3 years ago, my team at Lazer, Ashish Yelekar, and I began building Shopify apps and documenting our learnings, helping out 10,000+ merchants along the way. And today, we’re thrilled to announce that our flagship Shopify app, Supercharged SMS, has officially been acquired by Appregator 🎉
In 2019, after running and scaling our own Shopify stores, selling everything from blankets to phone cases to bags, we saw first-hand the power and independence Shopify gives merchants to run and scale their businesses.
More importantly, we experienced the power of the Shopify App Store, and how crucial Shopify apps are to all aspects of running a business. Everything from search & discovery, customer acquisition and retention, up-selling, logistics, and scaling, relies on Shopify apps.
When first thinking through what to build on the Shopify App Store, instead of trying to figure out a new idea by ourselves, we started by talking directly to Shopify merchants and by browsing Shopify community forums to learn what real problems merchants were experiencing. Throughout this process, we found that merchants who were using the Shopify POS platform were complaining that there was no good way for them to send text messages to their customers directly from the POS. So that’s where we started.
We quickly built an app that accomplished that one goal — to give a merchant the ability to send an SMS to their customer directly from the POS. Shortly after launching, it naturally started to pick up steam. We began learning more about the SMS industry, and merchants were finding our app organically on the App Store and started requesting more features. And we continued to expand the product into a fully-fledged SMS platform that Shopify merchants could rely on. Soon after, our mission was formed— to be the most intuitive, and highest performing, SMS marketing and communications platform for Shopify stores.
Email has been the standard way to market and reach customers over the last decade, but as time progresses it proves to become more ineffective over time. Open rates tend to be low around 17%, conversions through email tend to be poor on average, and customers’ inboxes tend to get flooded with emails that they don’t want. Email performance marketing has dropped 47% over the last 5 years.
As a company, you want to be able to reach your customers and leads effectively, whether it’s to convert them, share marketing materials, or simply to communicate to them.SMS has proven to be the most effective channel. Open rates of SMS messages are 98%+, CTR within SMS is 30%+, and it’s a 1:1 channel between you and the customer which they have opted in for. Millennials and younger generations prefer messaging over email.
That’s why we’re so proud of what we’ve built with Supercharged SMS. Throughout the time we’ve been operating the company, we’ve helped more than 9,000+ Shopify merchants, have sent/received nearly 10,000,000 SMS messages, and have accumulated more than 100 5-star reviews… All while helping merchants achieve a 90%+ open rate, a ~30% average CTR, and a ~24% conversion rate ❤️
View our last public update: https://twitter.com/ZainManji/status/1521198691792605185
We couldn’t be more excited to see our baby in the hands of the Appregator team, who we know will continue the excellence and grow the company further to reach its full potential to help millions of Shopify merchants around the world 🚀
As for us, we will continue to be embedded in the Shopify ecosystem, building apps, running storefronts, and helping others do the same. Shopify is one of the ecosystems we truly love, and we believe there’s no better place to build great businesses and products while being able to impact people in tremendously positive ways.
For any questions or comments, feel free to reach us by email at founders@lazertechnologies.com or drop a message to me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZainManji 👋
If you’re also building or looking to build a Shopify app and want to chat about growing it or getting assistance with it, feel free to hit us up 🚀
If you haven’t read our previous article on how to create, launch, and grow a successful Shopify app as well, I highly recommend it 😊 🛍