How to save time and improve your eCommerce ROI with marketing automation

In today’s digital marketing landscape, marketing automation is a true lifesaver! Why? Not only does automation enhance the marketing efficiency of an eCommerce business, but it also reduces human error.

What if you could start spending less time on your daily marketing activities whilst allowing them to yield better results? Read our blog to find out what marketing automation is and why it is crucial for eCommerce businesses to save time and increase their ROI.

What is marketing automation?
How marketing automation works?
Why marketing automation can improve your eCommerce ROI?
Conclusion

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation implies using powerful digital tools to speed up, streamline and simplify the business marketing processes across multiple online channels. Some of the most typical marketing processes include:

Email marketing
SMS marketing
Social media updates
Website widget content management
Creating and managing loyalty campaigns
Placing online ads
Analysing online marketing data

Essentially, marketing automation is a big part of customer relationship management (CRM), which can track the ROI of your marketing efforts on various digital platforms. To put it simply, automation aims to drive conversions with the help of marketing messages by creating rich profiles of your customers, and it helps in sending the right information to them at the right time. We have some solid reasons to prove that marketing automation is a must for any eCommerce business coming up! But first, let’s find out how marketing automation works.

How does marketing automation work?

It all starts with your eCommerce business needs, so a good offset point is to ask yourself, “What am I trying to achieve with my eCommerce marketing strategy?”. After you found the answer to this vital question, you will then be able to choose how will you use marketing automation platforms to either:

Automate surveys
Schedule and publish blog posts
Handle lead generation
Stay in control of your content management
Fine-tune research

After you’ve established your reason for using marketing automation, you must get to know your target market better. An important thing to know is that your target market are the ones who will benefit the most from automating your marketing efforts. Questions to ask at this stage would be:

Who are they?
Where can I find them?

The most vital thing is understanding their online behaviour to set the correct automation tasks you seek to accomplish. In doing so, you will identify the appropriate marketing automation software to use. When analysing and diving deeper into your target market research data, pay attention to:

Demographic factors
Geographic factors
Behavioural factors
Psychographic factors

After this essential step, you can move on to learning and choosing the right marketing automation tools for your eCommerce business. Ensure that you will carefully evaluate every marketing automation tool at this stage to achieve your marketing automation objectives. In the meantime, you can have a look at one of our favourite blogs on the top 10 marketing automation software so that you can start your research on the right foot.

So, you identified your eCommerce business needs, you researched your target market, you found the right marketing automation tool, and now it’s time to implement and improve as you go along! Strategy implementation is a half-baked idea in the absence of commitment, so make sure you stay dedicated and focused on the process to see results. Persistence is a must, we say! And don’t forget about checking your marketing automation efforts by measuring results and your overall effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns.

Accelerator

Keep an eye on your competitors, and compare your marketing automation efforts against theirs. Who knows what may come up? Maybe new ideas or slight changes in direction could make a big difference in the long run.

Why marketing automation can improve your eCommerce ROI?

When it comes to marketing your eCommerce business, the whole process can get time-consuming and sophisticated at times. Besides losing a considerable amount of time, most companies end up with poor digital marketing results, and this is reason number one for why marketing automation is a must for effective eCommerce marketing and to increase your ROI.

In today’s world, eCommerce businesses are largely opting for marketing automation, especially those whose aim is to grow. Why? Because marketing automation can be beneficial for businesses for the following reasons:

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is just as important as acquiring the actual sales in the first place. This is because a new lead may not wish to immediately purchase products from your website, so a certain level of nurturing may be needed to change your target audience’s mind.

Without a marketing automation system in place, sales teams usually can become easily overwhelmed by having to be present at all times to understand the needs of their potential buyers. We know that 80% of users that opted for marketing automation saw an increase in their number of leads, whereas 77% saw improved conversion rates. In case you are interested in finding out more about how you can increase your eCommerce conversion rates, we have an excellent article with our 7 most effective ways to increase the eCommerce conversion rate that you might find valuable to read. A good example of nurturing leads is email marketing automation. Marketing automation tools can create personalised email campaigns to target your customers and drive responses in no time. In the meantime, head over to our blog to find our top best practices for email marketing for some extra valuable tips.

Personalised experiences

Secondly, eCommerce marketing automation allows you to create valuable rapport with your customers, translating into driving more sales. Simply reaching out to people in a way that stands out and feels personal, it’s what makes the difference between success and failure.

One good example of this is that marketing automation allows you to send out behaviorally triggered emails. This creates a highly personalised customer experience without any efforts on your part. Providing your potential customers with a “VIP” treatment can have a massive impact on your overall eCommerce revenue. According to research, 93% of companies saw a growth in their conversion rates after personalising their customer experience, whilst 49% of customers have made a purchase that they didn’t initially intend to do. And all of that happened after receiving a personalised recommendation from a brand.

