How to grow your Shopify app to $100K MRR and beyond
Growing a Shopify app is hard! Competition is fierce. Category giants scoop up most of the merchants. Dozens of smaller apps compete for the rest. With 10 new apps released every day, it constantly gets harder.
How do you grow your app?
You can create content and use influencers for your target audience. Good thinking, but many competitors do the same. It gets saturated.
Outreach to your target merchants can also work. Some of your competitors think so as well. Merchants get bombarded.
SEO? zero-sum game. You gain, your competitors lose. Your competitors gain, you lose.
Performance marketing? Expensive. For some of the top keywords, if you factor in the cost per click and conversion rate to paying customers, you get customer acquisition costs that are out of touch with lifetime values.
It’s tough to grow a Shopify app!
The above tactics have one thing in common: They’re about driving merchants to your funnel — what all apps compete fiercely on.
Most Shopify app developers only focus on the merchant acquisition part of growth. They ignore the conversion part. That’s a mistake.
For most Shopify apps, optimizing the conversion funnel is the most reliable way to grow to $100K MRR and beyond.
Merchants must navigate complex funnels. They start on a landing page or app card and continue through the Shopify app store page, setup, onboarding, subscription, trial, and monetization. Such funnels can easily exceed 20 steps. To become paying customers, merchants must complete all steps successfully. The median conversion rate is less than 1%.
Most Shopify apps convert less than 1% of their Shopify app store page visitors into paying customers.
At the other end of the spectrum, some Shopify apps consistently convert over 5% of their app store page visitors into paying customers. These apps have highly efficient funnels. They can outbid other apps and scale with performance marketing while maintaining positive ROI. These apps with highly efficient funnels grow to become the Shopify app category leaders.
These successful Shopify apps figured out how to optimize their funnel. Their conversion rate is 5x the average. If they figured it out, you can.
Most Shopify apps have the potential to at least double their funnel’s conversion rate.
If you have 10K app store visitors a month generating 100 new paying customers at a 1% conversion rate, doubling your conversion rate to 2% will turn the 10K visitors into 200 new paying customers.
Doubling your funnel’s conversion rate means that you double your new paying customers.
It doesn’t end there. Let’s say you spend $5K/mo on marketing, your marketing gets you 1K app store visits which convert to 10 new paying customers. If you double your funnel’s conversion rate, those 1K visits become 20 new paying customers. Each dollar you spend on marketing now gives you back twice as much.
If you double your funnel’s conversion rate, you also double the efficiency of all your exisiting marketing activities. If that happens, it makes sense to pump more money and grow some of your current marketing activities.
Not only do your existing marketing activities become more efficient when you improve your funnel’s conversion rate. All potential activities do too. Some campaigns that had negative ROI before, now become viable.
By doubling your funnel’s efficiency, you immediately double your new paying customers. In addition, you can increase the budget for your current activities AND launch new ones that have become profitable.
Almost every app’s funnel can be improved. As long as you can improve yours, it should be at the top of your growth efforts.
You can get 3x+ growth by focusing on your funnel.
Because a funnel is a series of steps merchants must pass through, funnel conversion rate optimization works as a series of multiplications.
An improvement in any step affects the whole funnel by the same percentage. Improving 25% in step 2 has the same effect as improving 25% in step 7. In both cases, the funnel as a whole improves by 25%.
Multiplications add up quickly. Improving by 25% in 3 funnel steps doubles the overall conversion rate: (1.25)³x=2x.
Focus on the worst-performing steps to maximize impact. Target several steps where there’s significant poential for improvement.
To find the underperforming steps, you must know where you stand relative to benchmarks for each step.
Prys, a Shopify app growth platform, breaks down your funnel into steps and shows how your app compares to benchmarks of other apps for each step. You can easily see where to focus your optimization efforts and know the potential for improvement.
Finding which steps to focus on to optimize your Shopify app funnel is half the job. The other half is fixing them. While specifics depend on which step is targetted, here are some general tips:
It’s not enough to know that your post-install funnel needs improvement. Is it the monetization flow? Maybe onboarding? If onboarding, which exact steps?
