As an ecommerce brand owner, you probably know what it takes to run and market your online business. However, you lack the time or manpower to do stuff like email marketing, customer support and lead generation.
In that case, marketing automation can simplify your job as a business owner. And help you boost your ecommerce website’s performance and ROI. All you have to do is to use the right ecommerce automation strategies or tools and you’re set.
But how do you go about using the best marketing automation for ecommerce? This guide shall answer that, so keep reading…
What is Ecommerce Marketing Automation?
A simple definition of ecommerce marketing automation is that it’s a process of creating and managing marketing strategies with the help of software.
Here, “software” can refer to anything from an app, any third-party integration or an AI-based solution that records consumer behavior on your website.
Such tools make it possible for you to do a lot more on your site with a lot less effort. It can track sales funnels, automate repetitive emails, boost engagement on social media accounts, foster customer relationships through nurture campaigns, and ultimately sell more.
And it saves you time and allows your online retail brand to operate at full capacity without requiring 24/7 support from yourself or staff members.
So your job is to leverage these ecommerce software solutions and put your business growth on autopilot.
4 Practical Benefits of Ecommerce Marketing Automation
Ecommerce marketing automation can be a game-changer because it enables you to run your online business with limited resources.
Here are some of the benefits it offers:
Benefit #1: Higher ROI
The goal of any online business is to make more money with as little resources/expenses as possible and have a high ROI. Automating repetitive tasks allows you to spend less money on human resources while generating higher revenues.
Benefit #2: Increased Sales
Effective ecommerce marketing automation helps you achieve more sales by enabling you to run campaigns that convert visitors into customers—all without any human intervention.
Benefit #3: Fast & Efficient Customer Service
When you use customer support automation tools, you can respond to your customers faster and at much cheaper cost. To give you an example, your website’s frequently asked questions can be taken care of by an AI-powered chatbot. It’s quick to address customer queries yet doesn’t put a hole in your wallet.
Benefit #4: Time Savings
Last but not least, when you automate stuff on your online store, you save your valuable time. Because you would no longer be sending emails or answering tickets manually. Everything happens automatically while you work on growth hacking your business.
What are the Key Areas of Ecommerce Marketing Automation?
Ecommerce marketing automation can cover almost all the marketing aspects of your online retail business. It can help you in:
Automating Emails
Automating emails should be one of the first things you should consider when starting with the process of automation—this includes welcome email series, cart and checkout abandonment email series, promotional emails, etc. that are sent on a regular basis. And it can be done using an online email service provider (ESP) such as Klaviyo—where emails can not only be automated but also have deep personalization capabilities because of the robust data that a tool such as Klaviyo has.
Nurturing Campaigns
On the other side of email campaigns are “nurturing” campaigns that involve following up with prospects and existing customers to maintain interest until they’re ready to buy.
This process involves things like lead scoring, email drip campaigns, and behavioral triggers based on customer activity—all of which can be automated.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is a great way to grow your brand but it can be difficult to keep up with on all the different social media platforms. To solve that difficulty, you can use social media tools like Buffer and manage multiple accounts from a single platform. You can respond in real-time or schedule updates ahead of time without scratching your head.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is one of the best ways for new ecommerce businesses to stand out from the crowd; automation helps you create better ads, choose more strategic ad placements, optimize your bids, measure campaign performance, and more.
Customer Retention
Another area where ecommerce marketing automation is beneficial is customer loyalty campaigns (also known as “retention campaigns”).
These types of campaigns are especially important for small online stores because they focus on keeping current customers happy while generating word of mouth for new buyers.
And such campaigns can be set on autopilot quite easily.
How to Use Ecommerce Marketing Automation to Grow Your Ecommerce Brand
There are many ways in which you can use ecommerce marketing automation to grow your online brand. Here are some automation ideas for ecommerce to inspire your next marketing campaign:
1. Welcoming and Onboarding New Customers
Automating the customer onboarding process is a great way to get new users started with your brand. As part of it, you can work on things like:
Welcome Email Flow
You can start with a welcome email series providing valuable resources that helps them get started. This can include the founder’s email, your story, resources to learn about your products, value based contente—the more helpful it is the better.
Special Promotions
You can offer a special coupon code for their future purchases. It is a great way to encourage customers to buy from you.
Post-Purchase Follow Up
You can even email them shortly after they make their first purchase thanking them once again and sending them a link to your loyalty program.
And you could ask for a review after a couple of weeks (ensure they’ve received their product) with the help of Okendo—a review tool that we strongly recommend. It integrates really well with Shopify and Klaviyo and enables you to use its powerful features such as mapping product attributes & profile attributes to Klaviyo account.
And that allows customers to easily share review and content via 2-clicks, and so much more.
