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Let’s be honest, marketing your ecommerce business is not easy. Whether manually posting to social media or personally thanking your customers, marketing is not easy at all.
Repetitive tasks are unavoidable but don’t have to be laborious. In fact, you can offload the heavy-lifting and focus on what’s really important – running your business.
Luckily, there’s a solution and it’s known as marketing automation.
Marketing automation is your sales force!
Control your ecommerce marketing strategy and forget about manually managing every aspect of your campaigns. With a little marketing automation, your customers will reap the benefits of a better shopping experience caused by sophisticated marketing, which has been designed to be personal and speaks to each consumer individually.
The impetus of this post is twofold:
- First, we’d like to give you a quick overview of marketing automation?
- Next, to familiarize you with a few common marketing automation strategies and tools.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a technology that automatically manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across several channels.
As an integral part of most businesses, marketing helps to create a brand-to-customer relationship.
Typically, small companies are run just by a few people (often, developers and sellers). The scheme is pretty simple: builders who create products or services and those who sell them
At the same time, the company keeps growing and sooner or later it becomes impossible to keep everything under control. Undoubtedly, you could overspend on marketing specialists, who would be working on redundant tasks such as customer correspondences, publishing on the social media or emailing your users every time you post something in your blog.
This is the time when marketing automation comes in handy!
Marketing Automation Benefits
- Save time and increase productivity. In many cases, marketing automation tools are more efficient and effective than human capital.
For example, a recent customer asked JetRuby to implement ecommerce functionality that solved an abandoned cart issue. We developed a Ruby gem, which we integrated into the Mandrill API. Mandrill is an email infrastructure service as an add-on MailChimp that you can use to send personalized, one-to-one e-commerce emails, or automated transactional email.
- Boost your sales. Marketing automation increases sales by giving your salespeople superpowers! For example, they can automate the creation of Facebook ads, which can help drive conversions at scale.
42% of companies use a marketing automation platform, compared to 54% using a CRM and 82% using email marketing technology. – Marketo and Ascend2
- Consistency is the key to success. One of the toughest parts of marketing is being consistent with it. With increased social media followers, social media activity may take an enormous amount of time and energy. Luckily, you can automate most of… “everything.” This includes scheduling social media posts, creating ads or other marketing tasks and much more.
Put simply, marketing automation enables more traffic to be driven to your website, saving you time and bringing back more returning customers.
Alright, now that you know what marketing automation is, let’s take a look at the real-life examples and see how you can apply it in practice.
How do I Spend Less Time on Promoting My Website on Social Media?
In our contemporary life, social media became a regular part of our daily routine. One of the effective ways to connect with your customers is to go where they go. Nowadays, almost 3 billion people around the globe have their social media account.
Do you feel the power of social media marketing possibilities?
Why spend valuable time on monotonous work?
There are thousands of tools, which can automatically schedule posts on social media. As for us, we use Buffer.
86% of marketers consider “ease of use” to be the most important factor when evaluating automation tools. – Regalix
This tool connects multiple social accounts for scheduling content at different times and dates. Additionally, you can manage which content goes to which social channels.
Put simply, this streamlined social media management platform can make your life simpler and your marketing strategy stronger.
It’s really easy to use it.
All you need to do is connect a social account to Buffer so that you can start composing new posts to add to your posts queue.
Usually, posting times are automatically set up by default, which has been optimized for certain peak engagement times of the day. But you can always customize these posting times as you want.
Each new post, which you added, would be automatically scheduled for its publication at each consecutive time. You can also share the posts now or set up a specific scheduled date and time for each new post that you compose.
How Can I Get a Better Understanding of my Users Behavior?
In marketing, it’s crucial to understand how your users are engaging with your content. Everything is important. You need to know when your customers make a purchase, put a comment on your blog or even add an item into their shopping cart. Sometimes it’s really tough to know exactly what actions your visitors are taking on your website.
In automated marketing everything is possible.
There’s a tool, known as Hotjar that allows visualizing how users engage with your site. This tool uses interactive heatmaps of users actions and clicks, recordings of their session as well as gathering of their words from survey and feedback polls.
This tool can also be used for collecting feedback from your customers.
You can create custom surveys using an easy editor, collect responses in real-time from any device as well as sending your surveys using web links.
To get a better understanding of what your users really want, create polls and target questions to specific visitors anywhere on your web and mobile site.
To find out more about this cool tool, take a look at this complete guite to website heat maps.
How do I Automate my Email Campaign?
Email marketing is another important tool in today’s marketing efforts. This can help you grow your revenue and expand your reach by targeting a more global audience. All of this is possible with email marketing.
At the same time, a poorly designed email marketing initiative can hurt both your business and reputation. Luckily, there are tools today that allow you to thrive with your email marketing efforts. To be precise, we talk about MailChimp.
Using this tool, you can entirely automate email campaigns.
Using this tool, you can entirely automate email campaigns.
Here’s a scenario. As soon as users sign up to your list, a mailing is automatically being sent to them. This can be a simple “thank you” letter or any other meaningful content that only they can get as a result of signing up to your list.
Automated campaigns work as the personalization of your brand’s efforts and enhance the interaction between you and your subscribers which is invaluable.
Remember that subscribers are your potential customers.
Automated emails are perfect not only for welcoming new email subscribers but also for customizing mailings, such as product suggestions related to a purchase, an annual mailing wishing your customers a happy birthday or just showing appreciation the regular subscribers who are actively engaged.
In general, automated email campaigns are the perfect choice to bring you closer to your audience.
How do I Boost my SEO and Run More Profitable Ad Campaigns?
When running a business, there’s a huge amount of work to do. You just can’t afford to spend the whole day managing your ad campaigns.
Hopefully, there’s a perfect tool for it, which we use for improving SEO of our blog – SEMrush.
This tool allows you to conduct keywords research. Among the things it tracks are CPC ads, copies of AdWords ads and their positions, competitor analysis, and many other things.
For instance, long-tail keywords can significantly improve your SEO. However, they may be not so good for paid campaigns as there’s probably not enough search volume to ever net you any clicks.
One of the features is competitor analysis. In case you can’t find enough keywords to get started, you can pull down a list of keywords and ad copy from your competitors. Additionally, it provides a cost per sale range for each keyword
The Bottom Line
Sometimes, marketing may become really time-consuming. However, if you want to run your business in the right direction, you need to focus on what is most important.
In this post, we described just a few marketing ideas that can help you improve the outcomes of your ecommerce campaigns.
Using automated marketing, you can create ultra-effective strategies that can grow your following, boost your sales and encourage return shopping.
To find out more about how to increase your sales, take a look at this amazing post about Ecommerce marketing statistics.
At the same time, you need to consider the possible risks and know the ways how to avoid them.
A small tip: remember, with all email marketing, it’s crucial to follow the rules, such as GDPR privacy regulations. It’s really important that you’ve received consent from your users to contact them and store their details.
Summing up, ecommerce marketing automation helps companies save time and scale their businesses.
Use it wisely and may the automated marketing force be with you.
