9 eCommerce Marketing Tools to Reconnect with Customers

eCommerce Marketing Tools

In eCommerce, there are few things that have as much of an impact on your revenue as your ability to keep customers active with your brand. Savvy marketers are deploying top eCommerce marketing tools to help keep their customers engaged.

It’s easier and more cost-effective to grow the lifetime value of an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. 

But growing the LTV of your customers doesn’t just happen on its own. It takes a concerted effort and well-defined strategy across your marketing and sales channels.

A big part of growing the lifetime value of your eCommerce customers comes from increasing the average order value at the point of sale. This is done, most often, through upselling, cross-selling, and bundling.

However, another large component of increasing customer lifetime value for eCommerce companies comes from your ability to stay top-of-mind with those customers.

Customer Loyalty can be fleeting. A customer can have an excellent experience with your company and love the products that they have bought from you, but if you aren’t making a concerted effort to stay in touch and get your products in front of them, you can be certain that you will lose them over time.

And staying in touch with those customers requires an omni-channel approach. You’ll want to deliver high-quality newsletters with interesting information or intuitive product recommendations.

You want to give your customers a reason to follow your company on social media channels. And being interesting can be difficult in some industries.

That’s just the bare minimum. Companies should also look to other channels such as text messaging, direct mail marketing, remarketing, and content sponsorships to stay top-of-mind, among other channels.

There are many different ways to keep your brand in front of and reconnect with past customers. All of these channels must work together to create continuous touchpoints that keep your eCommerce company top of mind.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some popular eCommerce marketing tools and channels that marketers can use to stay in touch with customers, stay top-of-mind, and increase the lifetime value and average order value of their customers.

Postalytics – Direct Mail Automation

  • Price: Free, Fees for Sending Campaigns 
  • Rating: 4.4 / 5 on the Capterra
  • Platforms: CRM platform Integrations
  • Link: Postalytics Homepage

What Does Postalytics Do?

Postalytics is a direct mail automation platform that connects to your digital campaigns through integrations with popular CRM, Marketing Automation and eCommerce tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Shopify.

While it might seem counter-intuitive, direct mail for eCommerce is booming. Why? Because it helps brands cut through the digital and email noise.

Postalytics makes creating, sending, and tracking the results of direct mail campaigns fast and simple. On their dashboard, you can see the delivery rates, response rates, and engagement stats of individual campaigns. 

Postalytics home dashboard

Postalytics direct mail campaigns can connect directly to your digital campaigns. For instance, in HubSpot, you could add direct mail campaigns to existing workflows, injecting a new channel into an already-proven cadence. 

For eCommerce companies, the possibilities are endless. You could add a direct mail step to your abandoned cart sequence. You could deliver coupons and discount codes to customers. You can announce new products. You could send them reminders through the mail and bring customers back into the fold through advertising your loyalty program. 

They also offer a built-in drag-and-drop design system, along with pre-built professional direct mail templates, complete with personalization options. You just enter the copy that you would like to use into a re-usable template, import your mailing list into the software, and send it to your prospects. 

Then, using personalized URLs (like mydomain.com/john) and personalized QR Codes, you can see who has opened and engaged with your mailers. Those actions can then trigger additional actions in your integrated marketing automation software. 

Postalytics is an amazing solution for staying in touch with customers over the long-term, and connecting with them on a channel that other eCommerce companies are underutilizing. 

Klaviyo – eCommerce Email Marketing

  • Price: Free below 250 contacts 
  • Rating: 4.3 / 5 on the Shopify App Store, 1000+ reviews
  • Platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and more
  • Link: Klaviyo Homepage

What Does Klaviyo Do?

Klaviyo is a leading email eCommerce marketing tool. Using Klaviyo, you can connect directly to popular eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and more.

Then, Klaviyo will use your data to segment your audience and send them personalized messages. Klaviyo is email marketing automation on steroids.

The platform is able to automatically recommend products based on customer preferences and previous purchase history. Additionally, Klaviyo is able to create custom Facebook audiences to improve your advertising campaigns.

The money is truly in personalized marketing messaging, and that is exactly where Klaviyo shines. They offer deep segmentation features that allow you to speak directly to specific subsets of your audience and use previous purchase history to inform product advertising through email.

In their dashboard, you can easily track the amount of revenue that you have been able to generate from email marketing alone. They even break it down on a sequence by sequence basis.

eCommerce marketing tool Klaviyo dashboard

There are few channels that are more effective for driving new revenue and keeping customers coming back to your store than email. Klaviyo is the deepest and most effective email marketing automation platform for Shopify stores and stores on other platforms.

Klaviyo helps you market your products by using sales data from your store to do personalized Facebook, Instagram, and email marketing.

