Modern technology continues to revolutionize how people live, including how we do business. With new tools emerging left and right, companies are finding more ways to make work efficient and convert more people.
Workplace automation is among the many innovations garnering more attention in recent years. It refers to software or programs that handle routine or repetitive tasks in various working environments. These automated workflows enable business owners to eliminate workloads hindering company productivity in multiple fields.
One of these areas is marketing. Various automation tools are now available to help even small businesses compete in an increasingly aggressive online landscape. Integrating automated marketing strategies enables owners and marketers to communicate with their target audience and offer quality experiences that help produce more revenue.
Keep reading below to learn more about e-commerce marketing automation. Discover why automating different marketing efforts can help your e-commerce business and more.
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How Marketing Automation Helps E-commerce Stores
As more companies go online, marketing automation becomes crucial so they can reach and communicate with their target audience.
The following are seven known benefits of marketing automation for e-commerce businesses.
1. Personalized experiences
Personalization is a strategy where businesses create meaningful interactions or experiences tailored to the target audience. It's a way for them to connect with their current and potential customers on a more personal level, which is a crucial factor, especially today with the rise of fraudulent online stores.
In addition, modern customers find personalized connections appealing. By offering unique customer experiences, brands signal their target audience that they are willing to do more to meet their customers' needs.
Today, various marketing automation software offers features enabling organizations to launch campaigns more relevant to the target audience, like product recommendations, loyalty programs, and milestone rewards. These campaigns are based on factual data gathered by marketing automation tools.
Because of personalization through automation, the target audience is more likely to interact with your e-commerce business, increasing the chances of conversion.
2. Improve customer retention
Automation lets you track your target audience's interests, behavior, and interactions to create a tailor-fit marketing strategy.
You can use such information to provide more meaningful content and appealing customer offerings. Businesses can offer products and services, as well as rewards, that their customers genuinely need. In doing so, you nurture your customers, further boosting their loyalty to your brand.
3. More accurate reports
The best thing about automation is that they provide accurate reports on key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic and engagement, among others. They enable marketers to collect and analyze data quickly and error-free.
Moreover, automation can help marketers identify potential trends and patterns before they take off. For instance, multiple programs and algorithms can study customer behavior and determine segments that are more likely to convert. With this data, marketers can target separate groups with campaigns optimized for their needs.
4. Reduce cart abandonment
Cart abandonment occurs when potential customers add an item to their online carts but drop it before checkout. There are various reasons for shoppers to do such an action. However, most of the time, they're still deciding if they want to proceed.
You can target these customers by automatically sending abandoned cart emails to follow up on their shopping. You can set up automated emails or notifications to remind customers that their items are waiting for them in your store. It's also an opportunity for you to send out special offers, like discounts or coupons, to entice them further.
Moreover, automation can also help you identify other reasons customers are leaving their carts behind. By analyzing customer data, like browsing behavior and purchase history, you can improve your shopping processes and address any issues that hinder the customer's journey.
5. Boost upselling and cross-selling
Upselling encourages customers to buy a product or service that's relatively higher in feature or offering than their desired item or package. Meanwhile, cross-selling encourages them to buy a product or service besides what they plan on purchasing. These strategies, when combined, can help boost your online store's revenue. However, implementing them can be challenging.
To do such strategies, marketers must have an extensive understanding of their customer's buying behavior and history, among others. Fortunately, with automation, such data is within reach. Plus, marketers can utilize various tools to do such strategies more effectively.
By leveraging tools like recommendation engines and predictive analytics, you can create relevant offers more likely to resonate with the customers. These tools will utilize transaction history and demographics data to suggest meaningful products and services on top of their desired items.
Through marketing automation, businesses can successfully execute upselling and cross-selling. Because of this, they significantly increase their revenue.
6. Better lead scoring
Lead scoring is a marketing practice that determines the worthiness of potential customers. Marketers do this by attaching certain qualities or criteria to their target audience to help them decide which segment to focus on first. Unfortunately, manually scoring leads can be time-consuming and error-prone.
