convert than customers who don’t, it’s crucial to have an optimal on-site search experience to help visitors quickly find what they’re seeking.

Last year, Klevu’s team analyzed $1.4 billion of total online trade from 869 online stores over a seven month period. The study revealed that over $360 million (27% of the total recorded business) was directly attributable to site search.

Third-party solutions like Klevu can help to turbocharge your native Shopify search functionality — using machine learning and AI to deliver faster and more accurate results.

Optimized search results via machine learning, based on attributes like products clicked, search queries used, and adds-to-basket, help to automate the sorting and merchandising of products. It not only reduces the overhead costs of manually choosing where to display the most relevant products, but also saves you time and money.

Retailers are unlikely to merchandise the ordering of the search result above manually, so a machine learning input helps to ensure that the best-performing products are prioritized

Want to learn more smart search tools and tricks to boost conversions and your customers’ experience? This chapter covers how to:

  • Automate search result optimization via machine learning
  • Speed up the purchase process and reduce errors using auto-suggest overlays
  • Index non-product content and more

Discover smart site search improvement strategies

6. Enhance Your ERP Integration with Full-Scale Automation

If you’re regularly processing 200 to 500 orders per day, it may be time to start shopping for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to integrate with your ecommerce store.

That’s because the cost to fulfill an order is a whopping “70% of the average order value,” according to a study by Radial.

Integrating an ERP system is one of the simplest ways to differentiate your business from the competition, streamline your operations, and transform your customers’ end-to-end shopping experience.

In fact, a recent study by Panorama Consulting Solutions found that 93% of the businesses they surveyed improved some or all of their business processes with an ERP system in place.

To take the opportunity even further, retailers who automate their back-office systems by integrating a solution like Brightpearl with their ERP reduce the risk of making mistakes and spend less time on admin overheads. This way, they can focus more on selling, which switches your cost model from the back office to your front office.

ERP Automation Benefits Best Ecommerce Tech Stack

Image via Brightpearl

In this final chapter, you’ll learn how to improve your business processes and turbocharge your ERP with automation by understanding:

  • When it’s time to consider an ERP system
  • How to choose the perfect ERP for your ecommerce business
  • How to take your ERP integration from good to great with full-scale automation

Learn cost-cutting and sales-boosting ERP & automation strategies

Building the Best & Future-Proof Ecommerce Tech Stack

Mike Fiebach, founder and CEO of Fame House — a digital agency that builds ecommerce stores for some of the world’s most famous recording artists — believes his clients’ tech stacks must remain technology agnostic to future-proof their businesses.

The agency selects the best technology on the market to solve every ecommerce challenge.

According to Fiebach …

The beauty of Shopify is that we can plug-and-play apps that help solve an individual artists’ problems. We then customize our own tech stack on top of Shopify to meet the needs of our clients.

To discover how to build the best ecommerce tech stack for your ecommerce business, access the Power Up Plus series chapters now.

This article was originally published by our friends at Shopify Plus.

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