Marketing Automation & eCommerce Web Store

In an E-Commerce business, it is a challenge to find new ways to provide value to your customers even without cutting into your own margins. This is one of the difficult trials faced when running an E-Commerce business. You want to give the customer the best possible value and experience. At the same time, you have to look at your profitability as well so that you can go on to serve more customers!

Marketing Automation is an opportunity where you have the liberty to explore the above. A Marketing Automation suite when utilized properly will allow you to deliver customized messages to your customers when they are most receptive to them; by offering them the right product or service, at the right time and at the right price. Using novel campaigning methods, even a couple of staff can nurture/maintain the volume of leads that in the past you might have required 10-sales personnel to manage the event.

Marketing Automation

Collection of tools designed to automate a large portion of business marketing is known as marketing automation. It is a versatile and customizable tool useful for conducting repetitive tasks with élan. It is by far more than an E-Mail client! When implemented properly Marketing Automation would help to:

• Identify fresh leads
• Qualify those leads
• Develop leads through the sales cycle
• Increase conversions
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increase the lifetime value of customers

Some of the tools that would find a utility to achieve these aims are:

• Visitor identification
• Dynamic forms
• End-to-end analytics
• Dynamic and automated E-Mail content
• Dynamic lists
• Lead scoring

What Is The Secret Why Does It Work So Well With E-Commerce?

It is a difficult process to build a detailed picture of your customers. It is, therefore, necessary to understand what they want and how to market them the products of their choice. Here Marketing Automation comes into play.  It allows you to continually learn about your customers in a variety of ways.

End-to-End Analytics allows you to see how your customers react at every stage of their buyers’ journey.  See what kind of content and language caused them to click-through from an E-Mail that is being sent to them regularly.

Remember to use ‘Time on Page’ data to help to comprehend what kind of content captures the customers’ interest and also what types of content get bounced/rejected. A/B testing different marketing collateral, segmentation techniques, and web design gives you basket loads of usable data. Use this to continually improve your promotional campaigns and achieve higher conversion rates.

Form gates are only useful when you require the lead to give you a little information before you let them access a certain piece of content. This can be as simple as seeking an E-Mail address, name, and country of residence before allowing access to an eBook. As you nurture leads, you can use these forms to ask for data discreetly, which you otherwise cannot capture through any other way, such as ‘How much would you normally spend on a gift?’

• Personalization

You can now easily personalize from the data that you have gathered and built an exhaustive data out of your marketing efforts is commendable, to say the least. Automated segmenting means you can build specific workflows to send highly targeted messages, instantly to target customers.

Further, these segments can be based on almost any lead element if you feel certain product categories are often bought from together or in quick succession then you might even consider targeting based on this aspect of leadership behavior.  Moreover, if specific prospects respond best to messages sent on the weekend then make sure you have a workflow centered on optimum sending times. Rest assured you are limited only by your imagination.

• Adding Value for Customer without Decreasing Your Margin

This is the most sought after of e-commerce; adding value for the customer even without decreasing the margin. If you can somehow manage to provide better value than your competitors even while keeping your margins intact then you are achieving success the E-Commerce way! Usually, in order to provide greater value to the customers, your margins have to take a hit because you are offering discounts, bonanza, free shipping, offers, etc.

By providing your leads with information, products and offers exactly when they are most receptive, increases their effectiveness without having to increase their fiscal cost to you. Besides, nurturing your leads with useful information and helpful advice builds the trust of your brand which almost never hurts the lead-value! This is again an achievement if followed correctly.

• Reduce Cart Abandonment & Chase Abandoned Carts

Abandoning shopping half way is a human tendency. By the time you are encouraging your leads to make a purchase, they should be so geared up that abandoning their cart should not come to their minds at all. Better qualification and nurturing of leads will allow you to only prompt a purchase at the correct stage of the sales lifecycle.  This method should work.

Have an automated, dynamic E-mail that will remind the lead when carts are abandoned even after some fabulous products was almost purchased. Build offers or you can include alternatives into these to recapture a fair percentage of those not quite converting even with your entire PR.

What is The Right Time or Can I Wait for a Little Longer?

Relatively speaking there is never been a better time to start implementing Marketing Automation. Go get it and implement.

It has found that so far the general uptake of Marketing Automation has been a little slow-moving. This is due to the different factors that are responsible. But the main factor found to be is the perception that it will cost too much. A few years ago that was true for many businesses, but now that perception is obsolete.