Marketing Automation for E-commerce

For quite some time, marketers have spent time understanding the various aspects involved in marketing automation. During this journey, several insights have been gained on how marketing automation plays an important role in the e-commerce journey, and how retailers and manufacturers can boost sales and service aspects of their offerings.

This blog summarises all the knowledge on automation for someone who wants to learn about marketing automation in e-commerce.

 

What do we mean by Marketing Automation?

In simple layman terms, marketing automation means automating email marketing and scheduling social media posts. However, it doesn’t stop here, it also explores customizing the landing pages on your sites and various ways of easing the shopping cart access.

If implemented in a well-structured manner, it helps in:

• Sending out well-defined tailored emails to customers
• Based on shopping history, suggesting new products and promotions as and when available.
• Existing customers for new product sales.

It further allows to customize the store offerings by giving automated recommendations to customers based on what they click and browse.

 

Why marketing automation is important for ecommerce

Today, e-commerce users have low attention spans. On an average a customer spends around 3 seconds to decide whether an email will get read or not. This is further exacerbated by the growing number of email newsletters brands are sending every single day. So now the question arises whether one should give up marketing via email as ecommerce?

Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for e-commerce, especially during special occasions (Black Friday, New Year, Valentine Day, Amazon Sales). According to a report published by ContactPigeon.com around Valentine’s day, effective email marketing resulted in a 20% increase in online sales, and 17% of total orders contributed to email marketing.

 

How marketing automation can improve customer retention

Customer retention is paramount today in the digital world. Majorly, all consumers are confident that they will interact another time only if they have a positive experience for the first time. In parallel, as e-commerce retailers also have to look for new leads, segmenting those and personalizing the leads, to engage with potential customers across every channel is an important strategy.

A research from leadsquared says that customers demand more from companies, and delivering on those expectations can result in increased loyalty and more engagement across the board.

 

Marketing Automation Solutions in the market

While this might not be an exhaustive list, here's a list of some of the most prominent solutions in the market and might fit one of your needs. However, there are always other solutions which might be more effective based on different scenarios:

• Abandoned cart rescue emails
• Post-transactional emails like tips on using the products, feedback requests, after-sales support
• Welcome emails
• Dynamic emails once he/she visits the personalized offers.
• Win back campaigns.
• Real time communications
• Contact base segmentations