Shopify, the Canadian ecommerce platform, has released a series of new Merchant Marketing features to provide its clients with metrics and insights into their marketing efforts.
The service is designed to track a vendor’s most popular campaigns, orders made through various apps, and integrates some of the more popular add-on services users have access to.
According to the company’s internal research, Shopify merchants who manually track the success of their marketing campaigns see more than three times the sales than those who do not. But according to Daniel Patricio, Shopify’s product manager, that’s been a burdensome process.
“If you have the time, the effort, the know-how, you can certainly go and instrument every little piece of marketing in your store manually,” said Patricio. “What we actually see happening is that most people don’t get around to it or don’t know about it.”
Marketing apps are currently the most popular add-ons to Shopify’s platform, and the new Merchant Marketing features integrate with five of the category’s most popular downloads — MailChimp, Swell, Shoelace, Receiptful and Referral Candy.
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Shopify’s goal, said Patricio, is to provide merchants with marketing information for all channels and campaigns on a single platform. Patricio himself runs a Shopify storefront selling African beef jerky, and often uses loyalty programs, email campaigns, social media marketing and other methods for reaching customers. But he said he’s struggled to identify which were most effective and worth investing in.
“If an app’s doing a great job, I want to know why it’s working,” he said. “Now with the API, I can just open up my store in the morning and see ‘your referral program has brought you this much today, your email that went out on Tuesday is doing great, your retargeting adds have brought you four sales today,’ and it just gives you this very simple digest that tells you the health of your store.”
Patricio said Shopify’s merchants, which are primarily run by small business owners, often have little marketing experience, but those who are willing to dedicate the time and effort see dramatically better results.
“The difference between the successful merchants and the ones that don’t become successful is the successful merchants try new things, and when they try new things they can very quickly tell whether its a winner for them,” he said. “I want to see merchants try new things and be able to tell for themselves what really works so they can double down on what is working, stop what isn’t working and quickly jump onto the next thing. “
The new Merchant Marketing features will be available to all merchants at no additional cost. Shopify plans to continue rolling out new features and integrations in the coming months, further expanding its merchants’ marketing insights and capabilities.
