When you read through the eCommerce success stories and marketing tips, you’ll realize that automation is the holy grail of eCommerce marketing. It does not only help you nurture leads but also gives you intelligent customer insights. It also enables you to retain existing clients for the long term.
Email Monday reports that 49 percent of businesses are already utilizing at least one form of automation in their day-to-day marketing efforts. Studies also suggest that, if you use the trigger-based email marketing techniques well, you can generate 4X extra revenue plus 18X more profits as compared to the current email campaigns.
It doesn’t end there, however. If you automate the Abandoned Cart Recovery emails, you can recover over 40 percent of the abandoned cart emails which are opened.
It isn’t any smooth ride, though. You must invest in the valuable eCommerce automation tools to realize these potential benefits. It’s also worth noting that some strategies may work for other marketers but fail to work for you.
It could be that the automation system doesn’t blend with your business structure, you chose a wrong tool, or you implemented the strategies in the wrong way. In this piece, we open on the five best automation hacks that will give you the best results in minimal time. Read on!
Automated Welcome Emails for New Clients:
If you can send welcome messages to your clients, they’ll feel important and part of you from the start. The impression you give them on the first meeting is critical. It will make them loyal to your brand uniquely if you can craft something which blends with your brand’s voice, touches the prospects’ pain points, and offers solutions to these pain points.
Expert marketers automate welcome emails to build a rapport with new clients and put up the foundation for trust. Because welcome emails have some of the highest open rates, you can feed all the relevant information you may need to pass across to your clients in them.
Here are some of the automation tools you can utilize for this;
- MailChimp
- Izooto, and
- HubSpot, among others.
Recover Your Abandoned Carts:
Did you know that around 60 percent of eCommerce store shopping carts are abandoned due to issues like unexpected extra costs etc.? That sounds a bit scary, but it’s real.
You can, however, reverse this trend with the help of eCommerce automation tools which will send email alerts to the prospects who abandon their carts to recover these sales. Some of these leads can be unresponsive, but that shouldn’t make you give up.
Dive info Facebook Messenger and use it to forward the list of items your potential clients added to their shopping carts. Don’t forget to include an active Call to Action (CTA) in each message to encourage them to get back to the store and complete the transactions.
Study Your Audience Behavior and Act on it:
It can be a bit difficult to model how to handle fresh leads that you capture — especially if you’re a novice internet marketer. To get over this, you can use ‘Email Alerts’ to get the behavior insights from your past and current clients.
Here’s how to go about this: Get a marketing automation tool that comes with an ‘Alert’ feature. It should be easily customizable such that it gives you timely alerts:
- When an agent is assigned a new lead.
- When a new lead browses or visits specific pages on your site.
- If a lead requests for free trials or product demos.
- If the lead watches your video marketing materials on the site and,
- When a lead books or joins any of your virtual events or webinars etc.
This strategy will be instrumental in helping you hack the sales process to give your team a cutting edge over the competitors.
Post-Sale Follow-Ups:
The post-sale follow-ups are creative ways of showing your clients the commitment you have in serving them. It will build the clients’ loyalty towards your brand, something which is a sure bait when it comes to getting those valuable multiple repeat sales.
Most importantly, it will also be vital in boosting client reviews on the site and expanding your client base. Here is a quick rundown of steps that can guide you when using the post-sale follow-ups:
Step 1: Reach out to the customers to see if they were satisfied.
Step 2: Gauging from the client response, issue warranties, refunds, or repairs.
Step 3: Provide opportunities for client follow-ups, e.g., sales alerts, etc.
You can also include any of these elements in the post-sales emails.
- Request for a review. Make the request polite, so the clients don’t feel pushed to leave a review. You can use UGC marketing software for this process.
- Suggest some products which can be used like the ones you sold or look like them in the emails.
- Thank the client for ordering the items from your store.
- Add extra information like how to care for the item they just bought, other creative use cases for the product and the FAQs, etc.
Use Social Media to Create Fear of Missing Out (FOMOs):
The seasonal, limited-time sales emotionally connect with your clients, encouraging them to take some action — especially if you tag your products as ‘Limited Edition.’ It cleverly convinces them to make instant purchases for products they’re interested in since they’re made aware that the items on offer won’t be there for too long.
You can do this by creating scarcity and urgency and encourage engagement to build social proof for your brand. You can also ask for reviews on the client experience using the items on your store or being part of your team.
Finally, you can also promote exclusivity in your client base by setting up loyalty rewards for exclusive customers. Some of the popular automation tools used for this include:
- CoSchedule.
- HubSpot.
- FOMO.
Bottom Line:
Ecommerce is a broad field. Apart from the top hacks we’ve rounded up for you here, you can also dive into drip campaigns, and automating your referrals among others. Don’t forget to subscribe to our email list and follow us, so you don’t miss out on such valuable hacks in the future.