Power of Marketing Automation for eCommerce
Any marketer knows how complex a marketing campaign can be. Anything from lead nurturing to re-engagement can require months of hard work. Meanwhile, only a handful of companies has marketing teams that are large enough to handle a big variety of manual tasks.
That's where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation doesn't just give your team more time to focus on core activities. It streamlines your entire campaign by improving the customer experience.
Let's take a closer look at what marketing automation is and why your e-commerce business needs it.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is using software to automate marketing tasks. By delegating repetitive manual tasks to a program, marketers gain free time to focus on complex activities.
Examples of marketing automation for eCommerce companies include:
Automated emails — sending welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, onboarding emails, re-engagement emails.
Retargeting — following leads after they leave your e-store and showing them your paid ads on other websites.
Lead magnets — collecting customer contact details in exchange for lead magnets as they browse your website.
Chatbots — answering customers' questions on your website without involving a human customer service rep.
Tailored customer experience — suggesting new products to existing customers by collecting and analysing data about their purchase behaviour.
While the above tactics can be implemented manually, they would require immense effort from your marketing team. Since the majority of your competitors is using marketing automation, failing to do so could result in losing your market share.
Why is Marketing Automation a Must-Have for eCommerce?
Almost 70% of businesses currently use marketing automation. Besides maintaining a competitive edge, marketing automation for eCommerce has an impressive collection of benefits.
1. Saving Time
Automating repetitive manual tasks allows your team to save a tremendous amount of time. You don't need to stick to a schedule for sending emails or spend time typing the text and pushing the "send" button.
While on the grand scale of things, writing an email seems like a quick task, it's only easy when you have a few customers. As your customer base grows, manual tasks start eating up the majority of your team's time.
With marketing automation, you can schedule a big chunk of your campaign in advance, allowing your team to focus on something that warrants their immediate attention.
2. Increasing Employee Satisfaction
Did you know that companies with high employee satisfaction rates outperform competitors with low satisfaction rates by 202%?
Tedious repetitive tasks that keep your marketing team from working on strategy, analytics, and brainstorming contribute to the decrease in employee satisfaction rates. Typing emails and answering repetitive questions is hardly something they signed up for when choosing a career in marketing.
By giving your team members an opportunity to focus on core tasks, marketing automation increases employee satisfaction, thus boosting the company's profitability.
3. Improving Customer Experience
Improving the customer experience (CX) is a top priority for the majority of eCommerce companies. More than 80% of businesses that work on CX report an increase in revenue.
Marketing automation can help you improve customer experience by:
Onboarding customers smoothly.
Providing immediate answers to common questions 24/7.
Creating personalized offers while keeping the customer's preferences and buying behaviour in mind.
Helping make the right choices about purchases to increase sales online.
Creating, sending, and analysing customer satisfaction surveys.
It's easy to keep customers satisfied when you only have a few. Without proper automation, CX worsens as the numbers start growing.
4. Nurturing Customer Relationships
Marketing automation emails are designed to nurture customer relationships. Everything from onboarding to re-engagement contributes to maintaining a trusted relationship with your audience.
While you still have to work on the content of your emails, your team doesn't need to monitor each customer closely to know when to send relevant messages. Emails go out according to a pre-designed schedule so you never:
Miss a birthday or a special event.
Overlook an item abandoned in the cart.
Forget about a customer who hasn't been active in a while.
Fail to get an opt-in confirmation for an email list.
And much more.
Besides being highly convenient, marketing automation speeds up the customer's journey through the sales funnel, nurturing the relationship in the process.
5. Preventing Errors
Human errors are an unavoidable part of marketing. However, marketing automation can minimize them significantly. With automation, you can always communicate with the right customer in the right place and at the right time.
6. Cutting Costs
Marketing automation can help your company stay on a budget by:
Keeping your marketing team small — all repetitive tasks are done by software.
Generating higher conversion rates — customers get what they want faster.
Reducing the turnover rate — your marketing team is more satisfied with its work.
Decreasing customer churn rate — customer support issues are addressed timely.
Boosting retention — old and inactive customers are re-engaged on time.
Making the most of each lead — potential customers get the information they need to take the next step down the sales funnel.
Marketing automation can increase your campaign's ROI by cutting costs and speeding up the conversion process.
7. Creating a Personalized Experience
Personalization is the most popular concept in modern marketing. Nine out of ten leading marketers say that personalization is integral to the company's profitability.
Marketing automation contributes to a personalized experience by:
Creating emails based on each customer's behaviour.
Providing offers based on customers' important events.
Answering questions timely.
Marketing automation allows you to address each customer individually instead of trying to save time by sending bulk messages.
While you still need to design personalized content for each segment of your audience, automation helps you tailor the content and ensure its arrival to the right recipient at the right time.
Taking Full Advantage of Marketing Automation Today
Automation doesn't just cut costs and make marketing easier for your team. It improves customer experience, streamlines personalization, and helps you nurture trusted relationships with your audience.
By taking full advantage of its benefits, you can improve your marketing campaign and outrun the competition.
Would you like to learn more about incorporating automation into your marketing campaign? We are here to help.