These are the best Shopify apps to grow your ecommerce store revenues in 2023.
We focused on apps that would help you grow your brand, your business, or your revenues. There are many lists of ‘Best Shopify apps’ out there, but we didn’t want to focus on apps dealing with dropshipping, inventory, or fulfillment.
Instead, we identified 40 Shopify apps that fell into one of two categories:
Best-performing apps and market leaders: The top leaders in the field, identified by average rating, the total number of reviews, and positive recent reviews.
Interesting new apps: We scouted fast-growing DTC brands like Obvi, Muddy Bites, and FIGS to identify some of the interesting apps they used.
CedCommerce’s Suite for Google Shopping Fed surfaces your products on various Google properties, like Buy On Google, Shopping Ads, Local Inventory Ads, and more.
Free trial: Free plan available, 7-day free trial.
AdRoll powers advertising and remarketing campaigns for thousands of merchants, and boasts the ability to run a campaign that integrates email and ads.
AdRoll boasts AI-optimized ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and over 500 networks.
Free trial: 30-day free trial, Free plan available
Price: From $25/month, plus advertising costs
Best used for:
Advertising and remarketing across major ad platforms
Automizely Traffic lets you target and retarget customers with the right ads at the right time.
The ads exchange allows you to display your products in other stores, in exchange for promoting partner ads on your website - a win-win for both your stores.
Free trial: Free!
Price: Free!
Best used for:
Driving new traffic and sales by appearing in other partner stores
Outfy makes it easy to create product collages, videos, gifs, and ads, and publish them to top social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and more.
The autopilot feature allows you to curate and publish posts automatically to promote and sell more.
Free trial: 7-day free trial.
Price: From $15/month
Best used for:
Creating and publishing posts to social media platforms
ReferralCandy helps you grow your sales through word-of-mouth marketing, by rewarding customers for referring their friends. We also allow brands to run an affiliate program with cash payouts for successful purchases.
ReferralCandy powers referral programs for over 3,000 brands, and is one of the best Shopify and Shopify Plus referral apps out there.
Free trial: 30-day free trial
Price: $49/month plus commissions
Best used for:
Generating sales through referrals and word-of-mouth
Running an affiliate program with content providers and influencers
The Dovetale Community platform offers key features to manage an influencer marketing platform.
Dovetale’s key features include custom recruitment pages, easy gifting templates to send gifts at scales, as well as easy tracking of commissions and payouts through PayPal.
Free trial: Free plan available; 7-day free trial
Price: From $19/month
Best used for:
Managing an influencer marketing campaign without an agency
Sending gifts, affiliate links, and payments to influencers and affiliates
Smile.io is a loyalty platform best known for customer retention and VIP programs, but they also offer rewards for referral programs. Smile.io allows you to quickly set up and run your rewards program.
Boost new and repeat sales with Smile.io, the trusted loyalty provider for over 50,000 stores.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $49/month
Best used for:
Loyalty rewards, points, and VIP tiers
A modern rewards program with referrals, pop-ups, campaigns, and more
Refersion is a complete marketing platform for influence, affiliate, and brand ambassadors. You can even find new affiliates and influencers in the Refersion Marketplace for free.
Refersion offers a customizable affiliate registration page, dashboards to track performance, as well as automatic coupon code creation for rewards.
Free trial: 14-day free trial
Price: $89/month with performance-based pricing
Best used for:
Automated affiliate/influencer recruitment
An easy-to-use platform for tracking and paying brand ambassadors
Junip makes it easy to request customer reviews and display them on your product pages to help you convert customers. It also features review replies, Google Reviews snippets, and incentives for reviews.
Junip powers over 2,000 Shopify brands including top DTC brands like Doe Lashes, Huron, Baboon to the Moon, and more.
Stamped.io is a social proof marketing platform, based on generating high-impact reviews, ratings, community Q&As as well as user-generated content like customer photos and videos.
Stamped.io aims to boost your sales and traffic by generating high-quality, informative reviews and sharing them to Facebook, Google. Instagram and more.
Free trial: 7-day free trial, Free tier available
Price: From $23/month
Best used for:
Prompting customers to create reviews and user-generated content with incentives
Importing and collecting reviews from platforms like Facebook, AliExpress, and Klaviyo
Publishing reviews and social proof to social platforms
Reviewbit’s WhatsApp Customer Reviews prompts customers to create photo and product reviews through WhatsApp, which has a 100% open rate and higher response rate.
Best of all, the app integrates with Loox, Yotpo, and Judge.Me, so you can publish reviews collected through WhatsApp
Free trial: No free trial
Price: Free to install, but review requests start at $0.01 per message.
Best used for:
Generating customer reviews and photos through WhatsApp
Judge.me prompts your customers to create star ratings and reviews about your products and Shopify store, then displays it beautifully on your website with theme templates.