Kit – Social Media Management

What Does Kit Do?

Kit is a software solution that helps eCommerce companies to better manage and automate their Instagram and Facebook ads and social posts.

Kit is an eCommerce marketing tool that is like a Swiss Army knife for social media.

But it is more than that too. Kit is also an AI assistant. As you use the software, it learns about your brand. It helps you to identify opportunities and areas for improvement and interfaces with you directly through Facebook Messenger.

There, it will make straightforward, data-based recommendations to improve your social media marketing campaigns.

Screenshot showing a facebook messenger conversation

Using Kit, you can set up Facebook Dynamic ads and retarget your existing customers easily. Further than that, Kit allows you to utilize advanced segmentation and user Behavior data to retarget Shoppers that are most likely to buy from you again.

It can also help you with building lookalike audiences to lower your customer acquisition costs.

Additionally, Kit includes features such as posting Facebook updates to drive customer engagement, sending personalized thank-you emails to generate repeat purchases from your customers, and creating and promoting discount codes to bring customers back into the fold.

When it comes to reconnecting with previous customers, Kit makes it easy to engage with them through multiple channels. The focus on retargeting ads and lookalike audiences makes it an ideal solution for bringing customers back to your eCommerce shop.

PushOwl – Push Notifications

What Does PushOwl Do?

PushOwl is beautiful in its simplicity and power.

The platform allows you to send push notifications to customers, driving sales and revenue to your eCommerce business.

PushOwl Allows you to send push notifications for a wide variety of customer triggers. Some of these include:

  • Abandoned cart reminders
  • Back in stock notifications
  • Promotion announcements
  • Price drop notifications
  • Shipping updates
eCommerce marketing tool -  push notifications on desktop and mobile

And all of this is available with advanced segmentation, allowing you to send highly personalized push notifications to your customers.

This is an eCommerce marketing tool that allows you to send notifications to both desktop users and Android users. Currently, push notifications are not available for iOS users on PushOwl.

PushOwl also allows you to A/B test all of the different notifications that you send to your customers. Over time, you’ll be able to gradually increase the effectiveness of your notifications, pushing lifetime value even higher.

It’s easy to see how a solution like this could help eCommerce companies to stay top-of-mind with their customers, and find new and innovative ways to reach back out to them when it makes sense. 

Additionally, PushOwl being rated 5 out of 5 on the Shopify app store should inspire a lot of trust. It is by far the most highly rated push notification app on Shopify, Across nearly 1,500 reviews. 

ReferralCandy – Shareable Referral Codes

  • Price: $49/month plus monthly commission, 30-day trial available
  • Rating: 5 / 5 on the Shopify App Store, 295 reviews
  • Platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and more
  • Link: ReferralCandy Website

What Does ReferralCandy Do?

ReferralCandy is an eCommerce word of mouth marketing tool that allows you an additional touchpoint for keeping in touch with your customers.

It is available on all of the popular eCommerce platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and others. 

ReferralCandy’s research has shown that only 29% of customers tell their friends about eCommerce stores that they have purchased from when more than 83% are actually willing to do so. ReferralCandy helps you to leverage this fact, increase loyalty with your customers well bringing new customers into the fold.

Using ReferralCandy, when a customer buys something from your store, they are given a referral code that they can then share with friends. If someone that they share the referral code with goes on to make a purchase, the friend receives a discount on the purchase and the referer wins rewards at your store. It’s a win-win.

You get to choose what kind of rewards are given to the referrers. It could be a coupon, discount, or cash reward.

While this may seem like ReferralCandy is primarily a word of mouth marketing tool, it is also a valuable tool for keeping existing customers coming back to your store. If they love your products and want to share them with friends, they’ll make a concerted effort to share their referral code to reap rewards with you. 

LoyaltyLion – Customer Rewards

  • Price: Free with limited features, plans start at $159/mo
  • Rating: 4.6 / 5 on the Shopify App Store, 300+ reviews
  • Platforms: Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento
  • Link: LoyaltyLion Homepage

What Does LoyaltyLion Do?

LoyaltyLion is a loyalty program software that works with Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Magento.

Using LoyaltyLion, you’ll be able to reward customers for almost any action that they take in your eCommerce store or with your brand. These include but are not limited to things like Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Instagram follows, customer birthdays, subscribing to your newsletter, purchasing a product, or referring a friend — all of these actions can fuel rewards in the LoyaltyLion loyalty programs.

Not only does this allow you to incentivize specific actions that are valuable to your business, but it gives your existing customers additional reasons to continue to interface with your brand.

By incentivizing liking or following your social media profiles or subscribing to your newsletter, you give yourself an additional channel to continue to engage with those customers.