While narrowing down, also maintain a holistic view. If the problem happens on step 3 of 5 in your onboarding flow, maybe you could cut onboarding to 3 steps and eliminate the current step 3.
Whatever steps you can measure in your flow, do so. That’s particularly true for the problem areas. You need to see the conversion rate of each small step now, and when you test a new flow.
User videos can be a goldmine of insights – particularly for bugs and UI issues. Make sure you cover the relevant steps with a user session video platform. Watch session videos of merchants that abandoned the funnel in the problem steps. You’ll probably find out quickly why they do so.
Your support team can provide great insights into why merchants abandon your funnel in a particular step. Interview your team members and read relevant transcripts. Ask the team how they help merchants solve the issue, and how they propose to solve it as part of the flow.
Don’t be shy. Some of your competitors deal with the same issues you do. Some of them figured out good ways to fix these issues. It’s all available for you to inspect and learn from.
Take in all you learned and create an alternative. Do whatever you can to validate your new flow before coding it. It would suck badly if you build something that fails. The support team can be your first validators.
An expert Shopify app funnel optimization agency can help you quickly find the problem areas and create optimal solutions. Working with experienced experts can lead to doubling your funnel’s conversion rate in months.
Run the new flow once it’s ready. Compare the data for the specific step (eg. step 3 of onboarding) and the broader impact (all of the onboarding). Supplement these metrics with merchant session videos and feedback from support.
Optimizing your conversion funnel is your best growth hack. Doubling your conversion rate leads to tripling your sales. Here’s how to do it:
Need help with your funnel? Convert2x has been helping Shopify apps optimize their funnels since 2018.
How to grow your Shopify app to $100K MRR and beyond
Shopify app funnel optimization part 1: Shopify app store page to Shopify app install.
How to double your Shopify app store page visitors
Since 2018, we’ve been helping Shopify apps achieve exceptional growth.
Our team at Convert2x offers a comprehensive solution to scale your Shopify app:
– Grow organic and paid traffic
– Optimize your Shopify funnel
– Maximize monetization
Convert2x was founded by Boaz Lantsman, a repeat entrepreneur and conversion rate optimization expert. Since our inception, we have focused on Shopify apps, perfecting every aspect of scaling: from SEO and paid traffic acquisition through end-to-end funnel optimization that maximizes monetization.
Before founding Convert2x, Boaz led marketing at a B2B SaaS startup, where his strategies multiplied the conversion rate by 16x and increased sales by 7x, leading to the company’s acquisition by DocuSign for nearly $100 million. Following this success, Boaz co-founded RoutePerfect, a travel startup where he achieved a 12x increase in conversion rate and scaled the platform to 5 million users and $500K MRR.
In addition to his work at Convert2x, Boaz co-founded Prys, a breakthrough Shopify app growth platform (https://www.prys.io). Prys provides end-to-end attribution, showing which search terms and campaigns drive your revenues, and offering actionable insights to scale your Shopify app.
At Convert2x, we apply Boaz’s proven methodologies and our team’s extensive expertise to help Shopify apps thrive. Join us, and let’s grow your app to new heights.
We help Shopify apps find and prioritize keywords, scale traffic with SEO and paid ads, maximize monetization, and optimize the Shopify app store page and post-install funnel.
We had a great experience on our funnel optimization project. Boaz was instrumental in helping us improve our funnel, which ultimately led to doubling our conversion rate and tripling our sales.“
Boaz helped us build a cohesive digital funnel and improve our customer experience. He is a seasoned marketer who understood our brand positioning, value, and the competitive landscape.”
Boaz and his team delivered a highly rigorous, professional, and impactful project to optimize our conversion funnel and we would not hesitate to recommend Convert 2x to other businesses looking to realize exponential returns.”
I’ve worked with many consultants before, who are just in it to sign another client and make another dollar. Boaz is far from that type of person. There haven’t been many people in my career who I’ve worked with that “get it” quite like Boaz. He uses a data-driven approach and industry knowledge to provide strategies that work. He helped us optimize some areas of our business better than I could have imagined. I thought some of the projections he proposed to us were impossible, but we’ve actually outperformed these and are still on our way up. I couldn’t recommend Boaz more (unless you are a competitor, in which case he sucks…)