477: Million Dollar Business Ideas Free For The Taking Part 2 With Nick Loper

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Have you ever found yourself lost in a sea of Shopify apps, not knowing which ones are really necessary for your online store? Well, you’re not alone. And today we’re going to change all that. In this podcast episode, I’m going to talk about an optimal Shopify store setup, revealing the only apps that you truly need to maximize efficiency, drive sales, and turn your store into an efficient conversion machine. What’s up, everyone? You are listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, where I teach you how to make money online.

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by exploring different tools, strategies, and understand how to leverage human psychology to grow your sales. This is a special segment of the show called Family First Fridays, where I’m going solo to give you my thoughts on how to make money without sacrificing your lifestyle. Now, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book yet, The Family First Entrepreneur, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book and fill out the form to get over $690 in free bonuses.

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Also, if you’re interested in learning how to start your own e-commerce store, make sure you sign up for my free six day mini course over at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now the apps that I’m going to describe in this pod are what I consider a solid Shopify store setup for beginners and experienced store owners alike that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Now why is this episode necessary? Because it’s really easy to get carried away installing random apps that you find on the app store.

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Also, most of the apps apply to other e-commerce platforms as well, such as BigCommerce and WooCommerce, so feel free to pick and choose what you need based on my recommendations. Now the first must-have app on my list is Klaviyo. In fact, out of every single app on this list, Klaviyo is probably the most important one. Klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I personally use and recommend for any e-commerce store. And right now, Klaviyo makes up roughly 30 % of the sales.

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for my seven figure eCommerce store over at bumblebelandons.com. Now there are hundreds of email marketing providers out there, so why Klaviyo? Klaviyo is designed from the ground up to sell physical products online, and it allows you to segment your audience based on the exact purchasing behavior of your customers. For example, if I want to send an email to someone who’s purchased a specific type of handkerchief last week and spent over a hundred bucks, I can easily do that. But the true power of Klaviyo lies in the automation.

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And Klaviyo makes me hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on autopilot. And here’s how. First off, it’s a well-known fact that if a customer buys from you once, then they’re much more likely to buy from you again. So when anyone makes a purchase from my store, a Klaviyo automation automatically cross-sells them related products. For example, I sell matching linen cocktail napkins, tea napkins, and dinner napkins in my store. Now, if someone buys cocktail napkins but dot dinner napkins, then Klaviyo automatically sends out an email

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that sells my dinner napkins. You can also set up Klaviyo to automatically send out abandoned car reminders, solicit reviews for your products, anniversary reminders, basically anything. And overall, the primary way to grow your e-commerce store is through repeat business and to build a brand. And the only way to build a brand really is to bring people back to your site over and over and over again until your brand becomes ingrained in their memories. Now, if you’re just starting out, there’s a YouTube video that I filmed

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that will teach you how to set up these automated flows in Klaviyo. Now the second app that I recommend is Postscript. And just like email marketing, SMS or text message marketing will be one of your best ways to bring customers back to your shop. Now I call email and SMS owned marketing platforms because you own your customers contact information and no one can take that away from you. This is in direct contrast to platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Instagram where they control your reach.

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And the best part is that everyone checks their text messages, making SMS one of the best marketing mediums, period. And when I implemented text message marketing for Bumblebee Linens, I saw click-through rates in the 20 % range, and it instantly started generating revenue for my shop. Now, if you want to see a more in-depth case study on SMS, there’s actually a video linked in the show notes below. It’s also a blog post there as well, where I reveal real conversion numbers for my online store.

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Now you might be thinking to yourself, who the heck would want marketing text messages from your company, but it works. And the best part is that you only pay when you actually send a text. And if you’re still not a believer, then just take a moment, look at your phone, and I’m willing to bet that you have some text messages from retail stores, restaurants, Amazon even, everyone is using SMS today. Now the next app that I want to discuss is called Looks.

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and it’s spelled L-O-O-X. Looks is a social proof marketing platform that empowers over 100,000 Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants to grow their brands by turning customers into ambassadors. So basically, this app helps you collect video-based reviews and show them off on your website. Now, according to Bose.io, consumers spend 31 % more on businesses with excellent reviews. So displaying reviews for higher-priced products

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can increase conversion rates by up to 380%. I mean, I don’t have to tell you this, but reviews are important for any store. Now what’s also cool is that once you’ve started gathering reviews for your shop, they will show up in the Google search results as well. For example, if you were to do a search for hemstitch linen dinner napkins, you would see a bunch of stars next to my product. Now, if you saw a listing with stars next to a listing with no stars, which one would you click on?

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The one with the stars, right? And according to Google, having these stars next to your product in the search results can boost the click-through rate by up to 87%. Reviews, testimonials, and referrals are all forms of social proof. And social proof is important because people are like lemmings. People look to others’ actions and opinions to determine what is the right decision or behavior, and it’s human nature for us to seek validation from our peers, especially when we’re unsure about buying something.

