Getting Started with eCommerce Marketing Automation

Engaging prospects, leads, and customers is critical to digital marketing success, especially when you own an online store. The bread and butter of many online marketing strategies is executing campaigns that attract and convert prospects.  Marketing automation provides marketers and business owners with the ability to send out more personal, timely, and relevant content to those individuals who matter most. With the power of marketing automation, eCommerce owners are able to enhance their customer experience. They are also able to develop deeper, more impactful relationships with customers while driving positive sentiment and revenue.

The beauty of marketing automation is that it allows you to create streamlined content and campaigns that are then automatically sent to your prospects and customers based on specific triggers and steps in your customer’s journey.  While marketing automation remains the most effective growth strategy, many struggles to effectively utilize it, as they find the process too complex to even begin.

The good news is that establishing an automation system for your business is now easier than ever. You can plan, execute, and scale your campaigns without stress thanks to marketing automation providers and helpful support guides.

One of the many appealing aspects of running an e-commerce business is the ability to control much of your daily operations right from your computer. However, with the boom of the e-commerce industry, it’s more important than ever that you adapt to the continuously changing landscape of online business in order to thrive. One of the most essential tools in your eCommerce toolbox is the automation of your marketing systems and processes.

Marketing automation spreads across all of your digital marketing channels, such as email, social, text, apps, and more. So if you are creating a marketing automation system for your business, it is critical that you consider how your data and content will come together to create a journey that leads to more leads and customer conversions.

Read on to learn how you can maximize the opportunity of automating your business.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation lets you implement your digital marketing strategy without having to manually send each and every email, message, campaign communication you create. Automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on campaign schedules and customer behavior. As you launch campaigns for your business, automation allows you to focus your attention on other operational tests, while monitoring and tracking the results coming in. With automation, you can save time and resources, drive revenue, and ROI and you focus on growing your business in other areas.

Regardless of the niche or specialty of your online business, by implementing an effective automation system you can:

– Generate new leads consistently
– Increase your website conversions
– Increase brand awareness
– Improve the customer journey
– Create a solid sales funnel
– Increase sales and revenue
– Increase customer retention

Which are all typically the goals for an eCommerce brand. When automation is used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, you are free to increase revenue and maximize efficiency, while saving time and resources.

How marketing automation works

The customer journey is the total experience your customer has with your brand. Marketing automation allows you to tailor every touchpoint in the journey based on specific customer data points collected along the way. This allows you to create ongoing, seamless journeys from start to finish each time a new prospect enters your funnel. You collect customer data through many interactions: text alerts, emails, website visits, social media, and so on. From there, marketing automation does all the work through tagging, segmentation, and targeting processes to scale.

Tailoring messaging to each customer automatically based on their behaviors or steps in the journey allows you to create the most relevant messaging and personal experience that drives your prospects to purchase.  Whether you have 10, 100, or 1,000 leads at a time, automation allows you to connect with them effectively and efficiently — from acquisition to advocacy.

Before you begin

Each automation system requires you to set up a few steps to start your process. This allows you to collect prospect information that you will need for your automation data points. This includes:

– At least one landing page
– One registration form
– At least one automated message or sequence

Even if you are starting at zero, you want to have your first automation workflow in place so that you can test and experiment as you get new leads coming in. As you see tweaks that need to be done you can easily make adjustments to your workflows.

As your prospects find your landing page and submit completed forms, your automated messages will land inside of their inbox. Their submitted data will also be segmented and added to your system.

Equally important, you’ll need is a comprehensive marketing strategy in place. Very rarely, especially for new e-commerce brands, will your customers find you without promotion. You need a structured plan to outline what you want to achieve, how you want to be received, and the necessary steps to make it happen. Having this strategy in place will keep your leads coming consistently, and keep your workflows effectively turning new leads into customers.

Automating your marketing is a necessity if you are to achieve your marketing goals and grow your business.

Steps to getting started

When you are ready to get started with planning and implementing your system, remember these steps:

1. Define your goals

What do you hope to achieve with this campaign? What are your sales or conversion goals? What actions do you want your audience to take? A successful workflow guides them to this destination.

2. Plan your strategy

How do you plan to get your brand noticed? What messages need to be automated for this campaign? What does the journey look like for your customer? What are the touchpoints from your brand channels that need to come together?

3. Determine your triggers

Think about the details of your touchpoints. How do visitors become part of your workflow? Think of how you can best utlize your marketing channels to attract your prospects. Once they arrive, do they visit a page? Subscribe to a list? Submit a form? Text a code? Register for an event?

4. Map out your marketing campaign flow

Starting from the first trigger, map out and plan each step in the buyer’s journey your customer takes, from their first interaction with your site to reaching your goal and converting them.

5. Set up your segments

As your leads come in, tag them so you know where they are from and which messages they need to receive. Who do you want to reach first? What message will motivate them to convert?

6. Create your campaign assets and content

These include forms, lists, landing pages, etc. Ensure they’re connected to one another and track them so you can measure their success. You might want to hire an experienced copywriter for this step.

7. Implement your workflow

How you set up your workflow will depend on which marketing automation software you choose. However, most modern platforms have comprehensive documentation, tutorials, how-to videos, blog posts, etc. and offer support if you get stuck.

8. Analyze and edit

Your campaign will require tweaks and changes along the way, so be patient. See what’s working and what’s not. Use some of the time you get back from automation to dig into the analytics and make the changes that will grow your business.

Popular marketing automation systems

If you’re just getting started with marketing automation you’ll likely need a user-friendly, budget-friendly solution you can implement with minimal hassle. Here are a few of the most popular:

– Active Campaign
– Campaign Monitoring
– Salesforce
– Infusionsoft
– Kartra

The best time to start automating your marketing campaigns is now, Working this way, in steps, will give you more leverage to scale your marketing strategy and, thus, continue increasing your revenue.

Automation makes it easier to manage every marketing task, from basic email sends to complex data mapping. With marketing automation, your business can better bring together marketing, sales, and customer service to create one seamless customer experience across your brand. To get started with your automated workflow give us a call to find out the best plan for your ecommerce brand.