Judge.me offers free photo and video reviews, and allows you to publish reviews on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr to boost sales and social proof.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $15/month
Best used for:
Creating star ratings and reviews
Publishing reviews on social media and Google Search (rich snippets)
Growave is an all-in-one Shopify marketing app with powerful tools for photo reviews, wishlists, loyalty programs, gift cards, referrals, and UGC. Strengthen the customer-brand relationships, increase repeat purchases, and boost engagement using convertible loyalty points, gifts & VIP-tiers membership on your site along with many other things.
Free trial: 30-day free trial
Price: Starts from $9/month
Best used for:
Reviews: social proof/trust, UGC, boost conversions
The average attention span of a shopper is five to eight seconds. Product Badges aims to capture customer attention with badges like “20% Off” or “Best Seller!”
Mode Magic received an award for ease of use from Shopify, and also offers 3,000+ product badges and stickers ready to go.
Free trial: Free plan available; 7-day free trial
Price: From $9/month
Best used for:
Improving conversion rate on product pages
Making the store look better with discounts, alerts, and more
Zipify’s One Click Upsell app maximizes the average order value for your customers by offering one-click upsells, both when customers are viewing their cart and during post-purchase checkout.
Zipify also boasts split testing and upsells on the Thank You page, to maximize revenue.
Free trial: 30-day free trial
Price: From $24.99/month
Best used for:
Increasing average order value and basket size
Brands with complementary products that benefit from upsells
ReConvert offers you the ability to customize your order confirmation/thank you page, allowing you to create a post-purchase funnel for more upsell opportunities.
Since customers visit the order status page to review shipping updates, it’s a perfect opportunity to retarget customers for an upselling opportunity.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $7.99/month
Best used for:
Customizing the post-purchase page
Widgets including discount popups, product recommendations, and post-purchase surveys
Shop-pop helps you reach customers with opt-in alerts on WhatsApp and Messenger. Customers can opt-in to receive alerts for new products, price drops, back-in-stock, and more.
ShopPop boasts 95% open rates for their alerts and easy data sync with Klaviyo.
Klaviyo, a unified customer platform for email, SMS, and more, gives your online brand direct ownership of your consumer data and interactions—so you can talk to every customer like you know them, and grow your business on your own terms.
Klaviyo integrates with other ecommerce platforms as well as plenty of apps (including ReferralCandy),
Free trial: Free tier
Price: Emails—Starting from $20/month (based on number of contacts); Email and SMS—Starting from $35/month (based on number of contacts)
Best used for:
Email and SMS marketing campaigns
Automations and flows (eg abandon cart, personalized campaigns)
Grow sales, offer real-time support, and deliver personalized experiences via SMS. Cartloop helps Shopify brands build a compliant SMS marketing list and grow like never before. Their 24/7 Live Shopping Agents connect with your customers in real-time with an emotive approach, helping them navigate shipping questions, find the right products, and close sales with personal attention that builds confidence and trust in your brand.
Free trial: No free trial. but there is a freemium plan that starts at $0 and has 250 credits included
With a customer-first approach, Dotdigital is a platform for data-driven marketers to deliver personalized communications across different customer journeys. The platform harnesses the power of customer data, powering engagement, conversion, and loyalty for brands as they grow and scale.
Free trial: 14-day trial
Price: Emails— Based on the number of sends. SMS— Based on unique subscribers and message volume/month.
Best used for:
Email and cross-channel automation marketing campaigns
GetResponse is scalable email marketing software at its core. Plus proven online marketing tools and seamless ecommerce integrations designed for growing businesses to communicate better online, all synchronized through marketing automation.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $15/month
Best used for:
Generate email signups and promote deals using forms and popups with a variety of predesigned templates and targeting options
Build stronger brand identity with no-code transactional emails and a visual drag-and-drop editor
Drive sales with automated email campaigns for all key scenarios, including welcome, post-purchase, product recommendations, and abandoned carts
Richpanel is a customer service software that uses smart automation to reduce redundancy in your customer support functions providing a seamless experience on both the customer's and the agent’s end. Richpanel’s amazon-like interface provides a highly personalised self-service experience, allowing customers to take order actions like cancellations without contacting customer support.
The customer support team enjoys a reduced workload due to better workflow management, omnichannel access, smart automation and an intuitive user-interface.
Free trial: 14-day
Price: starts from $150/month
Best used for:
Scaling ecommerce businesses who want to keep up with the increasing ticket volume without expanding their team.
Builder.io offers a powerful drag-and-drop visual editor that allows you to manage and publish content on any site or app -- headless CMS at its finest.
Nik Sharma has spoken highly of Builder.io, which also powers Alo Yoga, Harry’s, Everlane, and more.
