Managing an ecommerce business is quite a handful. Making sure your website is spotless, well-designed and competitive in terms of product offerings takes a lot of time and investing finances. Moreover, making sure your sales cover the investments requires planning ahead, constant monitoring of customer behavior on your website and re-investing in marketing and customer service strategy. To be able to do all that your 2016 ecommerce tools must-haves need to be planned right away.

To make sure you are covering all the basics necessary to fuel conversions in the upcoming months, you need to review the tools you are using to analyze, market and reach out to customers on a regular basis. Each month there are new apps and programs out there that may just give you that edge that you were missing until now and some of these apps may even bring you a concrete business advantage over your competitors.

We rounded up the 2016 ecommerce tools to have in order to be at the forefront of a successful ecommerce management strategy.

Keeping up with your analytics data

No matter what you offer to your customers or how brilliant your website is, you still may have a hard time in getting users to browse your website or potential customers to buy something from you. To be able to monitor your website traffic, conversion rates and average order value you need to invest in analytics tools that will give you comprehensive insights to use at your advantage.

Even though we urge you to try different analytics tool and test what suits your business best, our top 2 analytics tool for 2016 remain Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. Google Analytics is pretty much the holy grail of website analytics and we’re sure most of you already use it on a regular basis.

Crazy Egg is the "not so new kid on the block" that has been gaining momentum thanks to its excellent tracking of user behavior, scroll, clicking and overviews of which page parts are mostly visited and clicked on. Nowadays such knowledge of your customer behavior on a particular website page is key to understand whether you got your page design right or you need to make some changes.

Mutli-channel customer targeting

Once you have a great website, it simply won’t be enough to stay put and wait for customers to land in your web store and start spending. It takes serious targeting, brand identity building and marketing to make sure your brand is noticed and customers know you offer quality services and a great customer care.

To manage all aspects of marketing including social media, online PR, online advertising and content curation you can rely on marketing tools such as Channel Advisor which is an old time favorite of ours. Channel Advisor helps distributing retailer data within the global marketplace, offers great reporting and customer service packages to make sure your customers stick with your brand and become advocates for your products.

Email marketing planned and delivered in a smart way

Many have reduced the power of email marketing to simply sending out plain, uninformative emails with rather obsolete calls to action. Email marketing is still very much an essential aspect of ecommerce marketing and should be planned wisely. Good email marketing campaign can help a great deal in building your brand’s identity as well as customer loyalty. Both of these marketing aspects lead to more conversions and great PR.

While we are big fans of MailChimp and would still recommend it to anyone in the business, another non-traditional tool which can help you build awesome email campaigns, offers 24/7 technical support, integrations with all types of platforms and custom marketing solutions is Bronto. Certainly worth checking out if you are looking for an advanced solution for your email marketing efforts.

Social media for eCommerce

We’re pretty certain you are very well aware of how important it is to keep the conversation going with your potential customers over social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on sometimes can even become a direct channel of sales if used smartly and professionally. This is why we urge you to invest some time in planning your social media campaigns instead of publishing posts and tweets every now and then.

Carefully planned and executed campaigns can truly make a difference in building yourself a loyal audience of customers and brand fans. However, keeping up with social media accounts and updating these on a regular level can get stressful and time consuming. To help you manage multiple social media accounts, gain new followers, track feedback for your social media efforts, we rounded up our top 4 social media tools for ecommerce:

1. Buffer is probably among the most popular tools for social media management. It’s pretty basic and very simple to use. It lets you manage all your social media accounts in one place and schedule campaigns in advance. If you’re looking for something simple and basic, this is the one.

2. SocialBro is your must-have tool if you’re all about Twitter. Twitter community insights, analytics, planning tweets all in one tool.

3. Infogr.am is for all ofyou  who base their social media efforts on images and visual elements. With this tool you can easily build all kinds of infographics in just a few minutes and thanks to all the great features, whatever you build will look polished and professional.

4. LikeAlyzer is a great thingy to have around as it provides all your Facebook analytics and insights in one place. It also lets you compare your brand to other similar ones to get a better idea of how you rank on Facebook.

If you would like to consult with us on a particular eCommerce marketing and analytics tool, shoot us an email and we’ll be more than glad to help you out in finding what you need to manage your ecommerce website the best way possible!