Using multiple apps to market your Shopify store and engage shoppers is frustrating. Lucky for you, Growave consolidates a wide array of tools under one dashboard. Enjoy the ability to extend loyalty and rewards programs to your customers, better handling of customer reviews, comprehensive customer messaging capabilities, and so much more. There wasn’t much we didn’t like about Growave, but we’ll let you be the judge.
Growave: The Good and the Bad
Growave appears to be at the top of the class in terms of marketing kits for Shopify store owners. The full-featured plans are a boon for anyone trying to stoke repeat business and better customer loyalty. We did notice some hiccups and flaws during our testing, but Growave has far more virtues going for it than drawbacks, in our opinion.
What Growave Is Good At
Growave delivers a kit of tools that can elevate your Shopify store to the next level. All plans come with every one of Growave’s essential features, from loyalty programs and customer reviews to wishlists, social account logins, and more.
Loyalty, rewards, and referrals
The heart of Growave’s platform is a set of standout features that users and customers love. These present a fast track to boosting customer retention and lifetime value.
The loyalty program feature lets you reward customers with points for purchases, sign-ups, social shares, reviews, and more. You can define how many rewards each action can earn a visitor and how customers can redeem their points, plus set up point milestones with progressively better discounts and freebies.
For VIP shoppers, create tiers with special perks and statuses. And spinning up a referral program is easy within Growave, letting you take advantage of free word-of-mouth marketing and the increased conversions that come with it.
Rewarding shoppers’ engagement breeds loyalty. Customers feel valued and are incentivized to come back to your Shopify store time and again.
Powerful, unified dashboard
Rather than making you juggle multiple apps, Growave consolidates essential Shopify marketing and customer relationship features into one powerhouse offering. That is exemplified by the software’s potent, all-encompassing dashboard.
Everything is configurable in one place. Automate loyalty programs, curate reviews, and manage rewards, point systems, VIP tiers, referrals, and more.
You can use the dashboard to manually assign points and tiers to customers, add points in bulk, and edit balances, so you have complete flexibility to make changes if any of the automated elements fail or you want to run special promotions.
It’s also your single source of truth for customer data, like contact information and recent activity. With the centralized dashboard, you can see everything that’s happening with your loyalty, rewards, and referral programs, plus additional hard data that can inform your business decisions.
Automated email reminders
There’s enough behavioral data captured on your Growave dashboard that you can use it to segment personalized email campaigns and reminders.
Growave includes templates so you can send targeted emails when milestones are reached, points are about to expire, or a sale is about to drop. You can manually construct and send emails or automate email sends by setting triggers for customer actions, time periods, milestones, and more.
This gets further enhanced by Growave’s integrations with Omnisend and Klayivo on select plans.
The tool also supports reward notification emails that update customers on points earned and expiring rewards. Even birthday and holiday gift emails can be automated to delight your audience.
Staying visible in customer inboxes helps build meaningful relationships and loyalty. These set-it-and-forget-it email campaigns and notifications make that easy.
Wishlists
Growave makes it easy for shoppers to save their favorite items for return and repeat purchases. Your customers can wishlist products by clicking hearts or another icon you set on product pages and collections. Store owners can also add wishlist icons to headers.
Visitors don’t even need to register or log in to start curating wishlists, which helps reduce friction. That’s a big win for shoppers that don’t want to create an account just to browse your products.
And they can even create multiple wishlists, segmented to their liking, then easily share any of them via email or social media to their friends, family, and fans.
On your end, you can capitalize on this wishlist feature by sending targeted marketing emails when items go on sale, come back in stock, or are almost sold out. Your store visitors can opt into these messages whenever they add something to their wishlist.
Requesting reviews from recent shoppers
Growave takes the work out of gathering reviews by automating post-purchase review requests. Send emails to customers after purchase asking for their feedback and a review of the products they’ve bought.
Review and feedback forms embedded in these emails are fully customizable and you can schedule exactly when one of these will be sent, whether you want it in a shopper’s inbox immediately after purchase or you want to give them a few days with your product before asking for a review.
This can also be used to help your product development. Review forms can get creative, asking for detailed feedback on product quality, comfort, design, or anything else.
To avoid bombarding customers’ inboxes with too many messages, multiple products can be consolidated into single review-request emails. You can also set in your dashboard whether any products should be excluded from these automated messages.
On top of that, you can also schedule reminders to nudge customers if initial response rates are low. Reviews can even be incentivized by offering loyalty points and rewards in exchange, which is simple to accomplish within Growave.
Showcasing customer reviews
Once customer reviews start rolling in because of your email requests and engagement, you can use them as valuable user-generated content (UGC) and collateral for marketing your Shopify store further.
Showcase your glowing reviews on product pages, sidebars, carousels, and even within your store’s Google listings. You can autopublish reviews that you have favorited in Growave so they immediately show up in hero carousels underneath a product or on landing pages.
For better authenticity, verification badges can be added to reviews to show that they’re being left by real buyers of the products. You can use Growave’s moderation tools to manually approve new reviews and reply to reviewers publicly or privately.
For multi-site merchants, reviews sync across stores automatically. And, if you already have several reviews you’re proud of that live elsewhere, Growave lets you bulk import from Yotpo, Judge.me, Stamped, and other platforms.
On top of all that, Growave lets you integrate a question-and-answer feature on product pages. New visitors can leave questions and get them answered by your team or fellow customers in a clean Q&A format below the product’s customer reviews.
Let Instagram fans market for you
Growave’s Instagram integration provides an easy way to showcase user-generated content relevant to your products and store.
Pull in Instagram photos from your connected account or by hashtag, turn your Instagram posts into shoppable content, or just showcase the best product shots from real customers on your website.
You get full customization of colors, fonts, and gallery formats, while the integrated Instagram analytics provide you with engagement data and sales performance. See impressions, which shoppable posts caused viewers to add a product to their cart, and conversion rates for your top visuals, then double down on what converts.
With Growave, Instagram expands beyond an obligatory social channel. It becomes a source of powerful social proof and visual storytelling to boost your Shopify revenue.
Social login
Let your customers create an account and engage in the easiest way possible by enabling login via their social media accounts. You can open up login options for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, in addition to other platforms like Google and Amazon.
This removes friction by enabling customers to join your fanbase and engage with just one click. No cumbersome signup forms required.
Social login buttons can be embedded anywhere on your Shopify store, from product pages to popups, headers, and more. Icons are customizable to match your store’s branding.
Once logged in via social accounts, customers won’t have to sign in again. Their credentials will be securely stored for future access. And Growave tracks all social logins in one centralized database, allowing you to easily monitor and manage members.
Growave’s commitment to supporting social media alongside ecommerce shows in their own accounts. Their Instagram is constantly posting material to update followers on new features, tips for merchants, and app partnerships.
Growave’s Potential Drawbacks
We found that, despite a lot of user reviews raving about Growave’s support, the level of service we received was a serious letdown. On top of that, there are some restrictions and user-friendliness issues to point out as minor flaws of the platform.
Underwhelming service
When we reached out to Growave support during our testing period, our interactions revealed some serious gaps—at least for non-paying users.
Growave touts 24/7 support via live chat on their website, as well as “industry-leading response times.” This, however, did not seem to apply to us as prospective customers who had not paid for a plan yet.
When contacting support via their chatbot on a Friday afternoon, we received no response for over three hours. Eventually a message came back saying their team was out for the weekend and would follow up on Monday.
That’s not ideal customer service, nor the level of support we expected.
We also tried their contact form as a workaround, but still only heard back the following Monday.
Now, this may be just because we weren’t full-fledged, paying users of Growave. Certain paid plans unlock phone support, as well.
Still, it doesn’t inspire confidence in their support if we were to sign up and pay for a plan.
Ecommerce issues can have drastic and terrible effects on your bottom line, especially if they go unresolved for hours or days. Whether it’s a technical issue affecting your site experience or a site element not living up to your visitors’ expectations, downtime or poor impressions can result in lost sales and a diminished online reputation.
The lack of response over a weekend could be hugely detrimental for you, as well. Maybe the support team is more readily and consistently available if you pay for the service, but our first impression is that this aspect of using Growave needs improvement.
Integrations cost extra
Growave offers a couple of integrations to expand its native capabilities. However, these require you to pay for one of their premium plans.
Integrations with Klayivo and Omnisend are only accessible when you pony up for the Growth plan, which runs $99 per month.
On the other hand, many other useful integrations need to be purchased separately from your Growave subscription via the Shopify Marketplace. That can add up if you have an elaborate store setup that requires multiple tools to sync with one another.
We wish there were just more native integrations in general and that useful ones like Omnisend—which is a huge help for automating and managing emails to rewards program members and recent and repeat customers—weren’t locked away on one of the highest-priced plans.
Feature overload
There’s no doubt Growave is packed with powerful marketing capabilities. However, the sheer depth of options available to users could lead to some confusion and paralysis at the outset. Even savvy ecommerce marketers may find themselves unsure where to focus first after initial setup.
And with great flexibility comes potential for distraction. It’s easy to get sidetracked experimenting with new capabilities before you’ve really hammered out your loyalty program or review request email sequences. Valuable time that could be spent executing campaigns instead goes into learning marginal features that don’t move the needle as much.
For merchants seeking simplicity out of the gates, Growave may feel overwhelming. But this is more of a short-term problem that ends up paying off eventually. The value of mastering the Growave platform could unlock some incredible opportunities and capabilities for your Shopify store, as it has for many other users before.
Just be aware that it will take many users a bit of time and effort to onboard themselves and learn how to maximize their access to the platform.