Free trial: 14-day free trial
Price: From $20/month, plus additional charges per user and by monthly views
This app does exactly what it says on the tin - allow you to add a Free Shipping announcement bar to your store. It also auto-detects the customer’s local currency and adjusts the free shipping amount instantly (e.g. Free shipping over $50 in the US and C$70 in Canada).
Research suggests that 88% of consumers would be more likely to shop if they were offered free shipping - so it’s a simple app to increase customers.
EComposer Page Builder is a codeless app that allows merchants to create their stunning website with any page type: Landing page, Homepage, Product, Collection, About us, etc.
EComposer is beginner-friendly, conversion-driving, and mobile-first optimized. Newbies can easily build their store with tons of pre-made layouts and sections, just drag & drop everything.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: Paid plan from $14.99/month
Best used for:
Create any page type: Landing page, Homepage, Product, Collection, About us, FAQs, Contact, etc.
Highly customizable: Build specific sections that your theme does not support.
Run a high-converting, engaging store with ModeMagic by Mason—an all-in-one, no-code, store conversion app made for Shopify stores.
With ModeMagic’s plug-n-play conversion playbooks, easily personalize your store for customers, without a coder or designer.
Use the app’s merchandising tools to promote products & keep your ecommerce shop dynamic 24/7—countdown timers, product highlight cards, sales, discounts, bestsellers & new arrival automation; make it happen with zero manual work!
Free trial: Free forever!
Price:
Growth-focused plan: $9/month for a store with 150 total store orders.
Scale-focused plan: $299/month for a store with 5000+ total store orders.
Best used for:
Increasing the store’s conversion rate by setting up no-code conversion playbooks for running sales, % Off, showcase stock updates, bestsellers & more.
Analyzing campaigns & store performance for structured, faster experimentation.
Running a 24/7 high-performance Shopify store by minimizing the many apps you may need; at half the cost. Grow your business & scale fast every season.
Gorgias offers a platform for Shopify brands to manage their customer support, all in one place. The centralized CRM offers support on every channel, from email and live chat to phone and social media.
Gorgias boasts a strong integration with Shopify, allowing your customer support team to see order details and refund, cancel or duplicate without leaving the app.
Free trial: 7-day free trial
Price: From $60 per month, plus additional charges per 100 tickets
Best used for:
Customer support across multiple channels
If you use multiple Shopify apps for billing, subscription, and loyalty rewards
If you get many support queries about billing or order
Tidio offers a live chat app bolstered by marketing automation and chatbots to address your customers’ needs and increase sales instantly.
Tidio boasts chatbots that can automatically reply to 43% of the most common queries, including questions about tracking and an Abandoned Cart Bot that offers discounts to help convert customers.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $15 per seat per month
Best used for:
Live chat support, including email and Messenger integration
Did you know that consumers check the status of their order at least four times before it’s delivered? These WISMO (Where Is My Order?) tickets are especially frustrating for customers if packages get lost or are delayed, and create a poor impression of your brand.
Wonderment turns order tracking into a growth channel with proactive shipping tracking. You can direct customers to on-brand tracking pages to deliver upsells and a better customer experience.
Free trial: Free plan available for up to 500 orders/month
Price: From $49/month for up to 4000 shipments per month
Best used for:
Brands that get a lot of Where Is My Order tickets
Marketing teams who want to improve customer experience, loyalty, and retention
Vajro enables Shopify store owners to convert their online stores into native android and iOS apps within 60 minutes, without writing a single line of code.
With more than 1300 five-star reviews on Shopify, Vajro has helped 3000+ Shopify merchants to sell more and engage better with their customers.
Free trial: 30 days
Price: Starts at $99/month
Best used for:
Driving customer engagement and selling more with live selling
Cashing in on impulse buying and improving sales conversions with push notifications for back-in-stock, price drops, and abandoned carts
Creating a brand presence that your customers will love with a highly customized and personalized mobile app that can be built with a simple drag and drop functionality
Improving in-app experience with over 60+ integrations
Shopney is known for its unique feature set and famous ease of use in the Shopify mobile app builder market.
Shopney offers 8 different theme options for your Shopify store as a unique Shopify mobile app builder feature to make sure you display your products most impressively in the product listing (PLP) and product display (PDP), and increase your sales!
Besides, to increase your customer retention and engagement, Shopney provides in-app chat with you as another unique mobile app builder feature. So, you can convert your customers with a 1-to-1 dialogue, offering customers a personalized shopping experience.
Free trial: 30 days
Price: $99/month
Best used for:
Turning your Shopify store into a mobile app in minutes with a drag & drop editor.
Increasing repeat sales, engagement and customer retention.
Marketing cost optimization: You can save up to 40% of your marketing ad spend by leveraging mobile push notifications.