Then, you can continue to reward customers in a wide variety of ways including but not limited to:

  • Money off an order (like a gift card)
  • Percentage discounts
  • Free products
  • Free shipping
  • Discounts off certain product categories

You can award points to your customers, who can then cash in those points for the rewards that you choose to offer.

Screenshot showing a cart page on mobile

LoyaltyLion is an eCommerce marketing tool that allows you to reward customers for taking certain actions.

TAWK.TO – Live Chat

  • Price: Free, $1/hour live chat agents 
  • Rating: 4.5 / 5 on the Shopify App Store, 200+ reviews
  • Platforms: Shopify, any website
  • Link: Tawk.to on the Shopify App Store

What Does Tawk.To Do?

Tawk.to is a live chat software solution for Shopify stores. Using it, you can chat directly with your customers on your Shopify store and answer questions, provide customer service, or direct them to products.

Tawk.to allows you to get your live chat installed and running on your store within minutes, completely free of charge.

eCommerce marketing tool - online chat

Live chat has been shown to be an excellent way to stay in contact with customers, and give them an additional channel to speak with your representative through.

Here, visitors can ask questions about products and receive answers in minutes flat without having to worry about a ticketing system.

If you do not have the manpower to manage a live chat on your website, Tawk.to makes life chat agents available at the reasonable price of $1 per hour. For $24 a day, you could potentially have someone man in your live chat and direct customers to the right products 24/7.

Additionally, Tawk.to allows you to see an accounting of the live viewers on your website at any given time. On your Tawk.to dashboard, you can see the percentage of those visitors that are returned visitors, and the percentage that our new visitors.

Screenshot showing a dashboard for tawk.to

A live chat solution is an excellent way to provide returning customers with an additional way to interact with your brand. Customers are more likely to interface with a live chat agent than they are to take the time to email your company.

SMSBump – Text Message Marketing

  • Price: $0-$42/month + SMS fees ($0.0149/SMS for US/Canada)
  • Rating: 4.8 / 5 on the Shopify App Store, 1,400+ reviews
  • Platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, OpenCart
  • Link: SMSBump Website

What Does SMSBump Do?

As the name suggests, SMSBump is an eCommerce marketing tool that allows you to send marketing messages directly to your customers’ phones via text messages.

With phones being such a huge part of daily life, text messages can play a vital role in an eCommerce company’s ability to stay in touch with their customers.

Additionally, SMSBump makes it incredibly easy to reach out to your customers for a wide range of different reasons.

You could send text messages after a purchase. You can send text messages for abandoned carts. You could send discount codes, promotions, or really any kind of marketing message that you like through the SMSBump platform. 

With advanced segmentation, you can effectively personalize these text messages to speak directly to the recipients. With their neat dashboard, you can track your revenue from the text messages that you’ve sent to see a straightforward ROI from SMSBump. 

If you are not already using SMS messaging to stay in contact with existing customers and to bring unengaged customers back into the fold, you are leaving money on the table.

Push Amplification™

What does Push Amplification™ do?

Push Amplification™ is a technology pioneered by MoEngage. It helps to boost your push notification delivery rates across Android devices. It’s not restricted by the limitations that Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) faces. 

In Asia, 40% to 70% of your mobile push notifications fail to deliver due to various reasons. To boost in-app customer engagement metrics and LTV, this technology maximizes push notification deliverability.

The Push Amplification™ technology identifies undelivered notifications and acts as a fallback mechanism when Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) fails to deliver your push notifications to customers’ devices. It then directly attempts to directly deliver the undelivered notifications to customers’ mobile devices. 

Push Amplification™ Plus, the next version of the Push Amplification™ technology, has a higher push notification delivery rate. The reason is that it has exclusive access to the OEM’s own push service system channel which cannot be killed and doesn’t have deliverability limitations as FCM does. 

With improved push notification delivery rates, you can immediately witness an uplift in push notification delivery rates, user retention, conversion rates, click rates, and lower cart abandonments.

eCommerce Marketing Tools Increase Customer Lifetime Value

These eCommerce marketing tools put companies in position to continually connect with their customers through a wide variety of channels. 

This improves the lifetime value of their customers, allowing them to rely less on acquiring new ones. 

Disengaged customers may have to be brought back into the fold through a multi-channel approach — and these eCommerce marketing tools are custom-built for the job. 

About the Author

Dennis Kelly
Dennis Kelly

Dennis Kelly is CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, the leading direct mail automation platform for marketers to build, deploy and manage direct mail marketing campaigns. Postalytics is Dennis’ 6th startup. He has been involved in starting and growing early-stage technology ventures for over 30 years and has held senior management roles at a diverse set of large technology firms including Computer Associates, Palm Inc. and Achieve Healthcare Information Systems.