The world of e-commerce is very different from its physical counterpart. You can’t rely on that knowledgeable salesperson on the shop floor to sell your product and greet customers in a friendly and alluring way.
Of course in the online world, buyers rarely interact with real people. It’s now easier and cheaper than ever to start an online store, and like any business, scaling is essential. It’s a foregone conclusion that if you’re successful in e-commerce, you will eventually reach a breaking point where you struggle to keep up with incoming orders and changing inventory levels. This is why it’s key to learn about marketing automation before it ruins your customer experience.
What is marketing automation?
The best way to describe marketing automation is the process of using eCommerce channel management software to manage repetitive marketing tasks. It combines the right people, software, and processes necessary to automate the way you provide a service to your customers.
Marketing automation needs data from the user to work efficiently, so the tool must integrate with a data source like an e-commerce platform. Examples of data points are a user’s personal information, social media activity or purchase history.
When do you need marketing automation
This is something that will be blatantly obvious when it happens. Without marketing automation, e-commerce merchants can’t keep up with their growing email volume. Every new email can be an overwhelming experience because you and your team struggle to handle it. It slows down the process and makes your service more prone to mistakes. E-commerce merchants must switch to a system focused around marketing automation when they are spending most of their time fixing mistakes or missing orders.
Start with email marketing
An important element of marketing automation is email marketing (specifically for e-commerce) which can help generate additional sales from a highly engaged audience. There are more than four billion email addresses in the world and 91 percent of users look in their inbox every day. It’s a common misconception that people don’t like receiving promotional and automated emails but research suggests that a customer doesn’t mind this if they have already established a relationship with the company.
Launching an e-commerce email marketing campaign can be daunting but merchants should take full advantage of these opportunities.
One of these opportunities can be an automated email to customers to recover abandoned shopping carts. Research by the Baymark Institute indicates that on average, 69% of shopping carts are abandoned without a purchase. 7 in every 10 potential customers fail to buy a product that caught their eye. An effective cart abandonment email automation process can help address the customer’s issue and bring them back for the purchase.
These types of visitors are relatively easy to target – and an automated email sequence can be used to market these new leads over the subsequent days by educating them about your brand and start to build trust.
Why use marketing automation?
These are many use cases in the ever-expanding world of marketing automation. Marketing automation can have a noticeable impact on your conversion rate, increase your revenue on a consistent basis and provide you with detailed insight into your customer’s behavior. Time is also an important factor, allowing merchants greater freedom to focus on building their brand and identifying new products and trends.
Marketing automation is an amazing tool when you use it right, but like anything, it has to be constructed and implemented properly for your business. Not everything works the same for every business. But if it works, it will drastically reduce human error and prevent communication lines from falling down. Digital customers must be nurtured and experience the best level of service from your business; otherwise, your competitors will take full advantage!
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