Shopify Editions Summer 2023 — Part 5: Full-Stack Marketing, Sell to Every Customer, The Shop Channel

This article is the fifth of Coalition Technologies’ 6-part series tackling Shopify Editions Summer 2023 updates.

This installment dives into the ease of marketing and selling facilitated by Shopify’s recent updates. The Summer 2023 Edition opens up new avenues for you to promote and sell your products with full-stack marketing options as well as options to greatly enhance the customer journey.

This edition also makes it easier for you to promote your products on the Shop app, giving you a new channel to grow your business. Here’s a summary of all these changes.

Full-Stack Marketing on Shopify

According to Deloitte’s recent CMO Survey, B2C companies spend on average 53%, and as high as 75%, of their marketing budget on digital marketing activities. Ideally, they would prefer to spend no more than 49% on short-term performance. This proportion of spending is even more imbalanced with early-stage brands that need to establish themselves. 

With this edition, Shopify has released a number of full-stack marketing features that make it easier for merchants to attract new customers and increase lifetime value.

1. Shopify Email

Create ecommerce-optimized emails with Shopify Email. It allows you to easily design branded emails or choose from several pre-built templates, all without coding. You can automate email replies based on custom workflows to speed up customer service. With Shopify Magic, you can even generate convert-ready copy for your emails.

Most importantly, as a full-stack marketing feature, Shopify Email lets you manage your email campaigns end-to-end in one place. The return on investment for email can climb to an astonishing 4,500% across industries. If you haven’t invested in email already, now is a good time to start. 

2. Shopify Forms

This is a free lead-capture solution that lets you attract and acquire new customers. You can create popup and inline forms and customize the fields and placement any way you like. Forms also lets you add in incentives like discounts for your customers and feeds back first-party data for actionable insights.

3. Shopify Automation

One of the big features with this edition, apart from full-stack marketing, is the thrust on automation and AI. Shopify now lets you build in custom marketing and non-marketing automations that help you engage customers throughout the purchase journey. For the most part, you building these automations are no-code processes, although you can implement code to further customize your workflow.

4. Shopify Segmentation

This is an incredibly useful full-stack marketing feature that gives you granular information on your audience, letting you target them better. You can get started by creating unique audience segments that make sense for your business and then put them to work by sending personalized emails, targeted discounts, and building automations.

5. Shopify Inbox

Shopify Inbox lets you leverage customer chats to convert more prospects. You can create automated replies for your chat box to offer quicker responses to customers and capture insights from your chats. It integrates well with other full-stack marketing features, given that you can repurpose customer queries as FAQs — Shopify even offers suggestions for this based on chat history. 

6. Social and Influencer Channels

Shopify offers you new integrations to help you sell your products where your customers spend the most time. This includes options to put your products out in front of people on Google, YouTube, and TikTok. Using the Shopify Collabs app, you can even collaborate with creators and influencers to drive more sales for your products. 

7. Analytics

Full-stack marketing is incomplete without robust data and analytics on your performance. On the Marketing page, you can review a summary of your marketing results, including traffic, channel, and conversion insights. You can also use pre-set attribution models to learn more about customer interaction on different channels. 

Shopify also helps you be more compliant with privacy regulations and give customers more control over their data. 

Sell to Every Customer

Beyond full-stack marketing, Shopify’s recent updates have made it easier for you to scale your offering to global and targeted audiences. Features such as dynamic storefronts, customized point-of-sale (POS) workflows, and localized experiences can help you tailor your store for regional audiences.

1. Custom Storefront Layouts

Shopify now gives you much more freedom to customize your storefront the way you want to appeal to regional markets and audiences. Shopify is rebuilding its Liquid rendering pipeline to allow dynamic storefronts that are context-aware. You can also differentiate localized experiences by adapting your theme and implementing features like announcement bars for specific markets.

You can reimagine your store more easily to respond to changing business dynamics with Shopify’s drag-and-drop custom flex sections. Its Storefront API is able to scale with your traffic for improved search and filtering functionality.

2. Shopify POS 

Shopify offers you a unified, real-time inventory management system to streamline your point-of-sale (POS) operations. It includes hardware and backend systems that let you handle inventory, manage payments, track staff performance, and build sustainable customer relationships. 

Shopify is also in the process of simplifying retail workflows to give you more options when it comes to sales and relationship management, but also integrate your POS processes into your full-stack marketing.

3. Shop Pay Installments

These are an effective buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) option that you can offer your customers to give them more flexibility at checkout. Shop Pay lets them settle their purchase with interest-free payments or monthly installments up to 24 months. 

Shop Pay Installments Premium offers you even more extended payback periods to further increase order value and reduce abandoned carts. You can use the continued association to target prospects with relevant offers and promotions as part of your full-stack marketing efforts. 

4. Customized Shopping Options

Shopify’s Search & Discovery app lets you customize search, filtering, and product recommendations for your shoppers, helping you increase relevance and average order value. Customers can also combine different discounts together on a single order to draw more value from their purchase.

The platform has also launched Shopify Subscriptions — still in early access — to give buyers with customer accounts more freedom around their orders, payments, and shipping options. 

The Shop Channel

The Shop app aims to be the new destination for mobile shoppers with truly personalized shopping experiences. It aims to be the modern-day Amazon for ecommerce buyers, providing you a new channel to execute your full-stack marketing efforts. It has seen some success as well with over 100 million users. 

As a retailer, you too can list your products on the app to improve visibility and draw in new audiences. You can manage your Shop Store settings by adding the Shop channel to your Shopify admin. 

1. Offer Native Experiences for Mobile Shoppers

Shop offers you a React Native SDK, packed with compelling shopping components, to help you build your own experience on the app. There are a number of pre-built templates you can choose from to quickly get started. 

It lets you tap into a redefined shopper journey, where the products are showcased right at the outset, leading to new follow-on interactions between shoppers and brands. Using the Shop channel, you can also access rich shopping data to further improve conversion.

2. Immersive Shopping

The app’s algorithm and its build is configured to offer hyper-personalization for shoppers. It leverages AI to help deliver tailored recommendations to visitors. It also allows you significant flexibility to further customize the experience on your Shop store using predefined design templates and build components. This is possible via the Shop channel.

3. Risk-Free Conversion With Shop Cash

With Shop Cash, Shopify has added a new element to traditional full-stack marketing. Customers earn 1% Shop Cash on every purchase they make on the app, which they can use to buy more products. You can target Shop Cash buyers by creating customized campaigns. 

As a merchant, you simply have to specify a desired cost per acquisition (CPA) for your customers and Shop will set the corresponding offers and audience. You will never pay more than your preferred acquisition cost.

4. One-Click Checkout

Nearly one-fifth of customers abandon their carts because checkout is too long or complicated a process. Most ecommerce players — the larger ones anyway — have picked up on this trend and curtailed the checkout process. The Shop app goes even further by offering users a one-click checkout as well as a speedy sign in to kickstart the shopping journey. By plugging new offers and improving upsell at checkout, the Shop channel can significantly level up your conversions and order value.

Grow Revenue With Proven Ecommerce Experts

Coalition Technologies is a multiple-award-winning full-stack digital marketing agency. See outstanding results with integrated SEO, PPC, and email campaigns tailored to your objectives. We’ve built and optimized close to 800 websites and earned over half a billion dollars in revenue for our clients worldwide. Whether you’d like to launch a brand new Shopify site or grow your existing one, we can help.

Schedule a personalized consultation for your Shopify project and get a free strategy review with Coalition.

Stay tuned to our blog for the last installment in our six-part series dealing with Shopify’s Summer 2023 Edition Updates.