6 Ways Your eCommerce Store Can Generate More Sales Using Marketing Automation

Guest post by Gloria Kopp, https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/gloria-kopp/

If you can master the art of using marketing automation within your e-commerce store, you can take your business to new levels of success that were never before possible? Sounds far-fetched? Consider how many hours, or even days, you spend carrying out menial tasks, task after task, which doesn’t leave you enough to time to focus on the more important aspects of your business, such as providing a better service or expanding.

Maybe you’re just looking for new ways to attract new and prosperous customers while generating more sales. Whatever the targets are for your eCommerece store, looking into how email automation can work for you is a great step forward to take since there’s so many possibilities and creative channels you can take.

Not sure where to begin? Here are four key ways you can use marketing automation to save you time while dramatically boosting your conversion rates.

Start with an Automated Welcome Email

You invest so much time in building your mailing lists for your eCommerce store but just how finely tuned is your emailing campaign for when you’ve finally got users to sign up? One source suggests that over 64% of all customers expect a welcome email within 24 hours of them signing up to a mailing list, so are you giving them that?

Of course, you’re trying to run an eCommerce store so stopping whatever you’re doing to send out an email to every person that signs up is going to take time you don’t have, so why not set up an automated trigger with your email marketing software?

“This trigger will be sent when someone first enters their email address into your system and they’ll receive an automatic welcome from your business saying hello and welcome to the family! You might even want to add in a little 10% discount to get them started on purchasing things in your eCommerce store” – explains James Larson, an Ecommerce Marketer at Revieweal.

Create a Complete Automated Email Marketing Journey

Using email marketing software solutions, such as HubSpot and Pica9, you can set up a fully automated email series to guide your customer through their sales journey on your e-commerce store.

For example, once someone has signed up to your mailing list, you’ll first send them an automated welcome email; welcoming them to your business and letting them know what options your business has for them, such as getting in touch, browsing your online catalogue and links to information about your business.

From here, it’s really up to you and depends on what business you have, but this is your chance to get really creative. You can set up cart abandonment emails, discount and sales emails, lead nurturing email series and even entire content-based email series that are designed to boost your social media follower counts and engagement rate; the choice is really up to you.

If you’re stuck for ideas on how to create these emails, use content marketing generation tools, such as Best British Essays and Academadvisor, who can create this kind of content on your behalf.

Automate Your Entire Social Media Campaign

One of the greatest features that came with marketing automation software was the feature where you can automate your social media campaigns. Consider how much time you spend writing out posts, planning when you’re going to post them, watching the clock to make sure that you’re posting at the right times.

The list goes on and on. However, with leading social media automation solutions, such as SalesForce or Leads Squared, you can proactively take control of your social media accounts, while saving yourself enough time to carry out other important tasks in your day.

Having a dedicated social media strategy is so important to your success as a business and using automation can help you achieve consistency for your followers, save you time through features like post scheduling and can give you all the feedback you need to monitor and track the performance of your campaigns, so you’re constantly improving.

Of course, this kind of automation only works if you’ve got the content ready to post well in advance. This means doing your research, predicting trends and spending enough time creating a content series for the future. You can always use social media content generation services, such as Viawriting or My Writing Way if you can’t find the time but still need the quality.

When creating an automated social media campaign, be sure to organise your workflow so you can see everything exactly how it is. This will allow you to easily manage and organise your content so you can stay on top of things, find it easy to analysis your data and tweak your strategy to perfection.

Upselling: Personalized Product Recommendations

One of the more unknown features that automation software has is gathering and collecting data on your customers as they use, navigate and buy things from your eCommerce store. As Steve Jobs once said, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.

“Using automated software, you’ll be able to monitor your customer’s browsing habits to then automatically show them over similar items that they might be interested in. Take video streaming services from Amazon and Netflix as they are prime examples of this” – says Carolyn Turbeville, a Sales Manager at Academized.

After you’ve watched something, Amazon will automatically recommend something similar to the user to watch. These recommendations add up to around 35% of Amazon’s total income from its video streaming service. Netflix; around 75%.

As you can see from these figures, upselling is a hugely popular and effective marketing strategy and if you weren’t aware of it before, the chances are that you’ll now see it everywhere, especially if you’re using the website of successful brands and businesses.

There are many places where you can make these recommendations so get creative, depending on what your business is like. For example, you could directly advertise related products on the same page as a product, you could email the products in the receipt, or separate email after the customer has made a purchase. You could even use cookie tracking to ‘follow’ your customers around the internet while advertising related products on different websites.

Luckily, all these processes listed above can be automated using simple triggers, saving you time while maximising your sales opportunities. When creating emails, like the ones listed above, you can use email marketing automation tools, such as Grammarix and Lets Go and Learn, to set up these triggers and create your content.

Don’t forget that you can upsell products in your eCommerce store, articles and posts in your blog, related pages on your website or content in your email campaign.

Improving Your Customer Experience

Marketing automation is just about generating the perfect experience for new leads and new customers. You can also use it to nurture and look after your old and existing customers at the same time.

Using many of the same marketing automation triggers that are listed above to gather information on your customers about their experience with your e-commerce store. For example, you can send an email several days after someone has made a purchase to make sure everything was okay with their experience and that you’d love to hear their feedback.

Likewise, when a customer sets up a support ticket, you can send them an email saying that you’ll return to helping them as quickly as possible. It’s so important that you continue to nurture your leads after a sale has been made as it’s so much easier to retain an old customer than sourcing a new one.

When creating these kinds of emails, and any other SEO-related content for your website, feel free to using content generation services, such as Writing Populist and Best essay writing services that can save you the time. It’s vital that you use services like these if you haven’t got the time or the resources to do it yourself.

This is because you can’t risk sending your customers low quality content since this can seriously damage the credibility and reputation of your eCommerce store.

At the end of the day, the experience that your customers and subscribers have with your business and store is the most important aspect to consider since it’s this factor that will determine your success.

Implementing a Loyalty Program

Finally, the last point we come to is looking after your ‘VIP’ customers. These are customers that continue to use your eCommerce store over and over again and are renowned for being your best customers.

Using marketing automation, you can set up triggers that track customers to see what purchases they are making and how much they are spending. When a customer reaches a specific milestone, such as ten purchases, you can automatically send them an email welcoming them to your loyalty program.

Within the loyalty program, you can offer exclusive content and products, program-only discounts and whatever other kinds of discounts or benefits you wish to offer. You could even send them a free e-book.

Using a loyalty program such as this is a great way to keep your best customer interacting with your business while giving your new customers something to aim for, all of which comes together to boost the revenue of your business.

Conclusion

Remember to keep up to date with your automated marketing campaigns. It’s not a case of simply setting everything up and forgetting about them. You’ll need to monitor the performance of your campaigns and continuously improve to make sure you’re reaping the maximum benefits.