We know first hand how difficult it can be to stay up to date with all the latest features from your tech stack. With the e-commerce world developing constantly, your Shopify apps are also bringing out new features. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed, but we’re here to help you make sense of it all.
Here at Blend Commerce, our marketing team has been researching, collecting and putting together a new blog series where each quarter, we take a look at the latest feature updates from our Partners and what these mean for Shopify merchants.
In this blog, we’ll be taking a look at:
Gorgias
Gorgias is an e-commerce helpdesk that strives to turn your customer service into a profit centre. Integrating with Shopify, Messenger, Emails and soon Klaviyo and LoyaltyLion, you can bring all of your customer service messages into one helpful place.
Improvements to Intent Classifications
Automating tickets using intent classification has become a highly used feature for Shopify Merchants, so Gorgias has updated the feature to be more relevant for e-commerce use cases. You can learn more about using customer intent in rules here.
The following changes are now live:
- The Shipping/status intent has been split into shipping/status and shipping/delivery issue
- New intent: product/question
- New intent: product/recommendation
- Policy intents (exchange/policy, return/policy, refund/policy, discount/policy) have been merged with their request counterpart (e.g. return/request)
- Removed intents: account/cancel, job/application, unsubscribe/email, password/reset
Source: https://updates.gorgias.com/posts/intent-classification-gets-better
Reactions to Facebook comments are now displayed in Gorgias
You no longer need to open Facebook anymore to see if your customers have reacted to your comment. New to the message, Gorgias now displays your customer’s reaction and the total number of reactions made.
Currently, the Facebook API still limits you to only replying to a reaction with a Like but it’s a great way to see the popularity of your comment without leaving Gorgias.
Source: https://updates.gorgias.com/posts/reactions-to-facebook-comments-are-now-displayed-in-gorgias
New Gorgias API Documentation
For our Gorgias feature spotlight, we want to talk about the new API documentation they have released.
As part of Gorgias’s effort to cultivate a strong developer ecosystem, they have rebuilt their API documentation. This new update ensures developers have all the tools they need to build integrations with Gorgias. You can now benefit from the following:
- Guides and step-by-step tutorials
- Complete API reference: All resources and API endpoints are precisely described (attributes, parameters, responses, and more)
- Interactive API: Fetch/create/update your data directly from the documentation
- Automatically generated code examples (cURL, JS, Python, and more)
- Suggest edits to help improve our documentation
- Changelog
Check it out at https://developers.gorgias.com
As an agency, this is truly a great update for us. Being able to provide clients with better, more informed integrations improve the Gorgias experience for everyone. The step by step tutorial and guides are also a great help for Shopify Merchants to understand how to use Gorgias and make the most of it for their business.
Source: https://updates.gorgias.com/posts/the-new-documentation-of-our-api-is-now-live
You can find all of Gorgias updates here: https://updates.gorgias.com/
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an advanced email marketing platform that uses detailed customer insights to create developed automated Flows and Campaigns. Integrating with Shopify, ReCharge and POS systems, it’s now even easier to create a streamline experience on and off your store.
Campaign Page Date Filter
For customers who send many segmented campaigns, the current campaigns page isn’t the easiest interface to find historical campaigns. Therefore like many, you might rely on including the campaign schedule date in the campaign name. That’s why Klaviyo has added a new date filter.
It is contained within a new “More Filters” section, alongside the “List” and “Status” filters, and will respect any selected values in other filters on the page. For example, if the “Status” filter is toggled to “Sent” with the date range filter on “8/1/20 - 8/3/20”, the only campaigns that will be returned are those that were sent in that timeframe. In addition to the date filter, users can also choose to sort their campaigns based on Modified or Sent.
Source: Klaviyo Platform
One Click Resend for Flows and Campaigns Emails
For our Klaviyo feature spotlight, we want to talk about the ‘One Click Resend’ feature available for Flow and Campaign Emails.
Users will now see the ability to resend any already sent message in two key locations:
- Within the Recipient, Activity view for a Flow email or sent Campaign
- Within the personal "Sent" or "Skipped" inbox for a Klaviyo profile
This feature provides the ability to resend any email to an individual recipient in one click. Currently, this feature doesn’t allow for bulk resending, but this is a feature Klaviyo will be further evaluating later this year.
With Klaviyo pushing toward making transactional Flows easier in Klaviyo, we can see how this feature can help create a seamless experience for Subscribers. We find there can be scenarios where these emails are unintentionally skipped or are asked to resend them. With this new feature, we no longer have to go into a Subscribers profile, find the email they were sent, save it as a template and then resend, which saves us a lot of time and hassle.
Source: https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046797191-Resend-Emails-in-Klaviyo
You can find all of Klaviyo’s updates here: https://www.klaviyo.com/whats-new
LoyaltyLion
LoyaltyLion is a powerful, data-driven tool for loyalty and engagement. It gives you the power to build strong customer relationships through a customised Loyalty Program that integrates with Klaviyo and reviews apps so you can reward your customers for the actions they take.
View Claimed and Unclaimed Rewards
In LoyaltyLion, merchants have always been able to see data around vouchers, how many times a reward has been redeemed, and how many points customers spend to redeem.
LoyaltyLion has updated their platform so that merchants can also discover their customers’ claimed and unclaimed rewards. If you are a LoyaltyLion user, go to your Rewards page and click the button on the top right to export a detailed CSV report.
From this CSV you will be able to identify trends in claimed and unclaimed rewards that will help you to optimize your rewards budget and engagement more easily.
