Demand Spring (2021) has revealed that almost 50% of organizations started using a marketing automation platform for the first time only within the last four years.
Over the years, it has been observed that marketing automation has emerged as the most effective digital marketing practice.
And why not?
After all, marketing automation helps you save time and money. More than that, it automates repetitive tasks, reduces human errors, and helps you achieve better results. Marketing automation ensures you save time for your strategic planning and maintain brand consistency.
If you are still worried about how to use marketing automation in your E-commerce business, you have come to the right place. This blog will unlock all the Whats, Whys, and Hows of ecommerce marketing automation. Keep on reading this blog to know more about it.
The What: What Is Ecommerce Marketing Automation?
In simple language, ecommerce marketing automation uses software to manage all the repetitive tasks now, if you are wondering what types of tasks ecommerce marketing automation can handle for you.
- It can help you send your weekly or monthly newsletters.
- Collecting your customersβ data based on their activity with your website
- Can send reminders to customers who abandoned their carts.
- Can send Sale reminders to the customers.
- Can send Discount codes on customersβ birthdays
- Can upload social media content on different platforms at a specific time.
A human can do all these tasks, requiring a huge amount of time and workforce. But with marketing automation, it will be as easy as a breeze. You can use specific tools for different tasks or find Python, C#, or Ruby on Rails experts to build your custom solution..
Now letβs look at why you should be using marketing automation in the first place.
The Why: Benefits of Ecommerce Marketing Automation
Businesses face many challenges when it comes to marketing. And there are a lot of parts that can not be done with a human workforce (no offense). It is why business owners have started to automate their marketing efforts to get maximum results with less human error.
Marketing automation offers plenty of benefits that can enhance a company’s marketing efforts and overall business performance.
1. Increased Efficiency:
One of the most significant benefits of marketing automation is its ability to streamline repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, managing social media posts, and tracking customer interactions. By automating these processes, marketers can save time and allocate resources to their campaigns’ more strategic and creative aspects. Imagine, as a business owner, you do not have to send emails to each of your customers. You have a tool called OnceHub for that.Β
2. Personalization at Scale:
Marketing automation allows businesses to deliver personalized messages and content to their audience based on their preferences, behavior, and demographics. This personalized approach helps build stronger connections with customers, increasing engagement, brand loyalty, and, ultimately, higher conversion rates.
3. Improved Lead Nurturing:
Lead nurturing requires a lot of patience. But automation enables marketers to set up sophisticated lead-nurturing workflows, ensuring prospects receive relevant and timely information throughout their buyer’s journey. This lead nurturing can be done through lead magnets like PowerPoint templates, ebooks, and whitepapers.
By delivering the right content at the right time, businesses can nurture leads more effectively and guide them toward making a purchase. Tools like Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue, can greatly help lead nurturing.
4. Enhanced Customer Experience:
Marketing automation enables businesses to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across various channels. By tracking customer interactions and behaviours, companies can tailor their communications to meet individual needs and preferences, leading to higher customer satisfaction. You can opt for website redesign service to revamp your website’s seamless user experience. A great example of this is a chatbot. Since their advent, chatbots have helped customers to skip the queue to get their queries solved. And the same goes for the business owner. Some of the best chatbots are Haptik.
5. Better Lead Scoring:
Lead scoring is basically a system that lets you evaluate the chances of a lead becoming a customer. Marketing automation platforms often include lead scoring capabilities, which help prioritize leads based on their engagement and behaviour.
Once you identify high-quality leads, sales teams can focus on the most promising prospects. More importantly, it will save time for improving conversion rates and sales efficiency. Tool example: BambooBox.
6. Data-Driven Decision Making:
The collected data can be great but more complex. How do you use this data? That is a perturbing question for many business owners out there.
Marketing automation generates valuable data and insights about campaign performance, customer behavior, and other critical metrics.
These data-driven insights empower business owners as well as social media marketers to make informed decisions and optimize their strategies for better results. One of the famous examples of such a tool is Microsoft Power BI, which provides powerful analytics capabilities and numerous Power BI dashboard examples for visualizing data effectively
7. Multi-channel Marketing Integration:
Marketing is not just limited to one of your channels. There are various platforms that you require to keep updated.
With marketing automation, businesses can orchestrate campaigns across multiple channels, such as email, social media, SMS, and more. You can use various external tools to simplify your campaigns, such as email marketing software, SMS verification service, social media automation tools, etc.
This integrated approach ensures consistent messaging and a cohesive brand experience across different touchpoints. Campaigner is one good example of such a tool. With the Aihello tool you can automate your PPC campaigns for your e-commerce business and increase your sales on Amazon.
8. Lead Attribution and ROI Measurement:
Ecommerce marketing tools allow marketers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and attribute leads to specific marketing efforts accurately.
This level of granularity helps in measuring the return on investment of various marketing initiatives and identifying the most successful channels and tactics. Google Analytics is an excellent example if you are looking for a tool to help measure your campaign’s effectiveness. You may also want to consider top Google Analytics alternatives that come with free and paid options depending on the effectiveness of the tool and the purpose for which it is used. Besides measuring the effectiveness, these tools offer actionable insights that help get the most out of your campaigns.
9. Efficient Sales and Marketing Alignment:
The bigger your sales and marketing team gets, the harder it is to align both. E-commerce marketing automation helps business owners to have better alignment between sales and marketing teams.
