I may be a little biased here, but Endear is the number one retail marketing app I would recommend to brands on Shopify POS. No matter its size, it’s important for any brand (and really any company in any industry) to be able to control their data and fully utilize all of their resources. If you fail to do this, you will fail as a company.

For online stores and retail stores, your data includes your customers and their order information, while your resources include your sales team and the tools you’ve given them. Together, these should build trust with your customers, boost sales, significantly improve the shopping experience. Endear is a retail-specific CRM that connects directly to your Shopify account to import and sync all of your data. That data is then put in the hands of your sales team so they can leverage it to manage, message, and sell to their clients. With foot traffic in retail stores slowly declining (and likely only trending lower due to COVID-19) it’s important for your sales team to be able to sell and checkout digitally.

With Endear, you can filter data by categories like Total Sales and Last Order Date to group segments of customers, which your team can then contact via email and SMS. If you plan on using Shopify POS to sell in person, I would also plan on including Endear in that tech stack.

If you are part of the Shopify fan club like myself, you probably recognize that, while Shopify excels at numerous other features, reporting isn’t quite its strength. The same is true with its POS. The reporting you get out-of-the-box is fantastic for those small businesses and single-store retailers, but bigger brands tend to quickly outgrow this. This is where Better Reports comes in handy.

Better Reports is the ultimate Shopify plug-in for reporting. Say goodbye to massive CSV exports of data that take your team an entire week to discern any insights from. With this app, you can build and save reports in real-time using every piece of data flowing through your Shopify account (both POS and e-commerce), share them through integrations with Google Suite, and use them to fuel retargeting and other marketing campaigns.

Shopify allows you to create discount codes out of the box and apply automatic discounts, but only in a very limited fashion. In order to create the types of automatic bundling discounts customers are used to seeing, the Ultimate Special Offers app is the go-to add-on for Shopify.

This app allows you to automate promotions like buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deals, product bundles, and total order value thresholds for discounts. This takes the pressure and responsibility off of your store team to know when and where to apply discounts; it also increases upselling and cross-selling opportunities and improves your average order value.

Nothing gets me excited like a good loyalty program. Every customer likes the feeling of reaching VIP status. With that being said, as a customer, nothing turns me off like a lazily-designed customer loyalty program. Thankfully, there are several rewards programs apps offered by Shopify with which you can create your own.

I chose LoyaltyLion here because of its array of options for how you can award points. If you're a Shopify Plus customer, you can give points for quite literally anything a customer does. Beyond the basics of making a purchase or a referral program, LoyaltyLion lets you set up rewards for product page visits, product reviews, social media tagging, engagement on Facebook Messenger, and more!

Have you ever bought something and received a standard, unpersonalized follow-up email? These types of emails can do more harm than good. Customers are smart enough to know that the email they receive 30 seconds after their transaction is likely an automated email. But, you’ve collected emails through exit-intent popups and customer purchases — and you shouldn’t let them go to waste. This is where Spently comes in.

Today’s email apps leave little excuse for you to make your transactional emails (e.g. shipping, renewals, cart abandonment, etc.) both well-designed and original in the messaging. Fortunately, Spently has an intricate template builder with great stock templates as a jumping-off point and is fairly simple to use. You can trigger your templates from all of the different Shopify notifications in addition to several unique triggers for your email list.

Shopify POS is a great tool for both small brands and big brands alike to process their in-person transactions. If you're already on Shopify for your e-commerce business, you get the added benefit of keeping all of your orders, customers, products, and inventory in one place. However, pairing these apps with the entire Shopify suite can scale a one-store operation into the next big thing. Use Endear to build and grow a loyal base of customers who sing your praises and always come back for more. Through personal one-on-one styling and relationship building, Endear fosters an environment where your customers feel just as much a part of the brand as your team.