How to start Marketing Automation for E-Commerce

E-commerce marketing automation is vital if you want to take your business to the next step. If you’re working in the industry, you’ll most likely have a million things on your plate at once - and that’s before you consider the changes that COVID-19 have brought to the landscape.

The overworked entrepreneur or marketing manager will be putting in longer shifts than ever before. We all wish we could do more with less time, but that’s exactly what marketing automation can deliver.

E-commerce isn’t an easy beast to tackle and there’s no magic recipe for success. However, you can give yourself an upper hand in this eternal battle for profits as you try to juggle managing campaigns, ensuring cart abandonment doesn’t run too high, preserve a high return on investment and keep customers happy.

How to automate your e-commerce with APSIS One

This is all a lot of work, but e-commerce marketing automation software can help with tasks like this, which can give your human workers a breather and assign them to tasks that need a more personal touch. It also means that you can accomplish more with less, and save money on hiring extra staff to carry out those labour-intensive jobs.

Luckily for you, APSIS One includes pre-defined e-commerce flows for browse and cart abandonment as well as post-purchase, for all users! These are perfect for new users and will help them get started straight away, while even e-commerce flow experts can use them as templates to cut down on clutter and repetitive action. Unfortunately, they are not available for users of our legacy program APSIS.

Why e-commerce marketing automation is game-changing

Retailers can really make the most of their e-commerce stores with some crafty marketing platforms and automations. These platforms can do an awful lot of good, including:

• Building an online store
• Managing your offering
• Unifying your presence across the web

As well as this, you can also be provided with a gold mine of behavioural and transactional data, which is absolutely vital if you want to carry out the type of personalised campaign that prospects love - and the type of campaign that will keep customers coming back.

If you get the right integrations, you’ll also be able to store your data in a way that makes it easy to access features and data in one place, which gets rid of silos and the dangerous impacts that can have.

Integrate your e-commerce platform

Before those benefits can be yours, you’ll need to integrate your platform to a platform like APSIS One. This will allow you to:

• Promote products
• Grow a customer base
• Create intelligent marketing automation flows

Small and large retailers can integrate their e-commerce platform to add value to perspectives’ customer journey. Data is vital, and in 2021, we can’t avoid it. So that means you need to use it to show off products, recommend items to customers and win back lost revenue.

So let’s dive a little deeper into what e-commerce marketing automation can do for you and your business.

Banish those abandoned carts

Abandoned carts are one of the most annoying things about running an e-commerce business. The people that tease you with their cash and then leave you alone at the altar can be tempted back, and it starts with marketing automation.

You can set up a flow of emails that allows you to customise content and personalise it to each individual based on attributes that are specific to that customer. That’s a lot of power at your fingertips.

Automated software can help tell you the exact number of customers that have left the store without purchasing whatever they put in their cart, and you can send them a little follow up to remind them of what’s waiting for them back on your site. You can also send product recommendations based on browser history to entice these people back.

Plus, abandoned cart automations will help you to automatically reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts - which can be really helpful in converting them into customers.

E-commerce marketing automations for the win

These automations can also come with extra little features, such as offering first-time abandoners a special offer if they complete a purchase. The best thing about these automations is that you can set them up and they just run in the background! How good is that?

Still not convinced? Check out these stats.

• Abandon cart emails have a 30% higher open rate than regular e-commerce emails
• 21% of cart abandonment emails are clicked on
• 50% of those clicked emails leads to a purchase

Give a warm welcome

Everyone likes to be welcomed and to be made to feel welcome whenever they take their first steps into something new, and the same is true for prospective customers signing up for a mailing list.

It’s so important for your business to welcome new customers, provide them with an introduction to the business and show them relevant products.

Marketing automation can set-up welcome flows that use pre-sign up behaviour which includes data collected from browsing history and from sign-up forms. All these different data points can be used to create welcome flows that have genuine warmth, proper personalisation and make new customers feel welcome.

Some platforms even provide a host of pre-designed templates to help those businesses who need a quick solution, or lack the necessary design skills.

Take your customers on a journey

The customer journey is really important, and e-commerce marketing automation can help make it as smooth as silk. Creative forms can be used to grab the attention of customers and perspectives, which’ll help point them in the right direction - but these forms will also help you to collect the type of data that you really want.

We’ve already touched on this but marketing automation flows can be built to react to things like abandoned carts, which should help you to recoup money and customers. Personalisation is king, we know this, and marketing automation can bring that power to your welcome flows, purchase flows and in things like a birthday email or a loyalty campaign.

As well as this, personalisation can also take into account each customer’s spending habits and behavioural data to deliver bespoke product recommendations that really get your customers spending money.

Start your journey with e-commerce marketing automation

How does that all sound? Pretty good, right. Marketing automation can seem or sound like a big scary idea, but it’s something that you can just plug in and forget about while it whirls around in the background, delivering value and putting smiles on faces.

Concepts like abandoned cart recovery, welcome-flows and customer journeys might seem like big-sky thinking, but when you break them down into their smaller parts you can really begin to see how they can add value to a business - but only if they’re set up correctly using the right marketing automation platform.

But what's the next step? You're going to need to talk to the experts and play with the concepts we mentioned. Book a demo with APSIS now, and start your marketing automation journey for e-commerce