How Marketing Automation has Impacted the eCommerce Industry?
eCommerce is the new norm, and with the rise of smartphones, digitalization has become a part of daily life. As more and more people use eCommerce to go shopping, sell goods or run their businesses, there’s a huge market out there that’s ready for advertisers to reach them. But as more people shop online, marketers also feel pressured to captivate larger audiences while racing against accelerated digital transformation.
The use of eCommerce automation is an excellent solution for marketing teams, enabling them to increase their bandwidth and focus on market trends and customer behavior.
Understanding eCommerce Automation
eCommerce automation is all about streamlining, boosting, and accelerating your marketing activities. It’s all about bringing the power and speed of automation to your business without sacrificing quality or effectiveness.
eCommerce automation software helps automate the entire marketing process and is a must-have for every online business. It provides an integrated approach to customer acquisition, nurturing, and awareness management. In simple terms, eCommerce marketing automation is software that automates repetitive tasks, freeing up resources so marketers can focus on what they do best – interacting with customers.
Here are some reasons to consider marketing automation in eCommerce:
Time Savior
Automation means that processes carried out manually today can be done automatically tomorrow, saving time and improving productivity. Automation saves time and frees up time to pursue other opportunities.
Enhance Analytics
eCommerce marketing automation software can help you generate more actionable data. Most of the automation software has access to Google Analytics, which provides advanced segmentation capabilities and enables you to analyze your campaign results in a way that helps you identify areas where your strategy is working well and where it needs improvement.
Omnichannel Monitoring
eCommerce websites often use web-based marketing channels to grow their business. From email marketing to social media, these channels are the backbone of eCommerce businesses and essential to a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. With eCommerce marketing automation, you can manage the performance across these channels by allowing you to measure the reach and effectiveness of campaigns.
Increase in CLV (Customer Lifecycle Value)
CLV is crucial for eCommerce companies to measure customer value and determine their worth. By using eCommerce marketing automation solutions, companies can enable effective communication with their customers through all the stages of their purchase lifecycle. In addition, by understanding the different life cycles, companies can deliver custom solutions to target specific customers or perhaps create a journey based on where they fall within the cycle.
eCommerce businesses can use CLV to make better decisions on customer acquisition costs, driving repeat sales and increasing profitability.
Personalized Customer Experience
eCommerce marketing automation tools help the experts understand the interests of their customers and bring together their touchpoints to create tailored messages. These tools monitor everything from website visits, downloads, and social media activities to define a customer’s purchasing journey. By tracking the behavior of potential and existing customers, marketing automation tools help eCommerce brands create a personalized customer experience.
Improved ROI
You can reduce marketing expenses and increase your ROI by using eCommerce marketing automation. The automation allows for a systematic approach to lead nurturing based on feedback from various touchpoints. When you utilize eCommerce automation, you can establish clear progress measures through the customer lifecycle. This results in considerable savings because it boosts conversion rates, minimizes costs, and increases profits.
According to the Harvard Business Review, marketers who use marketing automation software see an average of 10% to more than 30%, increase in new sales opportunities. In addition, marketing automation software can provide eCommerce companies with analytics that can be used to measure the effectiveness of touchpoints and prioritize leads, ensuring marketing campaigns are successful.
Refined Marketing Strategies
eCommerce marketing automation software offers several valuable features, including data analytics. It processes data from leads and then provides information on the trends marketers can use to make adjustments to improve marketing campaigns. This software helps marketers focus on A/B testing two versions of websites or any marketing asset and measure which one performs better. Knowing the best-performing asset is critical to making even the most superficial changes in campaigns that hugely impact conversion rate.
How to Use Marketing Automation in eCommerce?
This section discusses some classic examples of how you can use marketing automation in eCommerce to increase sales, improve customer experience and generate higher revenue.
1. Acquire New Contacts
Using eCommerce marketing automation software can help you grow your contact list and attract new customers. For example, if you regularly churn out high-quality, actionable, and insightful content or products, your audiences would be keen to hear from you. This situation could be an excellent premise for offering them something of value in exchange for adding their information to your email list. Typically, surveys, whitepapers, reports, and similar documents are available to those who sign up for a business newsletter.
2. Welcoming and Onboarding
As of late, most websites require new customers to register to receive communications from them. These automated emails are often sent out at the request of the customer or can be triggered by interactions with the brand’s products and services. Some of these emails may include a welcome message, an overview of the company’s values and message, or a step-by-step guide through purchasing the product. In addition, promos and discounts are often used to lure new accounts into swiping their card for purchases.
A welcome series could be a highly effective approach to help you extend customer service from you, especially if your product or service is already on the shelves. In addition, the in-depth explanation of what customers can do with your offering can boost their loyalty and enhance the overall customer experience of your product or service.
3. Translate Abandoned Carts to Sales
Abandonment of products in shopping carts is a severe problem of eCommerce. About 7 out of 10 shoppers will abandon their carts for various reasons, including product price or shipping costs, but the figure varies depending on the device and can go as high as 85.65% for smartphone users.
Marketing automation can help eCommerce businesses offset the losses caused by lost sales. For example, automated emails triggered by specific subject lines, email copy, and call-to-action buttons can tempt shoppers to buy from you instead of your competitors!
4. Capture Customer Feedback
Several studies indicate that eCommerce businesses encouraging users to post their ratings and reviews against the products can improve conversion rates. In addition, eCommerce marketing automation software can automate the task of collecting feedback by sending email reminders to customers after their purchase has been completed.
5. Send Media-Rich Dynamic Communications
Including rich media such as product images in your email campaigns can increase the number of clicks and conversions by 42% and 56%, respectively.
Using an eCommerce marketing automation platform can offer cross-selling or upselling to customers on your online store. All you need to do is set up product blocks and let the platform handle the rest! This form of automation will share relevant details such as product specifications, price, and other information to help you make an informed decision.
6. Reward Loyal Customers
If customers choose from various products, eCommerce businesses must recognize and reward customer loyalty. You can develop long-term relationships with repeat customers by segmenting customers based on their behaviors and interests.
Your loyalty program will build a steady revenue stream for your business since such customers are about five times more likely to purchase from you, seven times more likely to try out new products, and four times more likely to refer you to their peers. In addition, under your loyalty program, you can offer flat discounts, exclusive offers, BOGO promotions, gifts, and more.
Final Thoughts
eCommerce marketing automation is a must-have tool, even for small and medium-sized eCommerce businesses. However, any eCommerce business, regardless of its size or niche, will benefit immensely from taking advantage of marketing automation.
NimbusPost has helped thousands of eCommerce businesses worldwide improve customer retention, reduce delivery costs and increase revenues. We are the complete customer experience platform for SMEs that enables you to deliver a consistent customer experience through real-time delivery tracking, proactive shipment notifications, and a personalized courier dashboard.