By sharing valuable data and insights, both teams can collaborate more effectively and better understand each lead’s status, resulting in smoother lead handoffs and improved sales outcomes.
This is also useful if youβre aiming to put together a sales performance improvement plan, to ensure that team members can operate at their highest level. If everyone has the right tools and info at their fingertips, they will be able to work better both as individuals and as teams.
10. Scalability and Growth:
Managing marketing activities manually becomes increasingly challenging as businesses grow. Marketing automation offers scalability, enabling companies to handle larger audiences and more complex campaigns without sacrificing efficiency or effectiveness.
The How: Smart Ways To Use ECommerce Marketing Automation
Utilizing marketing automation for your eCommerce business can significantly enhance your marketing efforts, increase customer engagement, and drive sales.
1. Segmentation and Personalization:
Customer segmentation is one of the best ways to reach out to different sections of your target market. Start by segmenting your customer base based on preferences, demographics, behaviour, and purchase history.
Pick out some of the automation tools that allow you to create personalized messages and offers for each segment, increasing the relevance of your communications. It will help you improve the chances of conversion.
2. Welcome Series:
Now that you have already segmented your audience. Start with an automated welcome series for new customers. Send personalized emails to introduce them to your brand, your newer products, and any special offers they might be interested in. It helps create a positive first impression and encourages engagement from the start. You can use tools such as Mailchimp for this purpose.
3. Social Media Content Scheduling:
Social media managers always look for more ROI and less time spent. In such cases, as a business owner or a social media manager, you can easily automate content uploading on various social media platforms.
Use marketing automation apps to schedule and publish social media posts across various platforms. Maintain a consistent social media presence and engage with your audience regularly to build brand awareness and foster customer relationships.
Some basic examples of social media content scheduling tools are Hootsuite and CoSchedule.
4. Automated Social Media Content On Website:
You can repurpose your social media content for marketing pursposes. As a business owner, creating multiple content, including your website is impossible. And remember that, website content is an integral part of any marketing strategy. But by using social media aggregator tools, you can transport, repurpose and automate the social media content to your website. This social media content will be live updated on your website.
5. Abandoned Cart Recovery:
Customers have a tendency to leave their carts abandoned. In such cases, as a business owner, you can set up automated emails to remind customers who abandoned their shopping carts to complete their purchases. If you are using B2B eCommerce software, take advantage of its abandoned cart recovery features and automatically send targeted emails to remind B2B buyers about their pending orders
You can also include personalized product recommendations, product reviews, and incentives as discounts to entice them to the website and finalize their order.
6. Product Recommendations:
Leverage marketing automation to provide personalized product recommendations to customers based on their browsing and purchase history. These recommendations can be delivered via email or on-site notifications. It can even be done through retargeting ads, increasing the likelihood of cross-selling and upselling. For example, if your customer has purchased a product, you can retarget the other products related to the previous product.
7. Customer Retention:
It is easy to lose customers, especially if you are working in a competitive niche. What you can do to retain customers for your e-commerce business is to create automated workflows to engage with existing customers and encourage repeat purchases.
You can also send personalized offers, loyalty rewards, or exclusive content, such as reviews, to keep customers interested and returning for more.
8. Re-Engagement Campaigns:
These ensure inactive customers are still interested in your brand. Identify inactive or dormant customers and set up automated re-engagement campaigns. Remind them of your brand, tell them what they have missed, showcase new products, or offer exclusive discounts to reignite their interest and encourage them to purchase.
9. Post-Purchase Follow-ups:
Your job as a business owner does not end when the customer pays you money. But you have to keep them in the drill. Meaning that you have to thank them for spending time with them.
Send automated post-purchase emails to thank customers for their orders and request feedback. It will help you collect reviews as much as possible. You can also include related product suggestions or ask them to leave a review. It helps foster a positive customer experience and encourages customer advocacy.
10. Seasonal and Holiday Campaigns:
A seasonal marketing campaign is created to target customers at a particular time of the year. Plan and automate seasonal and holiday campaigns well in advance. For example, if you want to run Christmas campaigns, you must start planning in September.
Create a schedule of promotional emails, social media posts, and targeted ads to reach your audience with timely and relevant offers during peak shopping.
You can set up lead nurturing campaigns for potential customers who are not yet ready to make a purchase. These automated workflows can deliver valuable content, educational materials, and customer testimonials to build trust and credibility over time and on time.
11. Win-Back Campaigns:
At the end of the year, every one in four customers decided they did not want to see your e-commerce email anymore. It might be a new year’s resolution, but it can hurt your business.
One of the safest ways to ensure you win back your customers is to implement automated win-back campaigns for customers who haven’t purchased in a while. You can also offer exclusive discounts, loyalty rewards, or personalized recommendations to entice and reactivate their interest in your products.
12. Customer Feedback and Surveys:
Customersβ reviews and testimonials are as important as anything. Your business survives on what people have to say about your business. In such cases, you can use automated review-collecting tools.
Automate feedback requests and customer satisfaction surveys to gather valuable insights into customers’ experiences and preferences. This information can help you improve your products and services and enhance the customer journey.
The Final Note
Marketing Automation helps the e-commerce business to optimize its overall presence and marketing. After all, it is a lot when you are running an e-commerce business, so why not take some help?
We have mentioned ecommerce marketing automation’s whats, whys, and hows. Hope this helps your e-commerce business.
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