6 Squarespace Integrations for Marketing Your Online Shop
We love Squarespace for a number of reasons; the awesome themes, how easy it is to use… Reason #401 is that there are a number of great tools you can use for marketing your business.
If you’ve had a website for a little while, you’ll know that it’s not simply a case of “build it and they will come.” There are millions of websites online and you need to somehow draw just some of the browsing traffic to your website.
Building a good-looking, functional website is just your first task. Next up, you’ll need to tackle how you’re going to market it, by drawing more eyes to your site and keeping them interested once they’re there. Here are some great plugins and integrations that can help:
(Note: Some of these may contain affiliate links)
Get our tips for where to begin marketing a new website here
#1. Convertkit
If you’re wanting to drive more targeted traffic to your website, then email marketing is a great way to do this. The idea is that you build up a list of email subscribers who are part of your target market and interested in what you have to say.
People often wonder if it’s still worth bothering with email marketing given that the number of daily emails sent is projected to soar past 306 billion this year. Data from a few different email marketing studies indicates that it is worth doing. Consider these points:
Within ecommerce, email has higher conversion rates at 4.29% average than direct referrals (2.93%), search (3.04%) and social (1.81%). (Smart Insights)
59% of consumers say that email marketing influences their purchasing decision. (Hubspot)
Email marketing is worth doing, but in order to use it successfully, you need the right tools! You don’t want to be manually inputting email addresses or sending out email blasts to everyone when the content is only relevant to a segment, for example.
Convertkit is an excellent email marketing tool that integrates with Squarespace websites. The tool allows you to do things like:
Grow your email list using features like sign-up forms and landing pages. There are typically more design options than what you’ll find available through Squarespace.
Create smart, professional-looking emails.
Put marketing automation in place. This is essential for efficient email marketing. For example, you can set up automated sequences based on the actions or interests of people on your list. You can segment your audience based on their personal interests so that you can send the right message at the right time. The screenshot below shows a good example:
View reports and track metrics, so that you can decide upon what you might test or improve.
You can get started with Convertkit on a free plan, but paid tiers offer more features and more email numbers allowed per month.
#2. RightMessage
The power of segmentation is a key strategy for marketing effectively. Segmentation allows you to get the right message to the right people at the right time. It means your messaging can be highly relevant to the people who are seeing it, which is always going to get better results than a “one size fits all” approach!
As far as tools that integrate with Squarespace, RightMessage is a great choice for targeted messaging. It works by behaviourally segmenting your website visitors, so that they are seeing information that is relevant to them. In other words, every website visitor doesn’t always see the same things.
Visitors can be presented with offers based upon their customer journey. This is one way to keep it relevant - if they’ve looked at certain things or interacted with others, it shows what they are interested in.
RightMessage allows you to target:
Opt-in offers
Sales pages
Landing pages
Your email list.
They have features that allow you to set up surveys or quizzes on your website so you can learn more about the people who are visiting. The screenshot below shows an example of how they might help you to segment website visitors:
You can take a free 14-day trial of RightMessage and plans start at $29 per month.
#3. Product Color Image Swatch
Do you sell products with color variations? People will want to see exactly what those colors look like before they decide on a purchase, but it can be time-consuming photographing and uploading every variation.
This is where the Product Color Image Swatch plugin comes in. Instead of having a text drop-down for color variants, you can show a swatch image. You can set up the plugin with your own hex codes for colors and can also upload your own images or patterns.
An example is shown in the screenshot below:
Product Color Image Swatch is $39 for a standard license (one site), or $117 for a business license (more than one site).
#4. Product Gallery Video
Sometimes video really is the best way to give customers a better feel for a product they see online. After all, it’s not like brick-and-mortar stores where they can pick items up and look them over - you have to show all angles online so that they can approximate that experience.
Reviews of various studies show that product videos sell. For example, one online retailer found that product videos made customers 144% more likely to purchase. Of course, to make an impact, you need a high-quality video showing different angles of the product.
On Squarespace websites, you also need a reliable plugin to set up your video. This is where the Product Gallery Video plugin comes in. You can either set it up yourself, or get help from our concierge service.
Product Gallery Video is $27 for a standard license (single website) or $87 for a business license (multiple websites).
#5. SEMrush
Every successful marketer relies upon accessing good quality data. Why? Because you need to be monitoring the right metrics to track your progress and figure out what works.
SEMrush has a comprehensive package of features, providing insights and analysis for optimizing many areas of your marketing. For example:
SEO workflows
Analysis for paid traffic
Social media analysis
Content marketing insights
Market research data.
At the time of writing this, they offer around 35 different tools, monitor billions of keywords, and trillions of links and domains. They offer a seven-day free trial, after which you’d choose one of their tiered plans.
#6. Referral Candy
Customer referrals are a powerful way to market your business. We know that people look for recommendations from others whom they know and trust. Word-of-mouth referrals make up 20-50% of all purchasing decisions, so finding ways to encourage those referrals can be an important boost to your business.
One way to achieve this is to implement a referral program among your customers. Essentially, you’re rewarding them for referring new customers to your business. You can run this from your Squarespace website, but you need the right tools to do it.
Referral Candy is a customer referral program software that integrates with your Squarespace website. The system allows you to automate your referral program so that once it is set up, customers can refer via a set tracking process. They offer some great templates and promotion across different marketing channels.
Referral Candy offers a 30-day free trial, after which you sign up for a monthly plan.
Download our tips here for marketing a new website
Final thoughts
Squarespace provides you with great tools to build a beautiful website, but once that’s done, you need to market it!
The tools we’ve highlighted here cover a few different areas of marketing, all of which can play an important role for your business. Where should you start? We’d suggest starting with the things you can manage on your website, such as SEO and building an email list. You can always move onto some more advanced strategies (which can involve a bigger investment in software) once you’ve got some steady business coming in.
Wherever you choose to start, it’s important to have a strong marketing strategy in place. This is how you can get noticed among the millions of other websites.