To set up a great onboarding workflow for your customers, you need a reliable ecommerce email management tool. Klaviyo, for example, is one of the best email automation programs that many ecommerce brands rely on. You can use it too.
Once signed up to the Klaviyo marketing automation tool, here’s how you can go about creating an onboarding email series:
First Email: The first email should be sent as soon as somebody subscribes to your email list. In this, you can try and build a connection, and ask them to learn more about the products you sell. You can also mention what they can expect from your future emails.
Look at how Sweet Kyla does it.
Second Email: The second email can be sent after a couple of days showing your products that can help them.
For example, it can possibly be about soothing hues for a nursery to help the infant sleep or interior design ideas for nurseries.
In their second email, Sweet Kyla sends informational posts where its users can get some design inspiration.
Third Email: The third email could be sent after a fortnight. In this, you can start offering discounts that encourage them to make a purchase.
Although not fixed, as a rule of thumb, you can send one promotional email for every three value-based messages to generate more sales. And do a lot more with Klaviyo.
2. Segmenting your lists better
You can segment your email lists better and in many ways with automation tools such as Klaviyo.
- You can, for example, split up past customers into buying customers and non-buying customers. And send targeted offers to specific customer groups who haven’t bought anything yet and bring them back into the sales funnel.
- You can also segment customers by recency of purchase which allows you to send more similar products that they just bought from your brand.
- Along with that, you can segment your lists based on the frequency of purchases, geolocations and even based on their device (iOS or Android), etc.
- You can segment the lists based on different buyer personas. When you have properly defined buyer personas for different types of products, you can craft compelling email copies that resonate with each of them. This can enhance your email revenues significantly.
- And do many more segmentations!
That’s exactly what we did with regards to buyer personas for one of our clients.
Despite having a loyal fanbase, our client’s customer retention was poor and email marketing didn’t garner results as expected.
However, by segmenting the email lists for buyer personas, revamping email design, and with a few other strategic decisions, our team managed to boost their email revenues from $100k to $300k per month.
And increased the email revenue by 54% monthly.
All these types of segmentations can be and must be automated to get the most out of your ecommerce email marketing campaign.
3. Providing Value or Marketing with Messenger Marketing
According to Forrester, if online customers don’t get quick answers to their queries, 53% of them will abandon their carts.
And as an ecommerce brand, you cannot risk losing 53% of your potential buyers. In fact, no business can. You need to have an instant support solution that helps them in their buyer journey. Or something that can also work as a promotional tool.
That solution is “messenger marketing.”
Leveraging messenger marketing or using automated chatbots is a great way to not just do effective ecommerce marketing automation but also enhance customer service, provide value to the customers and do a lot more.
With messenger marketing you can answer common questions. You can also create a database of the most frequent queries and build better FAQ pages that are more helpful for your customers.
There are several other benefits of using messenger marketing apps like Recart as an automated messenger marketing tool including:
Improved efficiency: The bots can answer a good percentage of questions asked by customers which used to go unanswered before.
Reduced costs for customer support: With a good messenger marketing app, there is no need to hire extra people who can take customers’ queries.
Improved customer satisfaction: The tool can answer simple questions quickly and accurately, making customers happier.
Reduced bounce rates due to time spent on site: Because the chatbots are readily available to answer all your frequently asked questions, you’ll make visitors spend more time on your website.
Better Promotions: You can use these messenger marketing tools to launch promotional campaigns and offer value.
You see, there are plenty of advantages to using a chatbot as an ecommerce customer support agent.
But what are the best tools to use?
If your online store runs on Shopify, as part of your ecommerce marketing automation campaign, you can use the popular Gobot or Tidio chatbot apps. It can help shoppers find products, automate support, collect data, and opt-ins and do a lot more.
4. Growing Your Email List with Automated Campaigns
As part of your ecommerce marketing automation you can also start self-running campaigns to grow your email list for your business.
Creating these types of campaigns involves setting up quizzes with tools such as Octane AI, landing pages or pop ups where people enter their contact information in exchange for something valuable (discounts, free samples, etc.).
But, a landing page or popup that makes people subscribe to your email list should be visually appealing and must have great a call to action.
To create enticing pop-ups that convert your visitors into quality email subscribers, you can use JustUno.
This tool helps you personalize on-site messaging at every touchpoint to convert more website traffic into targeted subscribers. Some of the best features of JustUno are:
Gamification: You can create highly engaging campaigns with multiple configurable game choices to offer consumers a more interactive conversion experience.
Segmentation & Targeting: You can leverage 80+ targeting rules, ensuring the correct message is shown to the right visitor at the optimum moment.