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Now out of all the Shopify review apps, I like Looks because they specifically help you get more video reviews. The entire world is moving towards video, and video reviews have the highest effect on conversions compared to text-based reviews. Now the next app that you should install is shipping software. And personally, I use the Shipping Easy app for my online store, and it helps me streamline shipping hundreds of packages every single day. And here’s why shipping software is a must-have.

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It allows you to easily ship out hundreds of packages per day as efficiently as possible with your brand displayed on the shipping label. It allows you to manage multiple carriers. Most stores, like my own, ship out via USPS, UPS, and or FedEx. And without shipping software, you’d literally have to log into each platform individually to print labels. It also allows you to deal with shipping errors. Most software keeps track of all your shipments and lets you know when packages have been delivered or delayed.

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But most importantly, shipping software allows you to save on shipping costs. Because they ship out so many different packages, they’ve negotiated incredible rates with all the major shipping carriers. And you can literally save 50 % or more on shipping compared to just going to the post office. Now, my two favorite shipping apps are Shipping Easy and ShipStation, but I generally recommend Shipping Easy for new e-commerce store owners because they have a free plan that allows you to ship 20 packages per month for free. Now, this next app…

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is software that I absolutely could not live without today, and it’s called Gorgias. Gorgias is customer service software powered by AI that helps you answer customer questions quickly and easily. And here’s the biggest problem with managing customer service for an e-commerce store today. Customers can ask you questions on a zillion different platforms. For example, every day we get questions via email, SMS, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

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It is literally impossible to manage correspondence on all these different platforms. But Gorgias allows you to consolidate all this correspondence in a single place. So today, I manage all social media comments, emails, SMS, everything from the Gorgias dashboard. And here’s the best part. Gorgias ties in directly with your Shopify backend and can pull order information without you having to manually look it up. Now in our store, and I’m sure this is common for most stores, the two most asked questions that we get are,

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where’s my order and has it shipped yet? And instead of manually logging into my store to look at this information up each time, Gorgias automatically detects these types of questions and then pre-populates an email response with the exact customer’s information from your Shopify backend. All you got to do is click send. And as you can imagine, this speeds up customer service dramatically. You can also use Gorgias to track phone calls and track however your customer service reps are performing based on the number of tickets that they close.

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Now this next app is crucial for getting customers to come back to your store and buy again. Smile.io allows you to implement a loyalty program on your online store. And as I mentioned earlier, a customer who has bought from you once is 65 % more likely to buy from you again. And the best way to get someone to buy from you again is to start a loyalty program. Here’s what our loyalty program looks like. Basically, a customer earns one point for every dollar spent in our shop. And based on their point totals,

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they earn valuable merchandise from our store. But here’s the thing, the merchandise in our handkerchief store costs us very little money and far less than giving out a discount coupon. But people are loyal because they want to build up points in their account. And here’s the best part. Instead of sending out a discount via email, sometimes we have 2X loyalty point days where we give out virtual currency for our shop, which is way cheaper than giving out money.

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And overall, loyalty programs increase customer attention, increase customer satisfaction, and because they’re getting free stuff, it actually greatly increases brand loyalty and repeat purchases. Now this next app is one that I consider a must have to increase your average order value and make every sale you make more lucrative. And this tool is called Zipify OneClick Upsell. OneClick Upsell is a tool that allows you to add additional products or upgrades to customers immediately after they made a purchase with just one click.

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without the need to enter payment or shipping details again. So when a customer has completed a purchase, they’re basically hot and ripe to buy more. After all, they already trust your company, they’ve already opened up their wallets and they’re susceptible to a follow on offer. So let’s say you sell body wash in your shop and you purchased one bottle. And then at checkout, you are presented with an offer to get an additional bottle at 30 % off. There’s a high chance that you’d take that, right?

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Well, one click upsell can increase your average order value by up to 12 % or more. And here’s the beauty of the tool. You only pay for a percentage of your sales that one click upsell generates for you. In other words, you only pay for the app when it actually makes you money. And this is what makes it a no brainer to install. Now these final two Shopify apps are if you are design challenged and need assistance making visual tweaks to your site. And these are both what I call nice to have apps. Now the first one,

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is a little known app called HyperVisual Page Builder. HyperVisual Page Builder allows you to build custom web pages for your Shopify store without knowing how to code or needing a designer. And most of you listening to this probably have never heard of this app because HyperVisual Page Builder sucks at marketing, but their tool is fantastic. They don’t have an affiliate program. They don’t do any influencer outreach, nothing. But their tool is super cheap compared to the competition.

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and it will allow you to create beautiful custom design landing pages with no coding. Now the second app helps you build email pop-up forms on your site. And if you were to go to bumblebelenus.com, you’ve probably noticed a spin to win pop-up on my site. And this is the highest converting email form that I’ve ever implemented. And a tool like Privy allows you to implement this on your site for free up to 5,000 visits per month. So all in all, those are my must have Shopify apps.

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If there are any on this list that I forgot to mention, send me an email and I will append them to the show notes of this episode.