Magento is a popular CMS platform with a reputation for powering highly successful eCommerce websites. One of its biggest advantages is the quality of the extensions that are available to extend the functionality of your online stores. In this post, we’ll take a look at eight different extensions which, together, form a suite of exceptional tools that can help your Magento site be even more successful. From customer loyalty to one-page checkouts, to customer reviews, this collection has everything you need.
- dotmailer
The dotmailer Magento extension is a versatile and comprehensive email and multi-channel marketing platform that enables you to reach your customers through some of today’s most popular communication channels: email, SMS and push notifications.
One of its most useful attributes is its ability to synchronise a wide range of valuable visitor and customer data. This includes, browsing history, shopping cart contents, order data and wish list information. This important data enables you to create marketing campaigns that present individual customers with highly personalised information and offers that are relevant to them. dotmailer also lets you send transactional communications too, such as welcome, post-purchase and loyalty emails. - Yotpo.
Over 70% of shoppers will read a review before making a purchase and 60% of them prefer to buy from sites which have customer reviews. This makes customer-generated reviews highly valuable assets. The more reviews you have, the more other customers trust their accuracy. At the same time, reviews give you unparalleled insight into the products and services you offer, enabling you to improve your service and curate your stock in ways which make it more appealing.
Using the Yotpo Magento Extension is a great way to help you encourage your customers to leave product reviews for other shoppers and, as a result, boost the number of products you sell.
Not only does Yotpo increase the number of reviews, it also presents them in a visually attractive way, both on your website and on social media. - Smile.io Loyalty Programs
Everyone knows that a truly successful online store is one which has customers coming back time and time again. One way to encourage repeat business is to create a rewards program for your customers.
Smile.io is designed to make this possible. Depending on your needs, Smile.io can create simple and quickly put together loyalty programs or, if you require it, you can develop more complex ones. Either way, your loyalty program will assist in retaining existing customers, encouraging higher spending and acquiring new customers.
To help, the Smile.io blog has lots of great ideas for eCommerce retailers about setting up loyalty programs and running successful loyalty campaigns. Check it out! - One Page Checkout
It’s a well-known fact that the more complicated you make the checkout process, the more customers you lose along the way. That’s why Amazon patented its one-click purchasing solution way back in 1997.
The One Page Checkout extension is the ideal way to prevent customer drop-off before they click the ‘pay now’ button. It works by converting your multi-step checkout process into a single page, making the process easier and more streamlined for customers.
You’ll also benefit from the extension’s fully responsive layout, which make buying much easier for the ever-increasing number of customers who shop on their smartphones. It also works with a variety of payment gateways, including PayPal, Sage Pay and Brain Tree. - WordPress Integration by FishPig
Many eCommerce sites generate sales through content marketing and the FishPig WordPress Integration extension is a great way to integrate your existing WordPress blog with your Magento store.
What’s more, the extension works with all versions of Magento and there’s no need to modify any coding on either Magento or WordPress. From an SEO point of view, you also get to keep the original blog post URLs, which means your posts won’t lose page rank and there’ll be no need to redirect from one site to another. - Zendesk Chat
Online chat is an exceptionally useful tool for eCommerce sites. It enables you to answer customer’s questions about products whilst they are still on your site, in real-time. This makes it a far more agile communication channel than email or telephone.
Using online chat is a great way to deliver customer service. It can ensure the customer gets the right product for their needs and budget and can prevent them leaving your site if the questions they need answers to are not immediately available.
The Zendesk Live Chat extension provides a responsive chat widget that can be configured to respond to visitor behavior. This means that besides the visitor contacting you, you can message them at key times during their visit. It also provides analytics that track how visitors use your site. - Pixlee
The Pixlee Magento extension lets you add user-generated content, such as customer photos and videos, directly onto product and category pages. This can seriously enhance any reviews your products have by adding video reviews and images of how other customers have used them.
Pixlee also lets you track campaign performance so you can gain important information about how customers interact with the images and videos you add. - Bronto
Created by the software giant, Oracle, Bronto is another exceptional email marketing extension. As email marketing is one of the highest converting eCommerce techniques and has the best ROI, using this application can have a big impact on your sales.
One of the strengths of Bronto is its ability to help you implement powerful email marketing strategies that are focussed on developing sales funnels. Using these you can create targeted lifecycle marketing campaigns that convert buyers into repeat customers whilst increasing the revenue from each sale.
Like dotmailer, the Bronto extension uses data, such as order history and product details, to create targeted customer segments, enabling you to send out personalised product recommendations, cart abandonment and re-order reminders, as well as automated transactional emails.
Conclusion
As you can see, this suite of Magento extensions provides a comprehensive and powerful set of tools which, together, can boost the sales of your website significantly. However, as each is available separately, you can always pick and choose the ones which are most relevant to your marketing needs.
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