With automation, businesses can nurture leads more effectively. They can gain more qualified leads by capturing and analyzing significant data points, including demographics, online engagements, and more. These allow marketers to objectively evaluate leads and score them with added qualities to help them make informed decisions.
In addition, quality lead scoring also helps marketers create more meaningful content for future campaigns to gain new customers. Because they understand their target audience better, they will know how to communicate with them more effectively, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
7. Save time on your campaigns
Generally, marketing campaigns take a lot of time-consuming effort, like gathering and analyzing data, content creation, and launching online materials. Automating various processes will enable marketers to focus more on creating meaningful campaigns and drive better results.
Before automation, marketers manually sent emails and published social media content. Now, they can do so with a few clicks on an automation platform. They can schedule campaigns weeks or months in advance, meaning marketers can post their campaigns online right after approval and monitor performance in real time.
Automation also helps speed up the lead-scoring process. Since data is more accurate and consistent, marketers can quickly identify and prioritize the most qualified leads, enabling them to focus on specific segments with the most potential to bring more revenue.
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Best Examples of E-commerce Marketing Automation
E-commerce businesses can utilize marketing automation in many ways. Below are some of the common scenarios where marketers can use such platforms.
Sending triggered messages
Triggered emails are action-based messages sent to the recipients based on predetermined conditions. These messages have become vital in email marketing because they help improve revenue, save time, and boost retention rates.
Because they're action-based, they arrive at a customer's inbox at a unique time in their buying journey, making it appear that your e-commerce business is directly conversing with them.
One of the best examples of triggered emails is when customers sign up or subscribe to a newsletter and receive a welcome email. There are transactional emails where you provide them with the complete details of their purchase. These include payment confirmation, receipt, and delivery information. Not to mention a "thank you" after.
There are also lead nurturing emails where you provide updates, promotions, and other relevant information to help inform or entice existing customers. Additionally, there are win-back email marketing campaigns where you retarget inactive patrons to encourage them to purchase again.
Furthermore, you also have automated cart abandonment emails and SMS to help you recover lost sales by reminding customers of items they left in their online shopping carts.
Generally, these notifications are triggered when a shopper adds an item to their online cart and leaves the website without completing their purchase. You can send these messages out within an hour or two after the customers abandon their carts, enabling you to catch them while the item's still fresh in their minds.
Using chatbots
Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in modern businesses because they offer various benefits, like boosting productivity and customer support. These automation tools can attend to routine or repetitive inquiries so customer service agents can focus on more complex queries that require human input.
Through chatbots, companies can improve their customer satisfaction by enhancing their responsiveness. Chat automation can provide 24/7 customer service, allowing businesses to attend to concerns or inquiries without interruptions.
In addition, chatbots can also learn from their customer interactions, enabling them to improve their accuracy and effectiveness over time. That means the longer your chatbots engage your customers, the more personalized and relevant their responses become.
Finally, these can assist you with lead generation by providing personalized product recommendations based on customer behavior and purchase history.
Segmenting target audiences
Segmenting your target audience enables marketers to get more revenue by providing more personalized offerings to their recipients. By grouping your customers based on common segmentation factors like demographics, location, purchase behavior, and more, you can craft messages that perfectly resonate with them.
You can collect more data on your target audience through various automation tools to help you segment them better. You can also use these platforms to analyze the data you collect. Doing this will help you find more specific patterns and shared interests to create more substantial segments.
Aside from gathering data, automation tools can help marketers launch personalized marketing campaigns to target segments. Since your groups vary per common factor, you can send out different campaigns based on their interests and convert as many of your target audiences as possible.
Offering recommendations
Besides chatbots, you can offer product recommendations to your target audience in other ways. An excellent example is implementing a recommendation system in your online store. When your shoppers return, you welcome them with trending or related products on the platform.
Among the best examples of this is automating and optimizing landing pages. With proper customer segmentation, you can create landing pages to target each group with factors that resonate well with them. In doing so, you increase your chances of boosting your conversions.
Another example is sending automated emails to existing customers after their purchase. You can complement your recommendations with discounts or other special offers to make the items more inviting to the target audience.