Conversion rate optimization: Seamless mobile shopping experience, automated push notifications, and faster checkout boost mobile conversions by 5X.
Octane AI offers quizzes and pop-ups to create a better shopping experience for customers. From a simple email-capture pop-up to more complicated quizzes about product preferences, Octane AI helps you generate customer insights while staying GDPR compliant.
With the rise of iOS 14 and the age of data privacy, insights from Octane AI will become more valuable to create product recommendations and advanced segmentation. But don’t take our word for it - the official Shopify Hardware store uses Octane AI too!
Free trial: 14-day free trial
Price: Starting at $29 per month
Best used for:
Collecting emails and opt-in customer data
Offering a discount in exchange for answering a simple question
Personalized and bundle recommendations
44. Retention Rocket
Retention Rocket helps Shopify stores build a list of phone numbers, engage customers through 1:1 conversations, and automate SMS campaigns.
Retention Rocket prides itself on automated flows like abandoned cart and win-back series, as well as creating granular segments using Shopify data.
Free trial: Free plan available
Price: From $10/month, plus charges per SMS
Best used for:
Collecting email & phone numbers in a TCPA-Compliant way
Automating SMS marketing flows
1:1 conversations within the app to solve customer service issues or office a discount
Govalo aims to reinvent the gift card for Shopify stores, with gift card purchases, welcome gifts for new customers, and premium analytics and data.
Customers hesitate to make the first purchase because of high price points - a problem Govalo aims to eliminate with their digital gift cards. With the gift card market growing at 14% annually, this could be an interesting app.
Free trial: 7-day free trial
Price: From $0 per month (but 2.9% commission on gift card value) to $500 and 2.4%
Skio Subscriptions aims to make subscriptions easier - and capture all of Recharge’s customers. They offer merchants an easier way to modify subscriptions, a headless subscription portal, and native Shopify Checkout.
Merchants who are struggling with Bold and Recharge subscription apps can consider Skio as an alternative.
BEST Currency Converter allows you to display prices in different international currencies. The Elite plan even updates the currency automatically, based on your customer’s browsing location.
This makes the shopping experience easier for your international customers.
Free trial: Free tier available
Price: $9.95/month for >5 currencies and auto-switch by customer location
Best used for:
Businesses operating in multiple countries
Automations and flows (eg abandon cart, personalized campaigns)
Triple Whale offers a unified dashboard for all your important ecommerce metrics, pulling from your tech stack like Shopify, Klaviyo, Facebook, Gorgias, and more.
We’ve included Triple Whale here because of glowing endorsements from DTC brands like Doe Lashes, Muddy Bites, and Obvi, but we haven’t tried it out yet. It’s one to watch, and maybe sign up for, but stay tuned.
Free trial: None
Price: Starting from $100/month
Best used for:
Monitoring ecommerce metrics with a central dashboard
Relo is the easiest way for DTC brands to get customers to order again, try a subscription and stay on subscription. We predict when customers are going to buy again, sync that data to your Klaviyo & send personalized email comms to your customers.
Vidjet is a video player that turns videos into direct revenue. Using innovative video formats, segmentation options, and shoppable features, merchants can expose their visitors to videos, at the appropriate moment of their journey.
Free trial: 14-day trial, and a freemium option
Price: Starting from $29 to $299
Best used for:
Reuse social media videos on web pages
Engage visitors with appropriated content (ex: product tutorial)
Turn short videos into more sales, and more time spent on pages
Publish videos at scale, without code
Integrate more video touchpoints through the marketing-automation strategy
PeerBoard is a powerful social platform that enables community discussions and commenting directly in your Shopify store. Provide your customers a space to ask questions, share knowledge and help each other!
Free trial: 14-day trial
Price: Starting from $29 to $299
Best used for:
Q&A board
Knowledge base
Customer suggestions
Grow your brand in 2023 with these Shopify Apps
Custom Shopify themes can help your brand identity and image. With a clear color scheme or visuals, customers are likely to keep you at the back of their minds whenever they see something similar. On the other hand, you have more flexibility when you require certain widgets or functions to better showcase your products on your ecommerce store.
Looking for more resources? Check out these other resources:
We've been talking about the dos and don'ts of referral marketing in the past couple of articles. And as most marketers/founders know, attribution is an extremely important part of running a business. Without knowing where your traffic is coming from or who those people are, you could easily be marketing to someone who would never be a customer. And that's not where you'd want to spend your resources on!
With referral marketing, referral tracking is a way of quantifying the impact your referrals have on the business. It's not just a simple metric or number; it's also a way to understand how well your referral marketing is working and what tactics are most effective at converting brand loyalists into advocates and getting them to refer more. That means that with some solid analytics on your referral tracking efforts, you can improve them over time, resulting in better referral rates and referral sales!