Source: https://loyaltylion.com/uk/blog/feature-updates-from-loyaltylion
New integration with Shopney
With mobile traffic ever on the increase, LoyaltyLion’s latest integration with Shopney enables Shopify Merchants to build a mobile app in minutes. By using the two together you can streamline the loyalty program of your members and show them their profiles on the mobile app. This can be displayed either in the menu section or on the homepage.
You can also reward mobile shoppers for signing up, making purchases and more. All of this helps you to retain and grow your existing mobiles shoppers by giving them the same opportunities as your website shoppers.
Source: https://loyaltylion.com/uk/blog/feature-updates-from-loyaltylion
Cross-Store Rewards
For our LoyaltyLion feature spotlight, we want to talk about their latest feature Cross-Store Rewards.
Cross-Store Rewards enable customers to earn points and claim a reward on one store and redeem them on another. We think this is a great way to drive loyal customers to other businesses and has great growth opportunities for Shopify Merchants. Specifically, we feel that larger Shopify and Shopify Plus stores can benefit from this, and feel that strategic partnerships could be developed between non-competing brands for the same demographic.
To benefit from this you will need to have more than one store under the same LoyaltyLion subscription plan and use a different loyalty program for each of your sites. You can learn more about how to set this up here.
Enterprise merchants using Shopify or Shopify Plus can use Cross-Store Rewards to encourage their customers to engage with their other e-commerce businesses or partners.
Source: Kasia LoyaltyLion Partner Manager
You can find all of LoyaltyLion’s updates here: https://loyaltylion.com/uk/blog/category/new-features
SMSBump
SMSBump is a highly developed SMS Marketing Platform that uses Shopify customer data to create a personalised experience through Flows and Campaigns. Integrating with Klaviyo, ReCharge and LoyaltyLion, Shopify merchants can reach their customers in new ways with incredible open rate and ROI of text messages.
Updates to Segments
SMSBump have revamped their lists and segments section. They have a new improved design, where all filters are grouped by sections with explanations for each of them to create a more modern and simplified view when in the section.
But the biggest improvement is the addition to the OR filter. This means Shopify Merchants can now create even richer segments with more complex formats.
We’ve been lucky to be able to get a behind the scenes look at SMSBump when Mike Stoychev from SMSBump joined us on our Shopify Across the Pond Podcast to discuss the power of SMS marketing for Shopify merchants. You can listen to it here.
Source: Elena at SMSBump
Double Opt-In at Checkout
SMSBump have released an additional feature in which can be found in “Settings” that allows customers to use double opt-in at checkout. This feature already exists in their growth tools but SMSBump decided Checkout Opt-in would also benefit from this feature.
Once the customer subscribes to your text marketing program, they will receive an additional message asking them to confirm their subscription. Once they reply, they will be added to your list.
This feature allows you to create powerful lists of engaged subscribers and will improve your CTR and conversion rates.
Source: Elena at SMSBump
Upload fonts
Creating a custom experience has also been an area SMSBump has capitalised on and now they have added a new feature that allows you to upload your own font to use with their Growth Tools.
Making pop-ups customisable and easily adaptable is something that platforms often lack, but by bringing in this new feature, SMSBump is helping Shopify Merchant build and keep a consistent brand identity across all aspects of their store.
Source: Elena at SMSBump
3 New Analytics Features
For our SMSBump feature spotlight, we want to talk about their latest features added to the SMSBump Analytics.
View Unsubscribes from Campaigns
You can see who unsubscribed from your text marketing within SMSBump. When viewing the Analytics of your Text Marketing Campaign, when you click the magnifying glass icons, a new tab called “Unsubscribed Users” will be present.
From this, you will be able to see exactly how many people have unsubscribed due to that SMS Campaigns.
This feature brings great positives to Shopify Merchants as you can now more easily establish the success of your campaigns. By seeing the number of unsubscribes you may be able to discern that your marketing copy was off or the frequency of your campaigns was wrong.
By assessing these analytics you can identify trends in the long term that can help improve your campaign performance.
Most Purchased Product Sections
If you want to be 100% certain what your customers like to buy, the new SMSBump most purchased product section could be extremely useful.
The products highlighted are the ones that have been ordered most via SMS and give valuable insight into your best sellers, giving you the data needed to drive upsells and cross sells through your SMS Flows.
Additionally, SMSBump has also added Product Images to the analytics view so Shopify Merchant can see quickly and easily which products are selling best.
Measure the benefits of SMSBump with your tech stack
With over 24 Shopify Integrations, it can be difficult to see how these work together to improve your store performance. To help Shopify Merchant see the benefits of SMSBump with their tech stack, the main analytics dashboard now displays the top 5 integrations along with stats such as the total number of orders, conversion rate and total revenue from each specific integration.
If you click on the Full report button on the top right corner you’ll see detailed reports for each integration, showing you metrics such as Revenue, Link Clicks, AOV, etc.
We think this is one of the most useful updates to date for SMSBump as they are bringing data into one platform, in an easy to digest format. This is often a struggle for Shopify Merchants, but with SMSBump, they have now been given a great tool to help them analyse and focus on implementing successful strategies that involve the whole tech stack.
Source: Elena at SMSBump & https://smsbump.com/blogs/analytics-features-improve-performance
You can find all of their updates here: https://smsbump.com/blog/new-features
There we have it! All of the latest updates you need to know from our Partners. We’re really excited to see what else our Partners release next and we’ll be sure to update you!
If you need any additional information or have any questions, leave us a comment below or email us at hello@blendcommerce.com and we’ll connect you to one of our partners or our customer service team here at Blend.
