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As eCommerce business owner, your primary goal is to boost sales. In order to do that successfully, you need to get to know your customers well. After all, the better you know your customers, the easier it is to add value to their experience with each interaction.
However, when running an eCommerce store, it can be hard to get to know your customers, for obvious reasons. Yet, marketing automation can help you build relationships with your shoppers and grow your sales.
Here are 8 ways marketing automation can help the sales of your e-commerce business.
1. Segment your Audience Improve Your Marketing Campaigns
The success of your marketing campaigns nowadays rests on your ability to segment your lists. This makes it a lot easier to create content that is relevant to your contacts.
Segmenting leads and prospects helps you get more sales by offering people what they already want. Marketing automation has made segmentation simpler than ever! You can segment your contacts to make lists based on various common factors like location, average order value, engagement level, age, profession, etc.
Furthermore, you can leverage the segmentation capability of marketing automation software to send out personalized product recommendations to make your communication even more relevant.
2. Turn new customers into returning customers
After a customer purchases at your online store, they are more likely to return and make another purchase, rather than get new customers to make a first-time purchase.
That is why after new customers make a purchase you should send out some form of automated follow-up communication to keep them engaged.
Here are some ways that you could consider:
- Asking the customer for feedback on the purchased products
- Invitation to join a customer loyalty program.
- Providing a promotional offer for their next purchase.
Whichever of the above you choose to execute, make sure that your goal remains to bring customers back to your site.
3. Follow up with visitors who abandoned their carts
Customers that come into your online store, won’t always buy. The problem of customers abandoning their online shopping carts has always been an issue.
There are plenty of reasons people leave their carts:
- They weren’t ready to buy
- The product wasn’t really what they were looking for
- High tax/shipping costs
- The check-out process was taking long
Ηοwever, if you send these customers a message after a certain period of time and remind them about these items, they might be more inclined to buy. With the use of marketing automation and by sending a follow-up message to customers who left items in their cart, you can be sure you are not losing your money on them. And, the best part about it, is that through automation you don’t waste any time at all to reach out.
Additionally, you can make this communication even more effective when you add similar product recommendations, providing them with other options that might be relevant to what they were looking for in the first place.
4. Re-engage with inactive customers
eCommerce marketing automation helps you re-engage with inactive customers that had shown interest in your product or service in the past but have lost touch ever since.
It can help you reach out to them and drive them back to your site with new content and messages that contain promotional offers, in order to incentivize another purchase.
By segmenting these emails by purchased product category, the promotions or message, even more, will be more relevant to the recipient, increasing the likelihood of customers returning to the store.
One you can do is by identifying old leads from past conversations and sending them promotional coupons with expiration dates. That way they won’t miss out on the promotion, even if they see your email on a later day.
5. Create a personalized website
By creating personalized content for your website you make it easier to build relationships with your prospects, which will lead to a better overall experience and, ultimately help you increase your conversions.
Μarketing automation has made it easier than ever to connect with your customers by using dynamically generated personalized content based on their demographic data and browsing behavior. For example, if a user is searching for bags, it makes sense that your landing page gives prominence to bags over other items to hold the user’s interest and attention. The only thing you need is the right marketing automation software to create segmented lists and build landing pages targeted to each segment for higher relevancy and conversions.
With marketing automation software you can communicate to your prospects relevant and personalized content.
6. Improve Customer Happiness
Marketing automation has an important role in helping you improve customer retention, increase customer lifetime value and satisfaction and even turn existing customers into advocates and refer others to your business.
Automation software supports the execution of an omnichannel customer experience by bringing together information gathered from multiple channels. It helps your customer care team offer personalized assistance quickly and effectively, without customers having to reiterate their questions or problems at the start of every interaction.
7. Automate the checkout process
A complicated checkout process will only discourage customers from completing their purchases. However, you can prevent that from happening by creating a smooth and trustworthy checkout process.
With marketing automation, you can fill in user details automatically and display preferred payment options, in order to make it as convenient as possible for users to complete a purchase. In addition, you can also add live chat options on the checkout page to answer user queries as they are approaching checkout.
8. Leverage social media presence
Social media is a great tool for eCommerce businesses to expand brand awareness, stay connected with customers, improve their relationship with them and understand their needs better. Marketing automation can help companies post regularly on their social media channels, maintain a consistent presence capable of increasing brand awareness, stay top of mind, and cultivate customer relationships leading to sales and an increase in customer lifetime value.
Social media automation is crucial in allowing your brand to monitor brand mentions and post high-quality content consistently. This is especially important as your brand establishes its presence across various platforms and channels and customers start asking questions about your products and services. To avoid losing out on direct customer interaction, the use of conversational bots becomes essential.
Give your e-commerce sales a boost
Ιn today’s fast-paced economy you simply can’t do everything in your business, while also working to grow it.
Thanks to marketing automation tools available to today’s businesses, you no longer have to, as they can help your business reach revenue and growth goals easily. After all, a good marketing automation platform is not only about making your life easier, it should also help you close more deals.
With WayMore’s all-in-one automation tool you can do that. You can plan, design and execute automated campaigns easily and effectively to increase sales and loyalty across multiple channels. It’s time you give it a try.
Note: this post was originally published in 2021 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness
