App Highlight: Alia

Welcome to our App Highlight series at Atlas Insider, where we cover an app we've been loving lately.

Note that Atlas occasionally has formal partnerships with the apps we highlight – although we will never highlight an app solely for that reason.

We assume most of you are already familiar with the common Shopify ecosystem tools such as Klaviyo, Gorgias and Recharge, so we aim to cover apps that are relatively new to market and have shown exceptional results in trials.

With that, today's app highlight is Alia.

Alia came up on our radar through LinkedIn – classic, we know. It's a popup that lets brands "educate" their customers in exchange for tiered sign-up offers. You can also add polls to the steps, gathering first-party data on your customers and displaying offers or content based on their answers.

The best part? They boldly claim Alia can boost sales from sign-ups by 2x to 4x compared with your current popup.

Conventional eCommerce wisdom says the lower the friction at sign-up, the higher the sign-up rate. Alia's approach was to add several friction steps in between and see what happens. Customers can still redeem a lesser offer immediately, but many choose the longer path – more on that below.

We drank the Kool-Aid and trialled Alia with a client who was seeing low sign-up numbers and low post-sign-up conversion. Here's what happened.

5-day trial: launch

Once we decided to test drive Alia, Cory from Alia had us set up quickly. From first contact to live took two hours.

We all know the pain of installing a promising new app only to find customer support is non-existent. That has not been the case with Alia, so they get points from us. We also know the pain of installing an app and then losing a full day to setting it up. No bueno.

The team at Alia offer white-glove onboarding, which saves brands a lot of time at launch. You'll most likely still need to fine-tune the content, but that beats building everything from scratch. We love apps with white-glove implementation.

5-day trial: results

Ignore the four-day period with no data – we were running other trials and Alia was switched off.

The client's previous Klaviyo form. 30-day data.

Keep in mind that the offer presented did not change. In fact, the margin improved thanks to Alia's tiered offer.

• Klaviyo offer: 10% sign-up offer.
• Alia offer: 5% immediately, or 10% if you "learn more".

Don't get me wrong – I'm not saying that installing Alia will boost your revenue on its own. At the end of the day, most welcome-offer recipients are customers who would have shopped with you anyway. There's plenty of debate about the best approach there, and it's probably a topic for another week. Feel free to reply with your thoughts.

That said, if you or your client are still relying on a basic popup, it might be time to test Alia.

First-party data

We captured two separate data points for our client, who is in the equine industry. Knowing the type of horse and the activities their customers prefer lets them personalise email communication much further.

Engagement has been promising: 34 of 41 customers answered.

Closing remarks and summary

Since this five-day trial we've rolled Alia out with three other clients and seen similar results. On average, our clients saw their sign-up rate increase between 4x and 8x compared with their previous Klaviyo forms.

Truthfully, trialling new eCommerce apps can be exhausting, especially when every app promises a 100x improvement to your existing systems.

This process has been anything but daunting, and the results speak for themselves. Every client we've recommended Alia to is raving about it – which is reason enough for Alia to be our first app highlight.

Questions

Does Alia integrate with Klaviyo?

Yes. You can feed captured data points onto customer profiles in Klaviyo, which is very useful for building more personalised segments.

How much does Alia cost?

As of writing: $50 for up to 20k unique website visitors, $100 up to 50k, $200 up to 100k, $300 up to 300k, $500 up to 1m, and $1,000 up to 5m.

Is it subscribers for the sake of subscribers?

Subscriber quality matters far more than quantity. Given the extra friction at sign-up and the double opt-in, our experience is that subscriber quality has gone up. Across the clients we've trialled it with, Alia-based welcome flows have seen 2x higher open rates, 6x higher click rates and 8x higher revenue per recipient than standard welcome flows.

How do I trial Alia?

Download the Alia app here. Tell them you found them through Atlas and you'll get an extended 30-day free trial, a dedicated CS manager and full white-glove onboarding. Full disclosure: we are Alia agency partners, but we never recommend an app simply because we're partners.