Marketing Automation for Ecommerce & Online Stores

All eCommerce store owners hope to have more time and money to increase traffic and sales. The reality, however, is the opposite — budding online stores have limited resources. To meet this gap, online store owners have to juggle different aspects of their business, such as a critical ingredient for traffic and revenue generation — marketing.

If you’re looking to grow your online business and sustain long-term success, ecommerce marketing automation is a crucial investment. Some online businesses face growth challenges because of the lack of marketing automation in place.

Many online sellers and marketers are not confident about their marketing automation strategy. One, because they think that marketing automation is costly. Second, because they feel that it requires adept technical knowledge.

Fortunately, over the past years, marketing automation has transformed in functionality, accessibility, and flexibility. In this article, you will learn the eCommerce imperatives to help improve your marketing automation strategies.

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What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is when a tool or software completes a repetitive task for marketing templates or sales in replacement of a person. The use of marketing automation is to help businesses more effectively promote their business across multiple channels and streamline the planning, execution, coordination, and monitoring.

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Why is Marketing Automation Important in eCommerce?

Marketing automation provides numerous benefits, but you can sum it up into four things:

• Improved Efficiency: As your business grows, the volume of your day-to-day activities increases. The use of marketing automation will help you reduce the manual labors and repetitive tasks.
• Improved Budget: With marketing automation, you can complete more tasks without needing to hire more people.
• Improved Sales: Marketing automation acts as your salespeople as it recognizes buying patterns which allow it to display relevant offers and promos at the right place and time. In fact, 77% of marketing automation users saw a significant increase in their sales conversions.
• Improved Customer Experience: The use of marketing automation allows online stores to deliver consistent, seamless and uniformed shopping experience across all channels. It also enables them to tailor fit their messages and provide personalized offers.

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8 Ways to Use Marketing Automation in your Online Store

With the explosion of marketing automation tools designed for eCommerce stores, you can select a variety of tools at hand. While all-in-one marketing automation tools may tempt you, online businesses have different needs, and these needs change over time as you are required to align your marketing efforts according to your target market.

A bundled solution prevents you from customizing your marketing strategies when you need to. To properly use marketing automation, invest in a solution that is necessary. Let’s look at the best ways that you can use marketing automation and the recommended tools for your online store’s success:

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#1 Email opt-in form

Within the first 15 seconds, 55% of visitors leave a website. This huge percentage of potential customers will go to waste if you don’t act quickly from the moment they enter your site. Why not place an automated email signup form that will display whenever visitors arrive at your site? You can use this to nurture them into conversion in the future.

To make it more effective, put a compelling offer so that your visitors will subscribe immediately. A widely used marketing automation tool for email opt-in is Better Coupon Box. It enables online store owners to set up opt-in email pop-ups with an enticing coupon code in 60 seconds or less.

For example, Unicorns Kingdom placed an opt-in email form with a 25% discount offer to persuade first-time customers to join their email list.

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#2 Welcome email

Establishing a long-term relationship with your customers starts with just a simple gesture like a welcome email acknowledging that they have subscribed to your email list or thanking them for their first purchase. This gesture is a way to make your customers feel valued and special.

Welcome emails can be easily automated so that whenever new email subscribers join your list, they will receive an email greeting instantly skipping that the manual labor. You can integrate Happy Email to send a thank you note 30 minutes after a customer made a purchase or registered to your online store.

Look at how Bagandtote sent a welcome email to its newly registered users which included a discount code to motivate the new user to purchase:

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#3 Product recommendation

Product recommendation has proven to increase conversion rates by up to 915%. But, the question is what products will you recommend and when, how, and to whom will you recommend them?

Invest in marketing automation tool that helps you display product recommendations by utilizing personalized and data-driven decisions. A powerful tool like Personalized Recommendation collects and analyzes buying behavior to unlock customer patterns so that the next time a customer visits your site, you can display smart recommendations based on the customer’s behavior.