Follow us through this article to learn more about referral tracking.
Why track referrals?
Referral tracking is essential to gain valuable insights into your referral process and identify areas where improvements can be made. It simply involves collecting data at every stage of the referral process, which can then be analyzed for maximum efficiency. Here are the various touchpoints:
1. Monitor customer satisfaction levels
Monitoring your referral program can provide clearer insight into whether customers are satisfied with your product or service.
If you are getting referral sales, and people are sharing about your brand or product via word-of-mouth, it’s an indication that they are satisfied with your brand, product, or service.
On the other hand, if your referral rates and sales are not performing at the industry average, it could be a sign of an underlying operational or product issue that needs to be addressed.
2. Accurately track attribution
Attribution can be a huge headache for ecommerce brands. Let's say you’ve seen a dramatic increase in sales recently. But you don’t know what’s causing it. Could it be the new product you launched? What about the digital marketing campaign that you pulled off not too long ago?
You might have an inkling that it’s the newly launched referral program, but you have no way to prove that assumption. A proper referral tracking system can solve that issue for you. And if the spike in sales does indeed come from your referral program, a referral tracking system will also let you know who your best advocates are. This gives you opportunities to further segment your customers and show appreciation to brand loyalists.
Essentially, you’ll need to double down on the channels that work best for your brand and tracking makes it much easier for that final judgment.
3. Monitor conversion rates
Knowing your referral conversion rates can be valuable for several reasons.
First, it can help you understand the effectiveness of your referral program and identify areas for improvement. For example, if your referral conversion rate is low, you may need to make changes to your referral reward to make it more appealing to customers. Or maybe it’s because you aren’t making your referral program visible enough.
Based on the conversion data, you can determine if you need to tweak things around and do more A/B testing to increase overall customer engagement.
Additionally, knowing your referral conversion rate can help you measure the success of your referral program and compare it to other marketing efforts. This can help you determine which efforts are most effective at driving new customers to your business.
4. Prevent referral fraud
With any referral program, the last thing you’d want to encounter is referral fraud.
Referral fraud comes in various forms:
Self-referrals
Duplicated referrals
Sharing on coupon sites
Return abuse
Self-referrals happen when customers would refer themselves to get both a discount for a new purchase and a reward for referring someone. And duplicated referrals just mean referring the same person twice.
Sharing on coupon sites happens when instead of sharing their referral link and code with their friends, some would post them on coupon sites, discount sites, or forums.
Return abuse refers to when customers get their friends to use their referral link and code. But once they receive the reward for “referring”, their friends would return the product and request a refund.
If your brand is offering cash payouts as a referral incentive, it’s even more important to have a proper tracking system in place. Users can easily take advantage of your rewards otherwise.
5. Identify your best referral assets
If you're not already A/B testing your referral program, you might want to start. And being able to effectively track this entire process definitely helps. Why so?
Studying the referral data obtained can help you tailor your future messaging, visuals and referral incentives for greater customer appeal. Establishing an effective referral program is key to success as it encourages more people to engage and provides more opportunities for referrals. To put it simply, the more people that register for your referral program, the higher the chance of more referrals and a succesful referral program!
How do you track referrals effectively?
Use unique referral codes or links
A common way to track referrals is to provide customers with a unique referral code or link that they can use to refer others to your business. When a referred customer uses the code or link to make a purchase, you can easily trace it back to the original advocate.
This referral code/link functions as a unique identifier that relates a referral to a specific advocate, which allows you to track it and collect the necessary information.
For example, you can see how many times the referral code has been used, by who, and for which purchases.
This can give you a very good overview of how active your advocates are and how well word-of-mouth marketing is working for you. It helps you decide how much effort to put into word-of-mouth marketing.
(+) Easy to track
(+) Saves time and money
(-) You have zero control over who signs up
Use cookies
Cookies are text files with data used to track, personalize, and save information about users’ sessions. They allow ecommerce sites to track visits from users, including the pages and products they view, to suggest similar products they may also be interested in. Some may even track their exit pages to retarget these users.
Referral tracking with cookies can be done by placing a unique cookie for each customer who visits your website. This cookie can be used to identify the customer if they return to your site in the future, as well as to track any referrals they make.
Let's say that a customer visits your website and you place a cookie on their computer. They then refer a friend to your site, and their friend clicks on the referral link. When their friend visits your site, the cookie on their computer will be checked to see if it matches the cookie of the referring customer. If it does, it will be recorded that the referred customer was referred by the original customer.
(+) Provides valuable customer insights
(+) Accurate in tracking referrals
(-) Requires more technical knowledge
Use referral tracking software
There are many different types of referral tracking software, like ReferralCandy, available that can help you automate the process of tracking referrals. This software can be integrated with your existing systems and can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your referral program.