Growave Plans and Pricing
Just about every feature of Growave’s comes on every paid plan. There are six options to choose from, which scale up in terms of the number of orders it can allow alongside the price. A few also unlock unique features. Let’s dig into the details.
Basic
Growave’s Basic plan is a great entry point for new Shopify merchants looking to boost customer engagement. Starting at just $9 per month (which goes down to $7.20 per month if you pay annually) for up to 75 monthly orders, it delivers all of Growave’s core features to build loyalty and social proof.
That means you get pretty much full reign of Growave’s suite of tools, including:
- Points-based rewards programs
- Redemption of points for discounts, freebies, and other goodies
- Referral programs
- VIP shopper tiers
- Customer wishlists
- Social login
- Emailed reminders, nudges, and review requests
- Customer Q&A feature
- Support for shoppable Instagram posts, carousels, and UGC galleries
You get a 30-day free trial period to test everything on the Basic tier risk-free.
For new brands ready to nurture customer loyalty through referrals, reviews, and more benefits, Growave’s Basic plan offers a fantastic springboard to better engagement with your Shopify shoppers.
Starter
The Starter plan expands your monthly order allotment to 150 for either $19 per month or $182.40 for a whole year (an average monthly rate of $15.20).
It includes all of the Basic plan’s core features like loyalty and referral programs, wishlists, reviews, social login, and shoppable galleries.
You get everything you want from Growave plus a roomier plan to fit your growing Shopify enterprise. And, you still get 30 days to test-drive it so you can make sure it fits your needs before committing to a full subscription.
Medium
Medium follows the scaling pattern of the previous two plans, expanding your monthly order allotment to 500 orders.
Growave offers this plan for $49 per month. Or, opt for annual billing to save a bit by lowering the monthly rate to $39.20 per month (a savings of 20%).
That’s a much bigger jump up in price, but that’s largely because Growave extends more reliable customer support to subscribers on this plan or higher. This is the first tier that gives you access to phone support and priority live chat support. Merchants can get answers to questions faster and work more closely with Growave’s experts to maximize their use of the platform’s tools.
You get a generous 30 days to test out Growave’s Medium plan before committing to a purchase.
Growth
The Growth plan from Growave keeps expanding your capabilities. Get a more generous allotment of 1,000 monthly orders for $99 per month (or $79.20 per month when you commit to a year of service up front).
You’re getting all the core features and the level of support from the Medium plan, but Growth is also the first plan to offer native integrations with Klayivo and Omnisend. This enables you to send better-segmented and more personalized emails based on customer behaviors and profiles. That’s a big enhancement to Growave’s native email tools.
For established Shopify merchants who have outgrown the allowances of lower Growave plans, Growth provides the premium order allotments, integrations, and dedicated support needed to progress to the next level. Plus, as with all previous plans, you can try it risk-free for 30 days.
Enterprise
There are two premium plans above the Growth tier, the first of which is the Enterprise plan.
You’ll pay $299 per month (or $239.20 per month when billed annually) to get all the benefits of Growth, plus a whole lot more.
First, the Enterprise tier dramatically increases monthly order limits to 3,500. That’s great for high-volume stores that want to make greater strides in customer engagement.
It also enables the ability to create fully customized reward actions tailored to your program preferences. That includes the ability to award points at checkout (instead of sending an email after purchase with reward updates) to provide instant gratification to customers for big purchases.
Enterprise also activates API access for deeper customization of many parts of the Growave platform. And, it’s the only traditional plan that gives you access to a dedicated account manager who can deliver personalized guidance and coaching.
With its massive order allowance, more intricate customization, and direct access to a Growave rep’s expertise, Enterprise equips serious Shopify merchants with the features to maximize this platform’s capabilities.
Generously, Growave still offers a 30-day trial period for the Enterprise plan. Not many other brands let you try out their highest-octane package risk-free.
Custom
For enterprise-level merchants that need more than 3,500 monthly orders, Growave offers fully customized plans to match the demand of massive customer bases.
Custom plans include all of the robust capabilities from the Enterprise tier, but they also give you access to an Account Setup Engineer who will help you get the platform integrated with your Shopify empire and onboard your team.
And, since you have API access and a dedicated account manager at this tier, you can really customize the Growave platform to fit your needs like a glove.
Since this Custom plan is also custom-priced, there is no free trial period. You’ll need to reach out to Growave and schedule an initial demo.
Final Thoughts
If you’re a Shopify seller looking to boost loyalty and engagement, Growave is a slam dunk. The platform’s packed with beneficial features to support loyalty programs, rewards, referrals, customer reviews, email engagement, social proof, and more.
While we were left wanting by our customer service experience, the depth of capability in this platform leads us to still confidently recommend it to most Shopify store owners. Better still, you don’t have to take our word for it—give any Growave plan a try on their generous 30-day free trial period and see for yourself what it can do for you, your customer base, and your revenue.
