The day-to-day management of an ecommerce store isn’t easy. A lot goes into getting prospects into the store, enticing them to buy, and ensuring that they leave happy. This means getting everything right, from marketing to shipping and the follow-ups too.
It’s common for entrepreneurs to feel like they are so inundated with the little tasks that they’ve lost sight of the big picture. What if you could spend less time on everyday marketing activities and put more energy into things that matter?
With marketing automation, you can. It’s a powerful tool that lets you increase sales and customer engagement for your online store. And at the same time, it can save you a lot by taking care of the repetitive marketing activities.
What does ecommerce marketing automation mean?
If your business were perfect, your promotional activities would closely align with your sales objectives, and all would be good in the world. But since it’s seldom the case, you need marketing automation to help you out.
Marketing automation software restructures your lead generation process, making it a lot simpler. This warms up cold leads, turning them into paying customers for your business. It can also play an important role in nurturing and retaining your existing clients, thus increasing their lifetime value for your brand.
The right marketing automation tool can:
- Follow up with your customers post-purchase using email or text
- Remind customers to finish their orders after cart abandonment or notify them of new deals
- Post to your social media pages
- Understand customer preferences
- Place online advertisements at the right spots
- Collect and analyze data from marketing campaigns
Essentially, automation can relieve you of some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks involved in selling online. To give you an idea of what this means specifically, you can rely on tools that can automate critical payment processes including email reminders to clients, sending invoices, tracking payment statuses, handling recurring billing for repeat customers, and managing customer data.
In essence, automation takes away the burden of work from employees and works with minimal human intervention. Not only that, but automation also allows tasks to be carried out with incredible speed, efficiency, and reliability. This leaves you to focus on other high-priority tasks such as dealing with workplace communications, training employees, managing sales, and planning a better future for your brand.
How can automation help ecommerce businesses be more effective?
Let’s look at a few reasons why marketing automation is so beneficial for online stores.
Less chance of human error
In a small business, consistency is usually not a problem since there are few processes to look after. However, the larger your business gets, the more repetitive and mundane each process becomes.
And when an employee has to do the same thing repeatedly, they might become complacent, increasing the opportunity for human error. Automating tasks can reduce this chance of error, ensuring consistency and making processes more smooth and efficient.
Save time
Since ecommerce automation tools can run in the background, you can focus on other essential tasks. For example, instead of organizing your email inbox manually, automation can help you filter your emails, make different folders, send automated replies – all with the help of software.
Personalization
As online competition increases for retailers, more consumers are looking for personalized experiences. Ecommerce personalization means engaging consumers with dynamic content such as product recommendations, special offers based on their purchase history, and actions based on their browsing behavior. This makes customers feel valued and remembered and increases ecommerce sales and conversions.
Ecommerce stores need to deploy strategies that match their business plan. For instance, if you aim to increase engagement with your customers, personalization can help you make drip campaigns specific to segmented customer groups. Similarly, if you desire to drive more conversions, personalization can help you land more clicks on your CTA button.
How can ecommerce stores use automation?
From making drip campaigns to sending out subscriber emails, marketing automation can track your ecommerce progress periodically and carry out tasks with greater efficiency.
Here are a few ways you can use automation in your ecommerce store:
Recover lost revenue from abandoned cart emails
Abandoned carts are every retailer’s worst nightmare. Abandoned carts are potential buyers who have almost made a purchase but walk away at the last minute. Studies show that 75% of consumers abandon their shopping carts at checkout, resulting in lost revenue for businesses.
Abandoned cart automation can notify you whenever a potential buyer abandons their cart. They also get an automatic email reminding them of the deals they’re missing out on.
Identifying exactly where in the customer journey people are dropping off and preparing a new approach that can retain shoppers is one of the most overlooked strategies when it comes to running an ecommerce store in general.
Some ecommerce sites also offer discounts to consumers to encourage them to resume their shopping. This is what an abandoned cart email looks like:
Additionally, automation can also help retailers analyze customer behavior to track checkout progress on their site.
Create automated campaigns to retain customers
Automation allows you to communicate with customers who haven’t interacted or purchased from your store in a while. These automated email campaigns aim to bring back customers and encourage them to buy from your store again.
Automation analytics can keep track of when customers last bought from you or opened your emails. You can also track a customer’s last purchase date with purchase tracking and send re-engagement emails accordingly.
Integration of artificial intelligence tools to improve workflows
One of the major marketing trends in ecommerce is to use AI features to drive conversions and marketing. This could be in the form of chatbots that answer customer queries, speed up the sales process, provide a fun shopping experience to customers on the website, and collect customer information and provide personalized recommendations.
Conclusion
Ecommerce automation tools make it possible for retailers to analyze customer behavior and target sales and marketing to make business processes easy. Hopefully, the automation techniques mentioned above can help you significantly impact your ecommerce store. This is arguably the best and most cost-effective way of improving your customer-brand relationship online.
Looking for help building your marketing automation campaigns? Contact the experts at Spiralytics today for a free strategy meeting!