Accelerator

Our top recommendation is to start looking into our favourite marketing automation tool, the HubSpot marketing automation software, in case you want to go beyond email marketing. This tool will allow you to scale your growth and spend less time on repetitive tasks, so what are you waiting for? In case you are struggling, maybe it’s the right time to start working with a HubSpot marketing agency like us that can help you align your eCommerce marketing in growing your business!

Monitoring sales across digital channels

A well-known factor is that the customer journey may begin on one channel, go through numerous others and end on another. This is the main reason why omnichannel marketing is so lucrative for eCommerce businesses.

But remember, no matter how many channels you use, the experience should be the same on all of them. That means you must keep a consistent brand voice and maintain the same high spirit across your digital channels. But monitoring all of these channels can become tricky, and this is where marketing automation comes in once again. Marketing automation, especially for eCommerce, allows your business to create tailor-made experiences for all your digital channels. Even better, omnichannel marketing automation significantly reduces the difficulty in creating unique customer experiences. It also ensures that your customers will touch all your customer journey touchpoints.

Thanks to clearly defined processes and apparent reporting features that marketing automation tools can offer you, you can start seeing what are you exactly not doing right and what you are doing right in your digital marketing strategy. In case it’s not crystal clear yet, having a solid digital marketing strategy is the most important thing for an eCommerce business, and marketing automation is a small fragment. In case you are feeling out of the loop, head over to our guide on how to create an eCommerce digital marketing strategy in 2021.

Cart abandonment reduction

We’ve heard a rumour that in March of 2020, a massive 88% of online shopping carts were abandoned. In simpler terms? This is the revenue that an eCommerce business has high chance of losing if the proper measures aren’t taken as soon as possible.

Marketing automation can help eCommerce businesses to recover their lost revenue due to abandoned carts, as it allows you to send automated cart reminder emails to your target market. This saves a considerable amount of time whilst generating more sales.

Accelerator

However, make sure that your carefully crafted cart abandonment emails are well spaced out to not to appear as spam. But also remember that people are very forgetful as they have many online distractions whilst browsing the web.

Our rule of thumb is to send out cart abandonment reminders 3 hours, 6 hours and 12 hours after it happened. The most recent digital marketing research experts revealed that 45% of people who received abandonment cart reminder emails ended up opening them, and out of those clicks, more than 35% ended up making a purchase. In case you want to level up your retargeting strategy, you can also retarget customers by automating your social ads to display their recently viewed products on any of their social media feeds. However, social ads are once again only a tiny part of your overall strategy, so make sure to check out our blog on how to create a social media strategy to stay on top of the game.

Customer retention

And this is the secret ingredient to making your eCommerce business a success! Customer retention implies acquiring new customers while retaining old ones.

Too often, acquiring new customers becomes such a priority for eCommerce businesses that they tend to forget about retaining their old ones. Keeping old customers is a lot less expensive, and it requires less marketing effort than acquiring new ones. To make it even more straightforward, the cost of acquiring a new customer can range from being 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping an already existing one. Also, a simple 5% increase in customer retention can increase an eCommerce company’s profitability by 75%, how crazy is that?

So, by now, it is pretty evident that increasing your customer’s happiness and experience quality must be a top priority. By successfully doing so, you will up your customer retention by building relationships with people that can stand the test of time. And as a last thought on the numbers, 44% of online consumers said they would likely become buyers after a brand’s personalised experience. What does that mean for your eCommerce business? That once your customers keep coming back for more, their customer lifetime value will go over the roof as well!

Conclusion

Concluding, marketing automation can open a pandora box of opportunities for eCommerce businesses, so make sure you don’t lose out on this opportunity. The world of online marketing automation is constantly evolving and expanding for the better, so there hasn’t been a better time for you to understand the processes you need to automate and their extent. From there, choosing the best marketing automation tools will make a big difference in staying ahead of your competitors and in saving time and improving your eCommerce ROI.

At Lnet Digital, we are a specialist eCommerce digital agency that understands the challenge of getting enough from your online sales. We are also specialised in revamping your eCommerce strategy, as we know that there is no better time than now to start attracting the right customers. Even more, as a HubSpot certified partner, our mission is to align your eCommerce sales and marketing with growing your business and with seeing the results you want. In case freeing up your time, improving your internal marketing processes, and accelerating your sales is something you are interested in, get in touch with us today, and one of our friendly team members will get back to you as soon as possible with the advice and support you need!