The best part is that aside from helping your customers discover more items, doing so offers an opportunity for you to upsell them. Since these automated suggestions are based on purchase history and customer preferences, they will likely consider the recommendations and checkout.
Other known examples of recommendation systems include pop-ups and product carousels.
Automating checkout process
One of the many reasons customers abandon their carts is to avoid going through a complicated checkout process. They'd instead go to another online store that offers a straightforward solution to the final stages of their buying journey.
You can address such an issue by automating your checkout process. For instance, you can fill in user details automatically, from basic information to preferred payment options. Doing this will benefit existing customers because they won't have to input their details when buying an item.
Moreover, you can also include a live chat option in case customers have any last-minute questions about the item they want to buy. Putting such a tool in place will help boost the shopper's buying process, further increasing sales.
A/B testing campaigns
A/B testing is a marketing process where marketers compare the performance of two campaign versions to see which is more effective. With automation tools, you can conduct A/B testing quickly without requiring special skills. You can test emails, landing pages, social media posts, and more on different marketing channels.
Furthermore, you can also launch campaigns on multiple audience segments based on different criteria. Doing this lets you determine which campaign version works best per segment.
You can also test two campaigns even with slight changes in their materials. For instance, you can test campaigns based on headlines, call-to-actions, images, and offerings.
Gathering reviews
Customer feedback is a vital part of building credibility online. Online users are becoming more vigilant and picky about the online brands they choose. That's why showing social proof like customer reviews is essential to prove that you're trustworthy.
Collecting customer reviews online can be tedious. With automation, you can send out campaigns encouraging customers to leave reviews for your products and services. For instance, you can set up triggered emails with survey forms or questionnaires sent to customers after product delivery.
Apart from triggered emails, you can use push notifications or other trigger-based materials to gather feedback for your brand. Some automation tools can also help you collect reviews created on platforms like social media.
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E-Commerce Marketing Automation Tools To Try
There are various e-commerce platforms available for businesses today. Here are some of the best options you can try.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a powerful marketing automation program that enables businesses to provide quality customer experiences. With its email and SMS capabilities, you can connect with your customers through campaigns like abandoned cart reminders and other special offers.
This platform also enables marketers to create personalized campaigns through its built-in automation. You can send out more tailor-fit experiences or meaningful campaigns to their segmented lists through this feature.
Moreover, Klaviyo offers quality benchmarks and predictive analytics that help marketers determine their campaign and online store performance. These features can help you improve your performance and experiences further.
Klaviyo offers a free version of their tools but with limited features. However, their email-only plan costs $45 monthly with up to 1,500 contacts. They also offer a plan for email and SMS for $60 a month with up to 1,500 contacts.
Hubspot
Hubspot provides tools and services that enable e-commerce businesses to simplify their marketing activities. It has an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides access to customer data and actions on top of automation tools like live chats and direct attribution reporting.
Besides that, this platform offers various automation solutions like triggered campaigns, data collection, lead nurturing, and more. Hubspot also provides landing pages for different campaigns.
Currently, this platform has a free version. Its starter plan costs $50 monthly if you want to invest in more features. They have a professional plan with an $890 monthly price and an enterprise plan going up to $3,600 annually. However, these plans' costs may change depending on whether you pay monthly or yearly.
Mailchimp
Many consider this platform one of the best email marketing automation tools. It offers creative email templates and allows users to craft their own through its drag-and-drop designer. Plus, it allows personalization, where emails can address their recipient directly by name.
This platform also offers a multi-step feature where you can send emails to customers along a content path. This feature allows marketers to create journeys with various starting points and unique actions, giving each recipient a personalized experience.
Moreover, Mailchimp offers A/B testing and quality analytics to help improve future campaigns.
This platform offers a free version of its tool with limited features and up to 500 contacts. However, investing more can give you access to up to 200,000 contacts for $350 a month.
Archive
User-generated content (UGC) refers to any content created and published by online users about a brand or products and services. This content could be in the form of reviews, photos, and videos primarily posted on social media.
Archive.com is a platform that enables you to capture UGC, particularly Instagram and TikTok content that mentions your brand. For instance, Instagram stories are excellent forms of UGCs because they're raw or unedited. If they're product reviews, they're likely to have honest customer feedback.
