With the abundance of marketing tools, methods, and techniques, ecommerce brands today need a solid framework to engage visitors as soon as they land on a site, which is exactly where onsite engagement platforms like Privy sneak into the picture.
Here’s a quick table of content for you:
If you want to convert each visitor to a loyal customer, Privy has the tools you need. From instantly engaging first-time visitors to retaining old customers, it offers an entire suite of e-commerce marketing tools that can give your store the boost needed to generate more sales.
During my time as a Head of Growth in the Shopify ecosystem, I have personally tried and tested Privy. In this article featuring an extensive Privy review, I’ll be talking about what Privy is, the features it offers, and whether or not it is the right software for your store.
Full transparency time: I may get some commission if you click on these links but it won’t cost you anything. Also, these tools have not paid me to write this review. I use it every day and I support some of these projects regardless.
Privy Review: An Overview
Founded in 2011, Privy is a popular e-commerce marketing platform explicitly designed to boost online sales through targeted on-site displays and automated emails.
Privy offers you numerous templates to give a head start on your designs. You can create your projects from scratch so that the promotional campaigns fit your brand image. Moreover, Privy’s automation features keep your customers up to date without wasting additional time or effort.
Privy also offers lessons and classes on efficiently using their software, effective marketing techniques, and e-commerce strategies. These include onboarding lessons and masterclasses on various topics.
Privy supports popular e-commerce sites and marketing platforms like Shopify, Shopify Plus, Bigcommerce, and many more. Moreover, more than 600,000 businesses use Privy worldwide. Their current customers include Death Wish Coffee, Elva’s All Naturals, Wood Wood Toys, and Leesa.
Privy Review: Features
In this section, I describe all the features of Privy’s tools. You can also get any tool separately by contacting Privy’s sales team.
Privy Email
Privy Email is an email marketing tool. It allows you to send various types of emails to prospective customers, like newsletters, cart abandonment emails, customer win-back emails, and subscriber welcome emails.
These emails help you stay in touch with them by providing various offers and incentives for buying your products. Besides, Privy users get access to live chat and email support from a human agent 24/7.
Newsletters
Privy allows you to design and send newsletters to your customers, providing a reliable channel for you to communicate with them.
Privy’s drag & drop email editor allows you to set up newsletters. You can customize the templates to match the theme of your brand. Moreover, you can pull in products from your Shopify catalog with the click of a button.
Cart Abandonment
Customers often start shopping on a site only to abandon it a few moments later. Privy aims to avoid losing such customers by sending automated cart abandonment emails.
It allows you to set up an automated system. Once it’s complete, it requires no additional attention. The email templates are fully customizable. Besides, you can also include unique coupon codes to incentivize the customers.
Privy sends cart abandonment emails in three stages. The first email is sent an hour after the abandonment, and it informs them that they have an abandoned cart. Moreover, it provides them a link to continue their shopping.
When the first email doesn’t work, a second email is sent 24 hours later. This email includes a limited-time coupon to provide the extra nudge required to complete the sale.
Finally, a third email is sent 48 hours later. This email is typically sent several hours before the coupon expires as a final reminder.
Customer Winback
Customer Winback Emails remind customers to restock on previously purchased products. You can also attach various product catalogs to encourage the customers to try out other items your store has for sale.
These emails take less than 10 minutes to set up, and you only design the email and schedule how frequently it is sent. Once they’re activated, you’ll also be able to see exactly how much additional revenue these emails are generating.
Welcome Emails
Privy allows you to go beyond sending welcome emails by enabling you to create a welcome series.
A series of welcome emails enable you to share your stories, products, and communities with the subscribers. It can include all the essential things you feel your subscribers should know about your business.
Privy Conversion
Privy Conversion helps your store build marketing channels by using various sorts of pop-up displays.
You can design all the displays from available templates or create one from scratch using color schemes and fonts that match your store.
List Growth
Building an email list is very important for your store. The larger your email list, the more people you’ll reach, and it continuously increases the likelihood of someone buying your product.
Your growing email list allows you to acquire more customers without spending more money.
Spin to Win
Spin to Win is another unique way to acquire email addresses from your target customers and expand your list. It is an interactive pop-up that requires visitors to enter their email addresses to spin a wheel.
The wheel contains various offers like a significant discount, free shipping, or other rewards. Privy will show the redemption code and send it to the new subscribers via email if they land on an offer.
Up-sell and Cross-sell
Up-sell refers to replacing an item in a customer’s cart with a more expensive item. Meanwhile, cross-sell refers to adding a new item to a customer’s cart.
The idea is to get people who are already buying items to buy more. This feature acts like a store assistant who recommends complementary products.
Privy’s pop-up displays suggest relevant products and nudges customers to add more items to their cart. Usually, stores also recommend a bigger size of the ordered product.
Free Shipping Bar
Offering free shipping is one of the best ways for online stores to boost sales. So Privy’s Free Shipping Bar offers users a wide range of dynamic free shipping displays.
This feature utilizes geo-targeting filters to customize the free shipping display based on different postal codes, states, and even countries. You can set a threshold for free shipping, and when customers are close to that threshold, they are likely to make additional purchases.
Privy Text
Privy Text is a tool for SMS marketing that creates a list of “textable contacts” collected through a Privy Display Popup.
It is effortless to set up and allows you to reach customers where they’re the most available, mobile phones.
Direct Texts
Direct texts contain different messages that you can send to individual contacts.
Users can send confirmation sign-up messages, abandoned cart messages (including the link for the abandoned cart), and unique coupon codes. You can also create targeted banners, bars, pop-ups, and simple landing pages.