On top of the perks of being able to see everything at a glance with an insightful dashboard, you get to properly identify where your referral traffic is coming from—which platforms your advocates work best with.
It’s also much easier to take action once you have the big data at your fingertips. You’d know exactly which incentives are working best for your advocates and make those changes immediately.
(+) Referral tracking is faster and easier through automation
(+) More accurate data
(-) Can be pricey for smaller businesses
Use a referral tracking spreadsheet template
If referral tracking software isn’t a viable option at this time for your business, keeping track of your referrals on Google Sheets or Excel can be a great alternative.
Spreadsheets are easily customizable which means you can decide on what you want to track and how you want to track it. Plenty of third-party apps are available for you to integrate for an improved tracking process.
The downside is that if you require slightly more elaborate analytics, it’s on you to figure out how that’ll work.
Fret not, we have your bases covered! Read to the bottom for our free referral tracking template.
(+) A cost-effective way to track referrals
(+) Flexible with customization
(-) Manual and tedious
(-) Requires some technical knowledge of building a spreadsheet
Use Google Analytics
You may be wondering how Google Analytics can be used for referral tracking.
Here’s how you can find your referral report:
Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Referrals.
On that page, you’ll be able to see the number of users coming onto your site as a referral and identify your referral source.
This gives you a relatively good overview of how much traffic your referral marketing channel is bringing in, and which referrers are your brand loyalists. It also provides additional data that helps you to identify which advocates you should pay more attention to so that you can replicate that process with others.
(+) Relatively accurate referral tracking
(-) Requires pre-existing knowledge of Google Analytics
Use UTM Parameters
They're essentially unique short text codes that you add to URLs (or links) to help you track the performance of a campaign—in this case, your referral program.
If we take a look at this example above, the UTM parameter comes after the question mark. And it's easily and automatically generated with this campaign URL builder tool. This means that you can manually generate unique links for each and every one of your advocates. The only thing left is to make sure you're consistently tracking this on a sheet so you don't miss out on any unique links!
(+) A free method
(-) Requires pre-existing knowledge of Google Analytics
(-) Takes up a lot of time
How to use our free referral tracking template
Our referral tracking template comes with a referral tracking sheet as well as a dashboard and insights sheet for a better overview of your existing referral campaign.
There are 4 sheets on the referral tracking template.
Quick start guide
Dashboard & Insights
Referral Tracking Sheet
Setup and Calculation
Before you fill in the Referral Tracking Sheet, you will be required to fill in some necessary information on the details of your referral program. Click on the Setup & Calculation Page to edit your reward types so that they reflect in the Referral Tracking Sheet.
Once that is done, you can start filling in the following fields on your Referral Tracking Sheet.
Referral purchase date
Referred friend’s name
Referred friend’s email
Referred purchase amount
Minimum spend reached for reward eligibility (Yes/No)
Friend Offer Code
Referral Link
Advocate Name
Advocate Email
Reward sent (Yes/No)
Reward details
After you’ve filled in the Referral Tracking Sheet, you can head over to the Dashboard and Insights page to learn more about how well your referral program is working.
The dashboard shows the following:
Total number of referrals (all-time)
Total amount of referral sales (all-time)
Average referral sales in a month (all-time average)
Top 5 advocates (all-time)
A graph of the number of referrals per month (selected year)
A graph of the amount of referral sales per month (selected year)
You can filter through the graphs by inputting the specific year between 2022 and 2050.
The insights are an indication of whether your referral program is hitting the expectations of your referral marketing strategy.
A low number of referrals could mean that your referral incentives are not enticing enough for people to want to share about them. Or that you aren’t promoting your referral campaign enough and not many people know about it.
If you’re seeing a decent number of referrals but low referral sales, you might be setting the bar too low for your referral eligibility requirements. Eg, if you set the minimum spend for a referred friend too low, it results in an even smaller amount of sales from referrals.
Understanding who your top advocates are could also help you to better target people that are more likely to refer your brand and products. You could take the Top 5 Advocates derived from this template and analyze if the geographical location is a factor, or if their demographics are similar.
Referral tracking is the key to a successful referral campaign
At the end of the day, referral tracking is an important way to measure the success of your referral program. By tracking referrals, you can identify your best advocates, determine which channels are generating the most referrals, and see which offers are motivating people to refer your brand.
Our Referral Tracking Template is meant to be a stepping stone for you to get started on properly evaluating your referral campaigns. However, there are important factors to consider as well. Things like referral fraud are extremely difficult to identify through manual tracking sheets and that’s why referral tracking software can be a better option once you have more traffic on your referral campaigns.
A referral program or a “refer-a-friend” program is a marketing strategy used by many top ecommerce brands to incentivize existing customers to recommend the brand and its products to their family and friends.
