How Your eCommerce Platform Can Benefit From Marketing Automation
With increasing competition in e-Commerce, customers are easily switching from one company to another. Different customers have different needs and understanding these needs can be difficult. In order to make the customer enter your buying cycle, and remain there, marketing is important. The efforts you put in the marketing of your products can be reduced significantly by the use of Marketing Automation.
In Marketing Automation, the company identifies the right time and opportunity to send the messages to the customer. The company decides when the customer is ready to accept the information. Marketing Automation helps you in sending customized marketing messages to the customers which help in converting visitors to buyers and buyers to repeating buyers. These systems are more efficient, less time consuming and personalized according to the customer.
Here’s how Marketing Automation helps you in so many useful ways.
- Understanding the Buyer’s Persona
Analyze the buyer’s behavior at each step, right from visiting the page till the time customer leaves the page, called as End to End analytics. Develop a process of qualifying, converting and managing the leads. It is possible to convert a lead into a buyer with proper mapping process. Monitor each step of the lead and provide customer service whenever the need arises. Buyer’s persona will help in finding the interest of the customer and then deliver the content.
Benefit: Understanding Buyer’s behavior and giving personalized offers will increase the sales of your eCommerce platform directly.
- Data collection of the customers improves the company’s overall efficiency
By collecting data of the customers, Marketing Automation will help in triggering the right point in the minds of the customers and push them to buy from your website. Develop an effective team to help you in identifying the customers.
Benefit: Customers will get more relevant offers and products to buy which directly adds benefits to your eCommerce platform.
- It’s more than Email marketing
While sending Emails, ensure that you are sending emails only to customers who are interested in buying your product. Keep streamlining your contact list. There is no point in sending emails to people who holds no interest. Instead, focus on leads and convert them into buyers. Do take follow-ups of these buyers in order to remind them to visit your site again for multiple purchases. Automate your system to send communications after every 15 days or 30 days. Send personalized emails to them in order to make them feel special and generate trust on the brand.
Benefit: Marketing will be user-oriented hence, the resources will be used effectively and will leav a greater impact on individual level.
- Unique content of emails according to specific choices of customers
The content of the email should be focused and related to the goal of the company. Don’t stick to the same content as offered by the marketing campaign. Keep updating the messages in the emails and not allow the technology to overpower your campaign. Buy software that integrates well with your system and does everything that is required by your strategy. Plan a strategy first and then buy the required technology. Buy more advanced software that helps in automation of internal marketing processes such as budgeting for various marketing activities, approval, planning, and other related activities. This will help in reducing the workload of marketing professionals and reduce their stress levels.
Benefit: Creates a goal oriented systematic workflow for the employees and customers get better experiences from eCommerce platform.
- Capture the interest of customers who visited but not purchased
Develop reactivation strategies keeping in mind that the customers may not have purchased from you in the past but their data is available and can be used to just acknowledge their association with your brand. If a customer is inactive and has not purchased anything since past 3-4 months, send reminder emails. The content of the emails should include the product details that the customer may be interested in buying. However, be careful of not developing a negative brand image by sending too many emails. Online tools like Hubspot are available which provides integrated marketing solutions based on the company’s needs.
Benefit: Increases the probability of purchase on an individual level by delivering interest-based offers to the customers.
- Cart abandonment programs
Develop cart abandonment programs to ensure that the customers buy products once added to the cart. Try to find out the reason behind the customer not buying the product. Send reminder emails and give Discounts or Offers on the products being searched for. This will help you make the deal and push the customer to buy. However, sometimes a customer may knowingly add products to the cart and abandon it, in anticipation of receiving discount. Carefully plan your marketing campaign to avoid such situations.
Benefit: Increases the sales directly and adding customers for a longer period of time.
- Follow-up services improve the customer experience
Post purchase service including asking for customer feedback about the product, its packaging and the customer service offered to the customer. The secondary benefits of these feedbacks will be capturing new buyer’s attention. Emails will be automatically sent after every few days by the system about the new products available on the website. These product suggestions are specific for each customer based on the past purchase history and don’t require any human effort.
Benefit: Good customer relationship with the existing customers and great marketing for the new customers.
- Marketing Automation improves the overall marketing of the products
Ensure that the sales team is working along with marketing team to plan the marketing campaigns. This will ensure that your campaigns are successful as each point of customer interaction will be recorded and used to modify the campaigns. Design your marketing campaign as creatively as possible. Provide useful information and align it with the goals of the company. Marketing campaigns should be effective enough to capture touch points of the leads across multiple channels like websites, social media pages, and emails. These should be then collected at one place by the sales team for analysis.
Keep in mind that your profit margin shouldn’t decrease with the investment in this Marketing Automation. Collect data measuring the effectiveness of the programs. Measure the revenue earned as a result of these campaigns and continues only if profit earned is more than the investments. Continuously updating the campaigns will help in creating a competitive advantage over the other brand. These systems apart from increasing traffic will also boost the cross sales and improve the customer services. The customers will, in turn, recommend your products to others and increase traffic to your website.
Benefit: Improves the number of visitors your eCommerce platform and boosts the lesser selling products.
- Few loyal customers are better than having many customers who easily switch
Loyal customers making the repeat purchases from the website should be segmented and should be given Special Offers to ensure that they stay with your company and not shift to other competitors. Satisfied customers will give good reviews and help earn good word of mouth publicity for the company which in turn will increase the number of customers.
Benefit: Creates a better customer relationship which will encourage them to stick to your eCommerce platform for longer period of time.
Conclusion:
In order to be a successful Ecommerce platform, what matters the most is the way you interact with the customers. It is possible to stay ahead of the competitors if you can analyze customer behavioral changes, identify new product preferences, and adopt the current market trends. All of this is easily possible with Marketing Automation.
A properly integrated marketing campaign will help you deliver timely content to the leads, and shorten the sales and marketing cycle of the company. Marketing Automation helps in moving the customers down the sales funnel and also builds trust in the minds of the customer. It enhances the overall experience of the customer with the brand.
Author Bio:
Bhavesh Koladiya is currently a Software Analyst at SoftwareSuggest and CallHippo. 
He is passionate about CRM, marketing automation, payroll management, real estate technology and all things digital. When not working, you can find him either listening to Music or reading Tech stuff. Connect with him on Twitter @bhavesh9040.
