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Brilliant Shopify app marketing and more

Author

Tim Kock
January 23, 2024

Yo. Today we have two competitors as our cover stories. One of them is annoying Klaviyo and the other one hired a woman who’s now making 25-person product marketing teams jealous. So if you’re in the mood for a bit of trouble, this episode is for you.

In today’s newsletter:

  • 💎 Built for Shopify promotion.

  • 🤑 Incorporating customer feedback and restructure pricing.

  • 🎨 The old Shopify AppStore look and feel.

  • 🕹️ Tobi Lutke playing Starcraft. 

  • 📣 Voice and tone guidelines of two big boys.

COVER STORY

Yotpo is making some noise

If you’re in the ecosystem for a while now, you know Yotpo’s pricing is always in the news. On some days merchants complain and on other days Moiz Ali does a Trump-style tweet. And while it’s entertaining for all of us, Yotpo probably doesn’t enjoy it that much. 

But those times might be over now.

Yotpo swallowed the bitter pill and made adjustments. And now they’re being rewarded with gratitude from the industry (and a silent Moiz).

In an announcement post from Tomer, Yotpo’s CEO, he said that they made quite a few drastic changes. From a brand new price structure to become “the most cost-effective choice for email, SMS, and subscription services”. Even an ex-Yotpo customer said in the comments “This is great and solving exactly why we left Yotpo back in 2016”.

And to put everything into perspective and offer more transparency, they completely revamped their pricing page:

If we take an even deeper look into the new pricing page, we can clearly see that Yotpo moved away from a (somewhat-confusing) individual product first pricing approach. They now prioritize their “full product suite” pricing. Considering their positioning as “The Retention Platform”, this makes a lot of sense.

No one is forced to take the full suite, though. Merchants can still choose to only pick the products they want. This serves Yotpo’s and the merchant’s needs at the same time. Win-win.

Bonus: If you stay long enough on the pricing page without taking action, you’ll see this:

Unless you haven’t signed up, yet, Shopify Editions - Winter 2024 is coming soon (Jan 31, 2024, 11 am EST). Sign up here.

(Never watched GOT. So I missed this unique “Winter is coming” opportunity.)

TODAY’S ISSUE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY AppStoreResearch

No matter if you’re just starting to build your app or already serving hundreds of thousands of merchants; understanding the needs, pains, and desires of your audience has to be a crucial part of your product and marketing strategy.

Now, one way to do this is to interview your existing customers. And while this is for sure important, it doesn’t give you a true inside look into the thoughts and decision-making processes of merchants that aren’t yet your customers. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could speak directly to your competitor’s customers and learn what you could do better so they’ll sign up for your app instead?

Well, you’re in luck.

My buddy Jonathan Kennedy built AppStoreResearch for you. It’s a premium service that is being used by leading Shopify app companies (Pushowl, Kimonix, Convertwise, and more). They all use it to book 1-1 research interviews with real Shopify merchants. And heck; they’re seeing amazing results.

Wanna target participants by role? Or by category? Or by apps they use? No problem. Recruit, schedule and pay your research participants - all in one place. Only available on AppStoreResearch. It’s really that good.

Now you.

Try AppStoreResearch today by clicking here.

And now… let’s get nostalgic: early version of the AppStore. Nice logo lol.

AROUND THE ECOSYSTEM

  1. Reminder: You’re (probably) affected by Google’s and Yahoo’s DMARC requirements.

  2. Literally Epic: A case study worth checking out.

  3. Integrations: Sendlane is not playing around.

  4. Social media: Want more Twitter engagement? “Like + RT + comment” ftw. Like here.

  5. Or: Here.

  6. Brand: Klaviyo’s voice and tone guidelines. And if you like V&Ts, here’s MailChimp’s.

  7. Nerd at night: Watch Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke playing Starcraft. Awesome.

Loox looks brilliant as a brilliant

There aren’t many official badges and certifications that actually mean something in our ecosystem. One, for sure, is the Shopify Plus Certified one. And another one is the “Built for Shopify” badge. Out of thousands of apps in the AppStore, only 300-something have received it. One of the latest companies that got it was Loox.

This is special.

And so the responsible person at Loox took the certification, ran over to the design/animation team and built a full-blown campaign to make sure this gets noticed in the ecosystem.

Here’s how they (she) did it:

As a lean organization operating at a massive scale (100K+ Shopify merchants and 500 million monthly end users), Loox strives for efficiency and impact. They craft the core messaging and then use it in slightly different variations on all available channels:

  • Homepage

  • Blog post

  • Email 

  • LinkedIn post

  • Twitter post

  • Facebook post

  • Instagram post

And the same goes for their custom made (and attention grabbing) GIF/video. Their motion animator created two core animations and they used it everywhere.

This is what amplification of efforts looks like. Great stuff.

Thanks for reading. Next week, same time?

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