12 Ecommerce Marketing Tools to Boost Revenue in 2021

From abandoned cart optimization to multi-channel automation, the best ecommerce marketing tools can make or break your online store.

Online spending has skyrocketed over the last 5 years. For example, in 2019, ecommerce sales accounted for 14.1% of all retail sales worldwide (Statista).

And given recent global events are monitored through website updates that will further transform the way consumers buy their products, choosing the right e-commerce tools for your business is paramount to your success.

In this article you’ll learn which ecommerce tools we know will help you save time and money across 12 different categories:

1. Generate More Referrals
2. Remarketing Facebook Ads
3. Email Automation
4. Build Mobile App
5. SMS Marketing
6. Loyalty Programs
7. Make a Press Kit
8. Promotional Sales
9. Influencer Marketing
10. Website Optimization
11. Brand Advocacy
12. Product Reviews

#1. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Generating More Referrals

Word of mouth is the most powerful influence your online store can have going for it. 

In fact, a study by Nielsen reported that 92% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family more than advertising. Which is why ReferralCandy made our list of ecommerce marketing tools

ReferralCandy is a referral generating platform that gets your customers to tell their connections about your product and service. And it does so by incentivizing customers to make product suggestions on your company’s behalf.

Here’s how ReferralCandy works. When a customer buys something from your ecommerce store, they automatically get a referral code that they can easily share with their friends and family. And when a friend of theirs makes a purchase with that referral code, two things happen:

1. The friend gets a discount on their purchase, and 
2. The referrer earns rewards from your online store.

You can choose to reward the customers that refer your business with either coupons or cash.

ReferralCandy is best for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the budget for designers and programmers to create custom web pages or custom referral programs.

#2. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Remarketing Facebook Ads

Facebook Messenger ads are rapidly gaining in popularity because they are different from your normal, overly saturated Facebook Ads. 

In fact, Messenger ads outperform other ads by 2X-10X. 

And the reason Messenger ads perform so well is due to the fact that they use conversational agents, or chatbots, to increase engagement rates.

Customers.ai is a multi-channel chatbot platform that has dozens of Facebook advertising tools to advance your ad performance. 

There are a couple of types of Facebook Messenger ads that you can add to your ecommerce marketing tools box. 

One directs traffic to Messenger from any ad viewed on any Facebook property. And the other utilizes sponsored content that’s native to Facebook Messenger.

What’s great for ecommerce marketers is that the majority of your competition doesn’t know about them. Furthermore, the ones that do often don’t know that a Facebook Messenger ad experience can start on many of the platforms across the Facebook family of apps, including:

• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram feed
• Facebook and Instagram Story feeds
• Facebook Marketplace
• Audience Network
• Facebook News Feed

Lastly, Facebook Messenger ads differ from your average Facebook ad because they always lead to a conversational experience between your business and the prospect.

#3. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Email Automation

Spently allows merchants to customize Shopify email notifications, automate post-purchase follow-up sequences, recover abandoned carts, and embed remarketing tools such as product recommendations, and discount codes to drive repeat purchases.

Using Spently, you can trigger event-based up-sells, discounts, and referral tools that are tailored to specific interactions that customers had with your brand via emails. 

These emails have high open rates as well because they’re Shopify notification emails. 

Spently users often use the platform to automatically follow-up with customers after purchases, shipments, and abandoned carts within a specified time-frame. 

Once your follow-up automation emails are ready to go, you’ll begin saving your business a lot of time while also increasing revenue.

#4. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Building a Mobile App

Not many digital marketers can say that they’ve built a mobile app. But that’s probably because they didn’t know how easy building a mobile app for your ecommerce store can be.

Tapcart simplifies the mobile app building process for you and enables non-tech savvy marketers to create their own branded iOS and Android apps for your online store.

Absolutely no development is required with Tapcart’s easy to use drag and drop builder.

Building branded mobile apps are a proven ROI and CLTV driver that delivers the following: 

• A more seamless user experience
• Quicker loading times 
• Optimized pages for conversions on mobile devices

Tapcart is great for brands with moderate or high mobile traffic, and companies focused on customer loyalty and retention.

#5. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is a no-brainer ecommerce marketing tool. Text message marketing is instant, convenient, and universal. And even more important, it produces results that can’t be ignored in 2020.

For example, take a look at these SMS marketing statistics for marketing and sales teams:

Using Customers.ai SMS marketing tools for ecommerce, you can set yourself apart from the competition by significantly increasing open rates, response rates, and conversion rates.

Text message marketing enables companies to send their audiences bulk SMS messages, as well as personalized text messages at scale.

Additionally, you can use Customers.ai opt-in tools such as the website chat SMS opt-in widget, web page pop-up forms for desktop and mobile, and SMS keyword opt-in tools.

Here are just a few of the different SMS marketing campaigns you can run with Customers.ai:

• Bulk text messaging
• SMS drip campaign automation
• Automated responses and proactive messaging

If you’re still skeptical of SMS marketing, check out these 60 SMS marketing statistics that every ecommerce marketing professional should know about.

#6. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Loyalty Programs

On average, loyal consumers are worth up to as much as 10X their initial purchase of your products and services.

LoyaltyLion is a loyalty program software that’s built specifically for ecommerce stores. It allows you to reward customers for taking certain actions that help generate more brand for your online store.

You can reward customers with LoyaltyLion for taking a number of different actions, such as:

• Likes and up-votes on social media 
• Following your brand on Twitter and Instagram 
• Discounts for your customers’ on birthdays 
• Signing up for a newsletter

And this is what makes Loyalty Lion one of the best ecommerce marketing tools. By offering rewards for so many different types of actions, you can choose to incentivize customers to take the actions that you most want them to take.