Referral programs are often called word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, because existing customers are rewarded for sharing and incentivize new customers to try out your brand.
Said referral incentives, include free cash, major discounts, or a free month of subscription or even products and custom gifts. While there is an upfront cost to the marketing channel, referral programs significantly increase long-term revenue by nurturing loyal customers out of your existing customer base.
Why do I need a referral program?
One of the biggest stresses of any business is finding a solid customer acquisition channel, or basically, bringing in new customers. When you have a solid referral marketing program, however, you let your existing customers bring new buyers to your brand. This not only significantly reduces spending on bringing new customers to your shop, but also increases customer retention, which is a very good thing.
How does a referral program work?
People don't make as many referrals as they intend to for a variety of reasons. A referral program helps make their mind up with a tangible reward for referrals.
Modern referral programs, or refer-a-friend programs, use software to track referrals made by happy customers through either a referral code, a rewards card, or a referral link. Depending on the referral campaign, customers will usually receive some kind of referral bonus or benefit when they refer a friend. Referral marketing software automates the payouts of these referral rewards, identifies possible referral fraud cases and ensures that your referral program runs smoothly with minimal effort.
This referral process creates a natural word-of-mouth marketing experience for your brand, which ultimately increases both your customer retention rate and your revenue.
It’s happening. Recent global events like inflated prices and multiple layoffs have led to conversations about a possible recession. Some even say we’re already in the middle of it.
Because of these events, agency owners are looking for new strategies to “recession-proof” their businesses. Ultimately, it’s more crucial than ever to continue providing value to your clients.
Adding value to your clients increases your value
What happens when you create value for your clients?
Improvement in brand reputation, resulting in long-term success
Boost in revenue and business bottom line
Increase in clients’ trust and confidence in your agency
Here’s the truth. When an agency is able to help its clients grow their brands, the clients will stay. This will then increase the agency’s customer retention rate, enabling them to thrive amidst a recession.
So take the time to dig deep and discover how you can continue adding value to your clients’ brands. Once you figure this out, offer it. You will immediately increase your perceived value because you’ve offered something more than what your clients signed up for.
So how can you add value to your clients? Answer: Think of ways to increase your clients’ profits. This will show them you genuinely care about setting them up for success.
Next, recommending referral marketing is the up-and-coming way for agencies to improve their clients’ net profits—and here’s everything you need to back this up.
But to keep things simple for your clients, here’s a very quick overview of some of the best benefits of referral marketing that are specifically connected to profit increase.
1. It reduces acquisition costs but drives more sales at the same time
Did you know that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer compared to retaining an existing one?
Additionally, numbers from Business Insider show that the increase in both ad costs and ad spending over the past year has been crazy:
Facebook CPM (cost per thousand impressions): Up by 89% YoY
YouTube CPM: Up by 108% YoY
TikTok CPM: Up by 92% YoY
This is where referral marketing can step in, hitting two birds with one solution:
Brands can spend less on paid ads as well as other acquisition efforts. Referral marketing costs less. Brands will only need to pay for the software of their choice and the rewards for referrers which they would only need to pay after a successful purchase anyway.
Brands will generate more sales and conversions. According to Business2Community, referred customers have a 16% higher customer lifetime, and they also convert 30% better.
So in a nutshell, referral marketing can lower your clients’ marketing spend while increasing conversions. Win-win!
2. It boosts brand loyalty and trust
Referral programs involve rewarding existing customers who successfully influence other online shoppers to purchase from a brand. Rewarding already existing customers will encourage them to purchase again and even spread the word about the brands.
Because of this, your clients can easily identify their loyal customers and advocates, allowing them to create personalized campaigns or exclusive benefits.
This will strengthen the relationships and engagement levels between your clients and their existing customers.
3. It expands the reach and exposure of brands
Online shoppers are present on a variety of online platforms. Some of them have their own personal websites, YouTube accounts, and TikTok handles among other channels.
If a brand has a prominent online presence on the platforms where its target customers are, then that’s a really big win right there. After all, around 71% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if they discovered it via a recommendation on social media.
When your clients invest in referral marketing, their customers can help bring their brand closer to where potential customers are.
Instead of spending more on brand awareness campaigns, your clients can just let their customers do the job via word-of-mouth on different platforms.
4. It generates User-Generated Content (UGC) efficiently
At this point in time, brands are already very much aware of the benefits that UGC can bring to their business. For starters:
According to 74% of online users, recommendations from people they know in real life help them decide on a purchase.
For 90% of consumers, UGC helps them decide on purchasing more than branded promos and content.
70% of consumers will study UGC reviews and ratings before making a purchase decision.
Because referral marketing gives incentives to customers, they are encouraged to create UGC that they can use to share about brands or products. This will help your clients lower their marketing spend and get new customers because content creation is essentially free. Getting access to the content created by customers is also a huge bonus because you can use these for your other services, whether you’re offering email marketing, performance marketing, and others.