You can display your top promotions or new arrivals. You can also display recommendations on the cart page. For instance, Wanahavit has a cart recommendation to suggest the most relevant products that a customer might want basing on their cart.

Alternatively, you can recommend product using the upsell and cross-sell strategy. What it does is you suggest complementary products or higher valued items based on the customer’s current product selection. You can effortlessly do an upsell and cross-sell with Boost Sales because it has a targeted upsell feature and bundled selling capability.

Look at Thanksnet’s upsell popup that appears when a customer adds an item to a cart. The upsell popup displays products that the customer might be interested in.

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#4 Cart abandonment notification

The latest cart abandonment rate is close to 70% of eCommerce shoppers. When shoppers add items to their shopping carts but leave without a purchase, a tremendous opportunity is lost. If you’re not doing anything about it, then it’s time you practice a cart abandonment strategy.

Follow up your customer who abandoned their shopping carts by sending an automated email reminding them that they have forgotten to complete their purchase. Offer an incentive so that they’ll go back to your site and buy their abandoned items.

While cart abandonment emails are extremely popular to recover customers, new marketing automation technologies such as Recover Cart Pusher allows you to display real-time web notification of the customer’s abandoned carts. This way, you won’t have to wait for customers to check their emails.

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#5 Exit-intent popup

Whenever shoppers enter your online store, they don’t exactly intend to buy right there and then. Sometimes, they are still searching for the right products, comparing prices or just undecided to make a purchase.

What you can do to drive your undecided shoppers to purchase is to integrate an exit-intent marketing automation tool which triggers a popup offer or deal whenever your shoppers are about to leave your site.

Better Coupon Box is powered with this exit-intent automation feature. This feature tracks the visitors’ mouse movements to detect when they are about to leave your online store. You can add an enticing special offer to your exit-intent popup to drive your shoppers into conversion.

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#6 Feedback and reviews

Gauging your customer’s shopping experience is an important way to understand how you are performing. Aside from that, getting feedback and reviews is also a good marketing strategy to make your shoppers feel valued and tell them that their opinions and suggestions matter. Shoppers display their confidence, trust, and loyalty to online stores that treat them as valuable and important.

You can automate your feedback or review generation by using customer feedback tools such as Yotpo which has an on-site review feature. The review generation tool also can incentivize shoppers when they write a review by offering discount coupons.

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#7 Referral program

Your referral program is another marketing opportunity which you can automate. It’s a way for you to reach new potential customers by taking advantage of your existing customers’ friends and loved ones.

To make it effective, create an easy to follow referral program so that your shoppers can conveniently refer their family and friends. Also, make it more enticing by rewarding their efforts to refer.

Voucherify has a referral program tool which helps you automatically send rewards via email or any other channel possible. There’s a wide variety of referral campaign you can do such as “Refer-a-friend so that you and your friend both get 10% off”.

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#8 Social Media

Social media generates 31% of overall site traffic. This pushes online stores to launch social media campaigns to market their products and engage with their target market. While it’s necessary to craft a social media marketing strategy in place, the challenge will be planning, executing, and monitoring it. The easiest way to help you with this daunting task is to use a social media management automation software.

Buffer is a widely used social media management tool which makes it easy for online store owners to manage their social media accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin to Pinterest without having to log into their individual social media account. It also allows you to schedule posts, evaluate performance, and work with your team — all in one automation tool.

For example, Buffer can post to your Instagram directly using your mobile. It will also notify you when it’s about time to post just like below. This makes advertising on Instagram much more convenient.

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Automate Your Online Success

As online store owners, you are also responsible for marketing. But, it can be time-consuming, especially if you’re managing all aspects of your online business. Smart eCommerce owners don’t have to spend hours to get their marketing done; they use a marketing automation tool to their advantage.

There are readily available marketing automation tools for you to choose from. What you need to do now is to find which marketing opportunities in your online store you can automate just like the ones we have presented. Choose the ones you need to help automate your work and be more effective in marketing your online store and products.

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