As for the rewards, here are just a few of the reward types that Loyalty Lion offers:

• Discounts and gift cards
• Free prizes and shipping
• Coupons for specified product categories

#7. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Making a Press Kit

Press kits are a highly underrated tool for ecommerce companies to take advantage of. If you really want your product to catch fire, the media needs to know who you are and what you do. 

So, consider adding a press kit to your “About Us” page or your website footer by using PressKitHero.

PressKitHero makes it easy to design a professional press kit for your ecommerce store.

Think about it, other than mentioning your accomplishments on certain pages of your website and on social media, what are you doing to promote your company’s accomplishments?

PressKitHero enables you to showcase all of your accomplishments, awards, testimonials, and press releases in one place. Additionally, their easy to use dashboard makes it easy to organize and display professionally while saving you lots of time.

So, make it easy for people to learn and share how awesome your products and services are.

#8. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Sales Promotion

Ever heard of a promotion blaster? 

Customers.ai’s web chat, SMS, and Facebook Sponsored Messages allow you to send mass messages across multiple marketing channels to all of your contacts.

The concept is similar to that of email blasts, but with chatbots, you get higher engagement, open rates, and conversions.

Furthermore, because users can respond and interact with chatbots, Customers.ai allows for two-way conversations, which is yet another benefit that chatbots have over email.

You can use promo blasts to make announcements, share offers, and let shoppers know about new promotions and products. This makes for a much more interactive experience than any email blast.

Customers.ai uses its own OmniChatⓇ technology and chatbot marketing automation to instantly connect customers and prospects to brands through native web chat, SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging apps, all from one platform.

#9. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, in general, is best for products and brands that have a strong opportunity to go viral. 

And if you see customers sharing your products online for free, then Carro will help to throw fuel on that fire.

Carro has taken a cool approach to influencer marketing that they call “authentic influencer marketing on autopilot.”

Carro enables you to discover how many people that can be considered an influencer have interacted with your brand in multiple ways. It does so by alerting you to potential influencers that have purchased your product, subscribed to one or more of your lists, or have followed you on social media.

Once you’ve identified your most influential customers, Carro makes it easy to reach out to them and ask for reviews, offer them free products, and build a mutually beneficial relationship.

The best part about Carro is that you already know that these influencers are fans of your brand, so it makes it simple and non-intrusive to reach out to them.

Carro is great for companies with large product portfolios and a strong online presence.

#10. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Website Optimization

CrazyEgg has been around since 2005 and has not lost its popularity among the many ecommerce marketing tools available. 

Use CrazyEgg to see what’s working, what’s not working, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, A/B testing, and more.

CrazyEgg heatmaps, scroll-maps, and other visual reports will show you how your customers are responding to elements on your site.

With heat-mapping tools, you can:

• Add an extra layer of insights to your Google Analytics data
• Drill down to how your email and ad campaign visitors are behaving on-site
• Make sure your CTAs are being seen
• Place content in the order of importance to your customers
• Track what’s going on behind pop up forms or login screens
• Set a website or page redesign project up for success.

Additionally, Crazy Egg records the entire user session. This enables you to understand general patterns of how people browse your site, or to investigate a particular point in the customer journey where people are dropping off.

With Recordings, you have the ability to:

• Identify areas of customer frustration, like form glitches or confusing navigation
• See in real-time how people are interacting with your product or checkout pages
• Dive into particular audience segments like New, Mobile, or Most Active visitor
• Filter by source (e.g. Google)

#11. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Brand Advocacy

Brand advocacy is a behavior you need to earn.

Smile.io is an ecommerce marketing tool that helps to build a community around your brand. You can use it to encourage customers to join, engage, and share your brand messaging. 

Use Smile.io for rewarding your customers with points as a way to establish and maintain lasting, emotional relationships with every member of your community.

Your customers become increasingly valuable as they shop and engage with your brand. Smile.io’s VIP program allows you to strengthen connections with your top customers through increasing rewards, statuses, and perks.

Lastly, Smile.io also has referral tools you can use to mobilize your best customers to refer like-minded people to your brand, effectively growing your community without any additional costs.

#12. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Product Reviews

Did you know you could use chatbots to get more 5-star reviews? 

Well, you can, and it’s important for ecommerce brands to do so. In fact, 90% of customers say they read reviews before visiting a business. And 72% of customers say positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

Using Customers.ai, you can put chatbots to work inviting customers to give feedback. Then, extend a special invitation to leave a review whenever someone tells you they’ve had a 5-star experience.

Here’s an example of how to get more product reviews that you can try out for yourself here.

Check out this step-by-step guide to getting more reviews of your products online. 

You should be able to make your review generating chatbot in roughly 30min using Customers.ai’s easy to use chatbot builder.

Important next steps

• Looking for more digital marketing tools? Check out our list of the best free marketing software, and the best digital marketing tools for marketing agencies.
• Get started with SMS marketing campaigns by building a free Customers.ai OmniChat™ chatbot. Get Customers.ai for free today.
• Talk and learn about chatbots with other enthusiasts. Join Customers.ai Island, a Facebook group of over 35k marketers and entrepreneurs that are ready to support you.
• Advance your marketing performance with Chatbot University, a free chatbot tutorial and training area for chat marketers.

See all the tools in Customers.ai’s multi-channel chatbot platform by getting started with Customers.ai for free.