It’s easy to add referral marketing as a service through the use of ReferralCandy—a Shopify Plus-certified software. So if any of your clients want to jump in, you can get started immediately.
When your customers get started with referral marketing, they may have some difficulty navigating it at first. Here are five strategies to help their referral marketing program find its footing.
Prime the customer loyalty program
If your clients don’t have existing customer loyalty programs yet, now is the best time to start. After all, their customers are probably waiting for it already. As much as 84% of online consumers are more likely to continue supporting a brand with a loyalty program.
Some steps for conceptualizing and implementing brand-new loyalty programs:
Finalize the type of referral program you want to have. There are point-based programs, tiered programs, or paid programs.
Check out the loyalty programs of brands you emulate. Know what’s out there so you can effectively come up with a unique loyalty program that works. For example, Sephora gives one point per $1 spent. The North Face also lets customers earn points through other things aside from purchasing, such as attending events or downloading their app.
Plan out the benefits and rewards carefully. They should be attractive to customers, while still making sense resource-wise.
Upgrade referral benefits and incentives
Now, for your clients with existing loyalty programs, it may be worthwhile to revisit the rewards and incentives.
Rewards are proven to increase referrals. A discount, a freebie, or any other benefit can give shoppers good reasons to promote ecommerce brands. Here are some popular examples of referral incentives your clients may want to explore:
Discounts Discount coupons are rated by more than 50% of global customers as the most-valued reward, so you can’t go wrong with these. You can explore set discounts ($50 off) or varying discounts depending on purchase value ($100 off for purchases of at least $2000)
Cash backs Cash is enticing because the customers really feel that they got something in return. An example is PayPal’s $10 double-sided incentive: the referrer gets $10 and their friend who opens an account gets $10 too.
Store credits Combine discount coupons and cash back rewards and offer store credits as a referral incentive. Store credit basically comes in a monetary amount, but the referrer can use this credit to buy from the same store. These are usually cumulative too, and can be used instead of a discount voucher.
Free items Throw in some samplers or branded merchandise because people love getting something for free. If consumers receive freebies for every successful referral, they will continue promoting these brands.
Referral marketing rewards brands’ already existing customers and recognizes their influence in their respective circles. If your clients notice huge volumes of referrals from a few customers, it might be a viable option to work with them as official brand influencers or ambassadors.
After all, eight out of ten consumers have bought something after seeing it recommended by an influencer. The power of influencer marketing is undeniable—but instead of spending millions on celebrities, your clients can invest in referral marketing and let their loyal customers be influencers in their own right.
Try a referral program software that runs by itself
Yes, referrals can happen organically, especially if customers are really satisfied with their purchase. With a referral marketing software, each and every successful referral can be tracked and referrers will automatically be rewarded.
Having a dedicated software for referral marketing will provide your clients an additional revenue source without too much of a hassle. It’s definitely a way to help them increase their net profits.
Prepare shareable content to create more referral opportunities
Customer loyalty program—check. Referral marketing software—check! First few affiliates, referrers, influencers—check.
Your clients can technically sit back and let their customers start promoting their brand whenever and however they want to.
But why not help your clients provide their customers with ammunition?
This can come in the form of ready-made assets, or even ideas and prompts. Brands can even be more active on their social media channels and post surveys, relatable articles, quizzes, or even memes—anything that is easily shareable. That way, existing customers will have plenty of opportunities to refer the brand.
Your clients can also consider creating an exclusive community for members of the program. Then the brand can broadcast announcements, assets, ideas, and even seasonal promos to market.
Conclusion: Help your clients start their referral marketing journey today
Offering referral marketing as a service to your clients will help them increase their net profits and overall business bottom line.
Additionally, this will also increase their lifetime value as your customer. You won’t be just another agency—instead, you’ll be the agency that just keeps adding value.
Join our Partner Program to get your referral marketing service up and running in no time and start transforming your clients’ businesses.
A referral program is a deliberate, systematic way of getting people to make referrals to your business. Referral programs are often called word-of-mouth marketing, because they reward existing customers for sharing and incentivize new customers to try out your brand.
We've been running referral programs for thousands of ecommerce stores for over half a decade now, making retailers almost $320,000,000 in referral sales.
What is referral tracking and why is it important? How to track referrals? We break down everything you need to optimize your referral program with a free referral tracking spreadsheet.
A referral program is a deliberate, systematic way of getting people to make referrals to your business. Referral programs are often called word-of-mouth marketing, because they reward existing customers for sharing and incentivize new customers to try out your brand.
Creating a referral email campaign to promote your program? Here are examples of beautiful referral email designs from leading ecommerce brands so that you can draw inspiration from them!