Unfortunately, stories only last a day. With Archive's automated platform, you can capture these materials once they mention your store.
This platform has a free plan with ten community members, Instagram-only stories, post and reel detection, and email and chat support. It also has a starter plan, a pro plan, and an advanced plan with 600 community members and other unique features like TikTok detection, automated likes, and analytics at $299 a month.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an e-commerce marketing platform that offers fully customizable and built-in templates to give shoppers a more personalized experience. This platform also helps marketers streamline their processes with pre-built workflows covering a customer's buying journey.
The best part is that you can connect Omnisend to other e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix.
Omnisend offers a free version of its email marketing platform with up to 250 contacts. Its standard email-only plan costs $20 a month with up to 1,000 contacts, while its pro plan with email and SMS costs $59 with up to 1,000 contacts.
Drip
Drip is a special marketing automation platform that helps e-commerce businesses create quality shopping experiences. The best part is that it offers an easy-to-use platform with pre-built email templates that enable marketers to launch targeted campaigns.
Moreover, this platform also helps collect and organize customer data in a single dashboard for easy monitoring. Other helpful features of Drip include forms, pop-ups, reports, smart A/B testing, segmentation, and more.
Currently, Drip offers its lowest price at $59 a month with 2,500 contacts. It also provides 5,000 contacts at $89 a month, 7,500 contacts at $124, and 10,000 contacts at $154.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is an all-in-one digital marketing platform offering quality features to enable businesses to build stronger customer relationships. Some of the best offerings of this platform include email campaigns, SMS messages, Facebook Ads, and marketing automation.
This platform also lets marketers track their best-performing campaigns and determine ROIs. Plus, it helps marketers generate leads and engage with existing customers.
Finally, SendinBlue also offers integrations with other e-commerce platforms, including Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify.
SendinBlue offers a free version of its platform. Its paid plan starts at $25 monthly, while its business plan costs $65 monthly. They also offer an enterprise plan that goes up to $1,000. These prices can still change depending if users will pay monthly or yearly.
Pro Tip: When sending out email marketing campaigns, ensure you offer an unsubscribe button to recipients. Including an unsubscribe button is an excellent way to show respect to your customers by enabling them to opt-out.
Maximize Every Tool for Your E-Commerce Store
As today's marketplace becomes more competitive and advanced, solutions like marketing automation are becoming increasingly vital for modern businesses.
Marketing automation enables businesses, particularly online ones, to craft meaningful campaigns that resonate with the target audience. Through automation, marketers can connect with customers better, leading to better engagement and more conversions.
Get the most out of every automation tool to help you build your online credibility and convert more people. Think Archive.
Social proof is vital for e-commerce stores today. If you want your customers to trust you, you must offer them materials that prove you're a trustworthy brand, like authentic user-generated content. Through Archive, you can capture and showcase quality UGCs, particularly from social media, to help elevate your brand in a highly competitive digital landscape.
User-generated content can help elevate your brand's online presence. Maximize every user-generated content with Archive.com.
FAQs on E-commerce Marketing Automation
How much do marketing automation tools cost?
The cost will depend on the platform you want to use and how much you're willing to spend. Some platforms offer their tools for free. However, these free versions provide limited features. It's best to invest in more features. Some platforms can exceed &2,000 monthly, but some plans will fit your budget.
What's the difference between a CRM and an automation tool?
Many confuse CRM programs as a branch of marketing automation. However, CRM is primarily used for sales purposes and not marketing. They help track the actions of existing or potential customers through various company channels, including social media, email, and websites. These tools also help gather information and guide the target market's customer journey.
Using these tools together with any marketing automation platform enables businesses to build better relationships with their target audience. Plus, they help execute and track campaigns better.
What type of tasks should marketers not automate?
Regardless of the many marketing automation features, creating content shouldn't be automated. Content is a vital component of a company's success. They must connect with the target audience while elevating their brand's credibility. Most importantly, they must be original. That's why creating them requires careful planning and, as much as possible, little automation involved.
