Ecommerce is booming, especially since COVID-19 turned our world upside down. But even before the pandemic started, online sales were dominating growth in the retail sector.
The advantages of ecommerce are clear. Websites run 24/7. Staff hours are limited. And having an online shop lets you cast a much wider net—you can reach customers you never would if you were limited to a brick and mortar store.
Even with an online store, though, you still need a team doing the work on the back end—from marketing to order fulfillment. This is where automation comes in.
Automating key processes can help you do more, even when your staff is off the clock.
Automation lets you take repetitive tasks and manual processes out of your employees’ hands so they can spend their time on work that requires more critical thinking brainpower. Automation can reduce or eliminate problems caused by human error, and it can help you track and centralize data for better collaboration between teams.
Here are 7 ways to use marketing automation to streamline and grow your ecommerce business.
1: Send Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned shopping carts are a huge source of lost revenue—three quarters of shoppers leave a site without completing their purchase.
On mobile phones, cart abandonment rates are as high as 80 percent.
The right automation tool can detect when a shopper abandons their cart on your site and send an automatic email to entice the customer back.
Good marketing automation software will give you the option of personalizing the message with a pitch about why they should buy the items in their cart.
You can also use automation software to prevent shoppers from abandoning their carts in the first place. For example, by indicating applied discounts during the checkout process or incentivizing them to spend a minimum dollar amount to get a discount or free shipping.
Consumers want to feel like they’re getting a good deal—you can use automation tools to help them see the value of purchasing from your site.
2: Create Data-enriched Chatbots
Like we mentioned in a previous post, chatbots are the perfect tool for answering simple questions at scale. Y
ou can create chatbots to welcome visitors, start conversations, and qualify leads.
Then as conversations get more complex, your chatbots can route site visitors to a live customer service or sales rep.
Chatbot technology is getting more sophisticated every day. Not only can chatbots help streamline your internal workflows, eventually they may become a core part of your “sales” team.
3: Create Shipping Labels
Delayed packages have a big impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. In one survey, 69 percent of respondents said they would be “much less” or “less likely” to shop with a retailer in the future because a package delay of more than two days. Ouch.
Worse, it’s inevitable that some of those dissatisfied customers will post a negative review on social media.
Problems with distribution often come down to small but preventable mistakes somewhere in the fulfillment process—a couple of transposed numbers or the wrong street address.
Using automation software to print your shipping labels and make sure orders are properly dispatched can help eliminate some of these common errors and free up staff to do other tasks.
4: Schedule Social Media Posts
More than half of social media users research products on their favorite platform. That makes social media a potent source of new ecommerce leads for your business.
But to really do social media effectively, you have to continually create and share engaging content. And that takes work.
AI isn’t all that great at creating content (yet). For that task, flesh-and-blood social media experts still reign supreme.
But using an automation tool to schedule social media posts saves time and gives you more flexibility, since you can schedule posts to go out day or night, across time zones.
5: Automate Inventory Management
Effectively managing and tracking inventory is vital for companies that sell online. Understock and you might lose orders—or even long-time customers. Overstock and you end up with storage issues in your warehouse. Automating inventory management will help you stock exactly what you need when you need it. Use it to:
- Allocate stock to orders
- Set rules to ensure stock comes from the closest/most appropriate warehouse or store
- Tag your order for dispatch
- Create shipping labels
- Send order details to your warehouse manager
- Alert warehouse members when it’s time to pack and item
- Alert suppliers of low stock levels
The right automation tool can streamline your entire inventory management workflow.
6: Nurture Lead Traffic
Launching a campaign to attract and qualify leads is a great start. But around 50 percent of qualified leads aren’t ready to buy, and nurturing leads is labor intensive.
It’s not enough to send one-off emails to your leads, especially if you have a long sales cycle. This is where lead nurturing software can help.
Automation software lets you systematically track how leads engage with your content and website. With this information, you can strategically send appropriate content to your leads at the right time—whether it’s discount codes or informational posts.
7: Manage Negative Reviews
Chances are you look at online reviews before you buy something or decide on a restaurant. So do your customers.
Negative reviews can seriously hurt your brand. But on the flip side, too many 5-star reviews can make people suspicious.
As it turns out, having some negative reviews can actually be helpful (or at least not harmful), but with one important caveat: that you actively manage complaints and offer a resolution. It shows the person (and, more importantly, anyone else looking at the review) that you care about customer satisfaction.
Automation software can help you identify reviews below a certain threshold—say, two stars.
Then you can have the system send a notification to a customer service team member to address the negative review or complaint.
Like it or not, reputation management comes with the territory of running a business in our hyper-connected world.
Get Help Automating Your Ecommerce Business
From lead nurturing to email marketing, the digital marketing experts at National Positions will help you make the most of every lead and every sales opportunity—with the right tools at the right time.
We put technology at your fingertips that drives more sales opportunities, gives you key insights into customer behavior, saves you time with automated workflows, and improves conversion rates.
Contact us today to start automating your ecommerce workflows and unlock the full potential of your business.