5. Use Dynamic Content for Better Customer Engagement
Customizing your content for each visitor is known as dynamic content. With dynamic material, the images, messages on your sites change to match user in-session behavior, demographic data, and characteristics. This type of content provides several benefits to the brands including:
Increased Relevancy: Customers will rapidly assess your website in less than a second. So to decrease the bounce rate and boost conversions, it is critical to provide relevant offers.
Personalized Experiences: Dynamically updating content, similar to relevance, allows you to deliver unique experiences. This increases consumer confidence and increases income.
Ecommerce brands can create dynamic content in a simple way:
1. Use Advanced Product Recommendations for Upselling Purposes
Upselling is absolutely crucial for any online brand to grow. It basically means generating more revenues from customers by offering upgraded/better versions of a product they are interested in. Doing this right can grow your Average Order Value (AOV), resulting in more revenue growth.
You can set up advanced product recommendations for upselling which makes an effective ecommerce marketing automation strategy.
For instance, to drive upsells, the below mentioned women’s beauty products line began promoting complimentary offers, showcasing the items that they think their buyers might like based on their existing degree of engagement and prior conversions. And you can do something similar on your website.
You can even use personalization to attract more prospects by tailoring offers to customers based on their status and site engagement rate, which leads to higher purchase value through upselling.
6. Using SMS Remarketing to Re-engage Inactive Users & Doing Much More
Another key component of ecommerce marketing automation could be reconnecting with your inactive users.
Many times, ecommerce brands can plan a one-time message campaign to re-engage these users. However, purposefully sending out a series of emails or SMS Remarketing to inactive users is a better way to reach them compared to sending a single message. Some of the best practices you could use are as follows:
a. First identify your inactive users: you can determine your inactive users based on three factors i.e. behavior, frequency of purchase, comparisons between active users and inactive users.
b. Setup your SMS Remarketing system: SMS automation can be done with the help of Attentive Mobile, one of the most comprehensive text message marketing platforms.
These SMSs could be automated to not just get your customers back from the dead but to do a lot more. You can use SMS automation for:
- Abandoned-cart reminders.
- Pre-delivery confirmations.
- Instant SMS responses to customers.
- Subscription renewal alerts.
- Post-purchase survey.
7. Gathering Feedback
You can build a workflow that gathers feedback from customers to enhance your ecommerce marketing automation.
To get feedback from the customers, you can send an email that encourages them to rate your brand and products, which you can then use to track your efforts and evolve strategies for greater success. You need to get feedback on the below areas of your website:
The design of your website: You can gather feedback on your website design as it’s an extremely crucial product’s UX: This can help you ensure that you’re not losing potential customers at any step of the buying process.
Customer service channels: You need to know how helpful your customer support team has been to ascertain if the customers are having issues after.
Product quality and delivery: You can ask them to rate your service and the quality of the delivered products.
The shopping experience: You can ask how your customers’ overall experience has been on your website. And in addition to that, you can ask them specific questions about certain areas of your site.
If you run an ecommerce brand on Shopify, you can leverage POWR Survey to conduct surveys automatically and get an idea about what your customers want. With this tool, you can:
- Design your surveys, polls, customer satisfaction questionnaires, and feedback forms however you need them in the POWR Editor.
- Make sure to include the fields you need in your survey, from required or optional text, dropdown options, multiple choice questions, checkboxes, and more.
- Stay on top of your survey data and consumer comments with an in-built dashboard with reports that can be exported, and analyzed.
Apart from the above seven critical marketing aspects, you can also automate push notifications using a tool like PushOwl. It allows you to reach your audience when and where you want, monetize your traffic, enhance ROI and do a lot more.
With Push Notifications, when a user receives a notification about cart abandonment reminder, they’re directly taken to where they left off the last time unlike SMS or email.
When a user clicks on the SMS or email notification, they’re taken to the SMS inbox or email inbox respectively.
How to Measure Ecommerce Marketing Automation ROI
As you read above, marketing automation is an incredibly powerful way to increase consumer engagement, generate more subscribers and sales, build rapport with customers, and improve overall business efficiency.
However, it’s necessary that you regularly monitor your progress to see how your ecommerce marketing automation campaigns are doing.
Some of the best ways of tracking your marketing efforts are by looking at:
- revenue per recipient (RPR)
- customer LTV
- daily unique visits
- session durations
- bounce rates
- page views per visitor
- conversion rate
- average order value
- sales per channel
These are a few essential ecommerce KPI metrics to track. Doing this makes it much easier for you to gauge which campaigns are most successful and what exactly is contributing the greatest value to your bottom line.
Conclusion
Getting the most out of marketing automation is increasingly becoming more important than it’s ever been. For ecommerce companies, in particular, this is huge because having an effective automated system in place helps you create a better customer experience and generate more online sales.