Automation is one of the most crucial business partners for your e-commerce brand’s success. Your team’s expertise combined with automation means increased efficiency.
Social Media Today’s State of Marketing Automation found that 75% of marketers rely on automation tools. Your e-commerce brand can automate social media post scheduling, email marketing, and advertising.
Let’s explore the benefits of marketing automation and strategies to help your team.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software and technology to automate marketing tasks and workflows. It allows businesses to streamline and automate repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, social media posting, and ad targeting, to save time and resources.
Marketing automation can be used for a wide range of activities, including lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation. It can also be used to personalize marketing messages and tailor them to the specific needs and interests of individual customers.
Key Tasks Performed by Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can perform a wide range of tasks in an eCommerce business. Here are five key tasks that marketing automation can help with:
- Lead generation: Marketing automation can generate leads by identifying potential customers and capturing their contact information, such as through the use of lead magnets or sign-up forms.
- Lead nurturing: It can nurture leads by sending targeted emails or other communications to help move them through the sales funnel.
- Customer segmentation: It can also segment customers based on their interests, purchase history, and other factors, which allows businesses to send targeted, personalized marketing messages.
- Email marketing: Marketing automation can automate email marketing campaigns, including sending newsletters, promotional emails, and abandoned cart emails.
- Social media posting: It can schedule and automate social media posts, saving time and ensuring consistent posting of content on social media channels.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can provide a streamlined structure for different functions in your department. It can contribute to the growth of your business.
1. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring helps marketing and sales teams assign scores to leads and build potential marketing solutions and strategies to nurture those prospects.
The scores (or points) that your marketing team appoint to qualified leads will define the value they bring to your business. The allotment of these scores depends on the lead’s interaction with your product.
Your e-commerce marketing teams may assign the following points:
- Download gift guide: +5 points.
- Add an item to the cart: +10 points for each product added
- Click on a blog post on your website: +2 points
Source: Get Voip
As an eCommerce marketer, remember to define an interest scale that will map your leads’ behavior and help you create strategies for conversion.
Lead scoring tools, like HubSpot, allow you to automate email workflows, create free buyer personas, and target customers with live chat.
2. Lower Churn Rate
Churn rate indicates the rate at which customers unsubscribe, don’t repeat purchases or leave your service. There are 2 types of churn rates:
- Voluntary churn rate: When your customer chooses to leave your service or not buy from your store.
- Involuntary churn rate: When your brand discontinues a product or terminated the subscription due to non-payment by the customer.
You can calculate the churn rate using this formula:
Many companies reduce their churn rate through marketing automation by launching drip campaigns. These campaigns are automated emails or reminders specific to the customer.
Drip campaigns include:
- Sending automation emails on holidays and events.
- Sending free coupons via email on customer’s birthdays.
- Inviting the customer to follow you on social media to get exclusive offers.
- Sending early bird access to loyal customers to retain their interest.
- Sending discounts to customers to renew their membership.
Anthropologie sends a birthday drip campaign with a 15% discount. This actionable email is automated for each customer using their birthdate. These types of campaigns can increase your brand’s retention rate.
3 Marketing Automation Strategies For E-commerce Brands
Here are some specific examples of how your e-commerce brand can leverage marketing automation:
1. Abandoned cart emails
Abandoned cart automation sends emails to shoppers who left items in their carts. You know prospects want your products; they just need a little nudge. Away sends a personalized abandoned cart email.
Source: Reallygoodemails
A marketing automation tool personalizes these emails for each customer. If you have 1,000 customers who have abandoned their cart, drafting a thousand emails manually would be an exhaustive task, but marketing automation gets the job done in a few minutes.
2. Chatbots for support
Your support team cannot be online 24/7, but chatbots can. Chatbots can also simulate human-like messages to keep the customer engaged with offers and new deals.
The e-commerce brand Urbanic uses its chatbot to give updates to its customers about orders and returns. Each time a customer takes some action on their website, their chatbot sends a response. For example, if someone has placed an exchange for their product, their chatbot will send a message regarding the time of pick up and delivery of the exchanged product.
3. Segmentation for personalization
When you divide your leads into different segments, you can create better targeting strategies. With segmentation, you can personalize marketing campaigns and offers for a specific group.
For example, with geographical segmentation, you can send your metro city’s customers information about purchasing a car, compared to rural customers who prefer bikes.
In that case, your team can use automation tools to create marketing campaigns based on the interest of each group. They will only see the offers that concern their needs and will be more responsive to the offers or rewards.
Marketing Automation for E-commerce Brands
Automation can lead to efficient and effective marketing results. Start by integrating the less-complex processes. Then, find new ways to boost your automation within your entire customer journey.
About the Author
Shreya Pandey is a B2B SaaS freelance writer for brands in marketing, e-commerce, SEO, productivity, and HR. She focuses on creating content for blogs and white papers through extensive research and engaging examples. When she is not writing, you can find her buried in books or learning a new language. Follow her @ShreyaPaandey.