Broadcast Texts
This feature allows you to send customized text messages which include coupons, exclusive offers, and promotions directly to multiple contacts. You can set schedules to deliver the right offers at the appropriate times.
You can even sort your contact list by attributes like Last Order or Total Lifetime Spend to improve customer targeting and increase the relevance of your messages. This option helps users reach more customers by raising new and repeat sales prospects.
Privy Review: Unique Selling Points
Privy has a lot to offer, but a few features set it apart from the competition. Here are some unique features Privy offers to its customers.
Advanced Audience Targeting
Privy offers audience targeting rules that allow users to target individuals with specific campaigns. Its purpose is to increase the relevance of your campaigns by displaying the right message to the right person at the right time.
You can also apply multiple conditions to a single campaign. For example, you can specifically target first-time mobile visitors or customers from a specific state who have visited your site more than four times.
Campaign Scheduling
The Scheduling feature allows you to set campaigns up in a way so that it broadcasts and expires at set times. If you have planned multiple campaigns within a busy period, Privy makes it much easier to properly execute them. For example, you can set the time and date of a campaign so that it launches on April 05, 5 PM and expires 5 days later.
Privy’s Plugins and Integrations
Businesses often use different combinations of tools to deliver the best experience. As such, compatibility between various tools is essential for users.
Privy offers integration with a wide range of platforms, including various e-commerce sites, SMS tools, marketing tools, and email service providers.
I’ve compiled a list of some of the available integrations here. Privy is constantly adding support for more programs. If you don’t see your desired software on the list, don’t worry. Privy builds custom integrations as required by customers.
E-commerce Platforms
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SMS Integrations
- Attentive
- Concierge
- Klaviyo
- Postscript
- Retention Rocket
Facebook Marketing Platforms
- Flashchat
- Octane.ai
- Recart
- ShopMessage
Email Providers
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Other Integrations
- Zapier
- Smile.io loyalty programs
- Adroll retargeting
- Google Analytics
- Slack
Privy Review: What I Liked
There’s a lot to love about Privy. Here is a list of some of my favorites.
Easy to Use and Setup
Privy boasts a very easy-to-use interface. Users don’t need to be technical experts to get the best out of this software. Setting the campaigns up can take fewer than 10 minutes, so you can start getting the most out of it as soon as possible.
Learning Tools
Keeping track of Privy’s tools and applications can get overwhelming at times. That’s why they have a dedicated blog that can keep you up to date with recent events in the market space.
They offer a store grader that helps you understand how well your store is doing. They also have a masterclass on Privy, e-commerce marketing podcasts, help docs, and one-on-one coaching.
Reporting
After you’ve launched a campaign, you can review its performance using the Convert dashboard. The Reports tool makes analyzing campaigns and emails easy.
You can leverage your data by using this tool to understand trends in customer preferences and build strategies accordingly. You can also integrate Privy with Google Analytics to get more in-depth.
Privy Review: What I Disliked
No tool is without flaws, and Privy is not an exception. There are some things that I wish Privy did better.
As Privy offers a lot of different pop-ups, users have to be aware of how many of these are being shown to customers. Too many pop-ups can overwhelm store visitors, causing them to stop visiting the shop altogether.
There is no room to add any sort of video pop-ups. All your displays will show text and images only.
Moreover, there is a duplication bug, where [email protected] and [email protected] will create separate contacts, so users will end up sending multiple emails to the same option, which is very annoying as it can flood the inboxes of your contacts. Users have to remove the duplicate contacts manually.
Privy Review: Pricing
Privy comes at three plans: Free, Starter, and Growth. A 15-day trial version is available to give you a taste of what Privy has to offer.
You can add Privy Texts separately for the first two packages, starting at $10 a month for 100 contacts. The Growth plan already includes Privy Texts.
If you’re looking only for list growth, you can also use Privy Conversion to get up to 50,000 pageviews which start at $70 a month.
Free Plan
The Free plan offers a generous amount of features. Users get up to 100 mailable contacts, unlimited flyouts, and pop-ups to grow their contacts list.
Other features include Add to Card, Free Shipping Bar Displays, advanced customer targeting features, and live email and chat support.
Starter Plan
The Starter plan starts at $15 per month. It includes Privy Conversions, Emails, and all the features from the previous plan.
It offers unlimited email sends and an upgrade from 100 to 250 mailable contacts. Users also get access to newsletters and cart abandonment emails.
Growth Plan
Finally, the Growth plan starts at $45 per month, and it includes Privy Conversion and all the features from the Starter plan.
It offers you a whopping 3,000 emails and 500 textable contacts (along with 3000 text sends). You can now send broadcast, cart abandonment, and after sign-up text messages.
After 3,000 email contacts, the cost increases by $15 per month for 1,000 email contacts. The price will increase by another $10 for 250 textable contacts after 500 textable contacts.
Lastly, this package offers free 1:1 onboarding, where an expert helps you get started up on Privy.
Privy Review: Best Suited For
Privy is best suited for small and medium e-commerce stores that want to grow their list and boost online sales. It is also an excellent tool for users who have never used similar tools before as they provide tons of tutorials and support.
Final Thoughts
Privy is a very well-designed, all-in-one e-commerce marketing platform. They provide businesses with the right tool to boost their sales by engaging new subscribers and existing customers.
All in all, I believe Privy can be a fantastic software for online stores. While numerous alternatives are available at lower prices, Privy offers better value for its packages. As a result, it can be a great addition to any Shopify store.
Disclaimer: Please note, I may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. However, these are the best tools I have tested for launching a website/store. You can read my affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy & affiliate disclosure.