About marketing your app

Listing your app in the Shopify App Store is just the first step. After your app is live, you can reach merchants through channels outside of the Shopify community to promote your app and build trust with your users.

Driving traffic to your app from outside of Shopify can help improve your app's ranking on the Shopify App Store. Also, if your app gets a significant amount of outside traffic, then your app can be listed in the Trending apps section on the app store's homepage.

Hosting webinars is a great way to engage merchants who want to understand a particular feature or ask any questions they might have about your app. You can use webinars to show merchants new features or best practices for using your app. Webinars can also help you build documentation for your app and figure out issues and areas of growth for your app.

There are many tools that you can use to host your own webinars, including GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, or Google Hangouts. You might also want to consider a service like YouTube Live Events, which will record your webinar and save it for merchants who missed it or are looking for a video tutorial.

You can reach a larger audience of Shopify merchants by publishing video tutorials about your app. You can upload your tutorials to a service like YouTube or Vimeo to have them indexed on search engines for specific keywords. Video sharing services will make your videos easily accessible by merchants and let you distribute your videos across other platforms.

Videos can also easily be embedded into your documentation or your social media, which can potentially be boosted for additional traffic. You can also use videos in email marketing campaigns to show off new features.

After you have created written content, recorded videos, and webinars, you should consider distributing these materials through social media.

Social Media retargeting is a popular marketing technique that can help you reach far more people than you could alone. You can use Facebook retargeting to identify and target specific demographics of people who might be interested in your app. Facebook will allow you to create an audience that revolves around a specific target event that you want to occur. This can help you drive engagement, get exposure to your app, or see merchants interact with a specific feature in your app. You should be able to gain insights on who has been viewing your online content and specifically target your marketing efforts to those merchants.

You can use Facebook retargeting to create dedicated ads or even boost a post within your actual Facebook page to reach an audience outside of your current scope. You can choose to focus on increasing engagement, clicks to your link, or awareness.

Email marketing lets you stay in touch with your merchants and keep them engaged. You can send emails about new features, or generate more traffic for your webinars. You can also let your merchants reach you directly by email, which can help increase trust and let you build relationships with your users.

Some services will let you collect email addresses from potential merchants, so you can send them more information about your app. Facebook Ads also has the ability to collect email addresses which you can import into these services as part of your email marketing initiatives.

You can use email services like AWeber to make email marketing easier.

Being active in external forums can help you access an audience with relevant interests and skillsets. Participating in these forums allows you to build relationships through continuous conversations, and interact with merchants who might be interested in your app. Reaching out to communities in this way can also help build trust with merchants.

Consider larger community groups like the Shopify Community forums, Shopify Blogs, or Reddit, where you can actively engage with the merchant community and provide value to them and their business.

See our guide on writing a press release for your app.

After your app goes live, you can use several methods to promote it to the Shopify community.

You can promote yourself and your apps by creating value for merchants and other Partners in the Shopify Community forums. Being an active member in the forums and helping merchants solve issues will build trust with other members of the Shopify community. You can also suggest your app to merchants if you think it will help solve their issues. Participating in the forums can also give you ideas for improving your app, or building new apps.

Partner-friendly apps can be installed for free by other Shopify Partners. This helps promote your app to other developers, as well as Partners who are helping merchants to set up their store. If other Partners use your app and enjoy it, then they can help promote your app to merchants.

To make your app Partner-friendly, you need to offer free testing for development stores.

Freemium apps are free to download, but offer merchants in-app purchases that add extra features. Making a freemium app allows merchants to see how your app can add value to their store before they pay. The merchant can then decide to purchase your premium features. Offering a freemium app increases retention over time and increases the initial install rate. After you've shown merchants the value that your app can provide, you can consider transitioning your freemium app to a paid app.

A successful app listing will meet the needs of both of its two main audiences: Shopify merchants and the Shopify App Store search engine. Merchants read your app listing to understand the value of your app before they decide to install it on their store. The Shopify App Store search engine parses the information in your app listing to determine when to show your app to merchants.

To learn about what kind of information you should include in your app listing, refer to Writing a Shopify App Store listing. This guide explains how to prepare each section of your app listing so that it appeals to Shopify merchants.

To improve your app listing for the Shopify App Store search engine, you can try the following:

• Fill out as many of the fields in your app listing form as you can, including optional fields.
• Proofread your app listing to make sure that it doesn't have any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes.
• Create a short list of keywords and key phrases to focus on in your app listing. The Google Ads Keyword Planner is free to use and can help you generate ideas and suggestions. When you add keywords and key phrases to your app listing, they should flow logically with the rest of the content.
• Make sure that you don't overuse the keywords and key phrases that you choose, since this can decrease your app's discoverability in the Shopify App Store.
• Avoid using symbols in your keywords. For example, use "tshirt" instead of "t-shirt".
• Use multiple common spellings and terms to increase your search index coverage. For example, you should optimize for both "popup" and "pop up".
• Study on-page SEO to understand the basics of how search engines work, and learn how to apply them to improving your app's SEO on the Shopify App Store.

After you make changes to your listing, you can measure their impact by tracking how many merchants install your app after reading the revised listing on the Shopify App Store. You can also track your listing traffic with Google Analytics or Facebook pixel to see how and where merchants are finding your listing in the Shopify App Store.

You can add positive feedback from merchants to your marketing material to help promote your app. You can collect feedback from reviews on the Shopify App Store, or by talking to merchants directly.

Getting positive reviews in the Shopify App Store can increase your app’s SEO and encourage new merchants to try your app. For more information about reviews, see our guide on managing app reviews.

If merchants enjoy using your app, then they will be more likely to recommend your app to other merchants. You can follow our app requirements to improve your app and provide good service to merchants using your app.

The following case studies feature developers that have successfully marketed their apps to build awareness, attracted traffic to their Shopify App Store listing and their own web and social channels, converted traffic to installs, and built a loyal base of customers.

• eVouch: Learn how New Zealand-based eVouch used the Shopify App Challenge to design, develop and publish an app in just 8 weeks.
• Yoast: With years of experience in SEO, Netherlands-based Yoast shares how they built their Shopify App and the tactics they used to successfully launch and gain their first customers.
• Marsello: Australian developer Marsello shares how they use merchant frustrations and feedback to build and continually improve their all-in-one-marketing app.
• Chatdesk: New York-based Chatdesk discuss their vision behind their software company and how they looked at solving problems as the basis for building their Shopify App.
• Maestrooo: France-based developer Maestrooo outline the methods and techniques they use to manage developing apps, themes, and client work.

Share, learn, and find new opportunities with other developers around the world. Consider joining and engaging with the following digital communities:

• Partner Slack
• .dev Community