How to Use Marketing Automation to Grow Your E-commerce

When we talk about Marketing Automation applied to e-commerce, we refer to the ability to automatically manage digital marketing activities. It is carried out daily by an e-commerce manager but direct human intervention is, in fact, not required.

Actions include, for example, sending welcome emails to users who open an account on the site, review of abandoned carts, management of newsletter with the latest e-commerce promotions, etc.

E-commerce Marketing Automation is an increasingly interesting option: it allows you to automate and manage the workflow of repetitive online store tasks. The result? Faster, and more precise, effective actions. 

What does Marketing Automation do for e-commerce?

In the case of e-commerce, taking advantage of Marketing Automation means:

• collecting all customer information, having lead scoring and lead nurturing in one place: a CRM system manages and qualifies leads, facilitating customized offer sends;
• automatically performing all mechanical marketing tasks – by simply setting triggers based on the most significant user actions;
• getting reports of all your activity performance. That way you are always up to date on what works and what doesn’t, and can change your Marketing Automation strategy, quickly increasing profitability.

To create automated campaigns for your e-commerce, you make use of workflow. Let’s take a look at some of the most effective:

1. Welcome email

As a general rule, when a user creates an account on your site or signs up for your newsletter they should receive, within a few minutes, a welcome email with their subscription confirmation.

Welcome emails are the ones with the highest open rate: their average open rate is 82%, four times the open rates of other email types and ten times the average click rates.

Why are welcome emails so important? Because they reach the customer at the right time and garner real interest. That’s because they contain confirmation of successful platform registration as well as other valuable information, such as login credentials or a welcome discount.

Automatic welcome emails are your greatest opportunity to build a relationship with potential customers.

2. Click-based workflow with a specific link

The most advanced management of Marketing Automation consists of automating personalized email sends according to user behavior (i.e., contents or themes they show interest in).

Thanks to this feature, your company can increase the degree of campaign or communication relevance to recipients, improving conversion rates and relations with users aligned to the brand.

In this case, you can develop advanced Marketing Automation strategy with a workflow targeted at each recipient’s click.

The MailUp platform has a feature that allows you to manage this type of workflow precisely, by simply configuring a trigger and indicating the content to kick off the workflow.

3. Workflow based on buying behavior

This type of email helps to segment contact databases, making you brand’s marketing campaigns for subscribers much more efficient. With this kind of workflow, your e-commerce automatically informs customers about new product offers related to what they have already purchased (cross-selling) and asks for information about their purchase experience once they have received the shipment.

4. Birthday emails

This type of workflow is activated on the user’s birthday, indicated in the database during registration. In an effective e-commerce marketing strategy, this email is the perfect pretext to offer the user a special discount and stimulate her to make a purchase.

It’s hard to even imagine the conversion rates registered for this type of automated email. We’re talking about a transaction rate 481% higher than promotional emails, revenue that is 342% higher and unique click percentages that are 179% higher.

If you haven’t taken advantage of this great e-commerce opportunity offered by Marketing Automation, you should, as soon as possible!

5. Workflow to recover abandoned carts

Cart abandonment occurs when a buyer adds something to their cart, but leaves your site without making a conversion.

The number of abandoned carts is typically high for all platforms – out of 100 potential sales about 75 get stuck at some point prior to checkout – which means you can significantly improve the performance of your e-commerce acting on this point.

How? A series of automatic ad hoc emails can stimulate user interest and convince them to finalize their purchase.

In this case, design is of crucial importance: it must be clean and functional. You can use the product image as a visual to remind your potential customer of originally caught their attention. You can also add a personalized offer.

In recent years, automation applied to marketing has soared. To date, you can choose from more than 8000 Marketing Automation platforms for your business.

Let’s look at some of the most popular E-commerce Marketing Automation platforms:

1. HubSpot: until recently, this was not an e-commerce platform. Since then it has added native integration of Shopify and the ability to connect a custom store. It has thus become an interesting option in this area as well.
2. MailUp: among the most powerful and reliable E-mail Marketing software. Its standout features include those dedicated to e-commerce automation. With MailUp, you can easily generate automated workflows and drip campaigns for custom and multi-channel communications, welcome emails and abandoned cart recovery.
3. Ortto: an easy-to-use Marketing Automation software, designed for e-commerce created with Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Ortto unifies the journey of your e-commerce customer by collecting and synchronizing all transactional and behavioral data.
4. Wigzo: a Marketing Automation tool that allows you to automate different activities on various channels (email, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp messages and more). Wigzo’s advanced machine learning algorithm recommends products to users based on their behavior.
5. Drip: this platform offers automatic ready-to-use workflows of email and SMS, perfect for E-commerce Marketing activities (welcome series, birthday emails, customer reactivation workflow and more).

How to choose the most suitable Marketing Automation tool for your E-commerce

To make sure you’re using the right solution for your online store, you need to be clear about your company’s needs and budget. In some cases, you don’t need to invest in the purchase of a complex (and expensive) all-in-one Marketing Automation platform – for example if your e-commerce need is simply to configure 3 or 4 highly targeted workflows and monitor activity performance.

Also, when evaluating the various Marketing Automation platforms, consider the other marketing tools you already use. What software allows you to make simple and functional connections with your Email Marketing tool or your Google Analytics account?

These considerations will lead to a simplified approach to your daily marketing activities and better management of your E-commerce Marketing Automation strategies.