Kit is a virtual employee created in 2013 by co-founder Michael Perry. It helps manage business-to-consumer conversations for small stores so that entrepreneurs can focus on other important business functions.
Shopify acquired Kit CRM in April this year to help its users ‘small shop owners’ in interacting with their customers over text messages. It allowed businesses offer real-time support to their customers or answer their queries via SMS and other messaging platforms.
The new ‘Favors feature for Kit’ has taken a step ahead in helping webmasters market their products. It can automatically create two Facebook ad campaigns for the selected categories of products/services and promote two Facebook social posts free of charge. It can also send thank you emails to first five customers upon successful purchases.
The idea is basically to provide shop owners with a dedicated marketing employee that helps them achieve their sales goals. Initially, it is extended as a ‘Favor’ until it makes first five sales.
Shopify will not charge a fee for this service regardless of how long it takes. Once a webmaster starts making sales, they can hire ‘Kit’ permanently for only $10/month and even opt for Kit Pro (a more talented marketing employee) for $25/month. It can tackle marketing tasks like:
- Product discounts
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Recovering abandoned carts
- Leveraging positive customer reviews
- Using ad retargeting to bring visitors back to purchase
- Automating accounting and invoicing tasks
- Setting up robust holiday promotional campaigns
According to Perry, “the purpose of doing this trial is to counter the fear of small business owners who are skeptical about the performance of Kit. By offering a free service, we are lowering the barriers so that merchant would at least give it a shot and try the new features of Kit. And we feel very confident that all our users will like to see the actual sales happening without having to use their credit cards in advance”.
Shopify demonstrates this confidence in its new software with the help of a positive Shopify Review received from a user “Wear Kids Play”. It says, “Kit is the best employee on our team – super efficient and the automation of tasks that Kit takes care of has seen an increase in repeat business and sales. We love that Kit posts to Facebook and Instagram, as well as the apps that integrate with Kit saves us time so we can work on our own business”.
Earlier this month Shopify also acquired a product design firm Boltmade to boost the features of Shopify plus. Some of these included: a dedicated account management personnel, a customizable checkout process and discounts on other add-on service offerings by Shopify. With new team expert engineers and designers, Shopify is targeting larger merchants operating on the platform that does a fairly high volume business like Reddit, Wikipedia, Tesla and the WWF.
Shopify’s plan, for now, is to continue expanding Kit and its features, and promoting it through the new Favors approach that seems like a smart way to expand the reach of its shop-running bot.
Dylan Moran is a digital marketing expert who enjoys writing about helping small businesses be successful with their Internet and social media marketing objectives. He has extensive experience in community management, social media consultancy, child safety, and crisis management.
