5 Ways to Automate eCommerce Marketing

eCommerce businesses face significant competition. More so, since global logistics enable competition at a global scale.

This means that eCommerce marketing is not optional. Loyalty from customers is rare as this business rests on price sensitivity. That is, if customers find a decent product at a cheaper rate, they have no incentive to remember an eCommerce website or return to it.

As a result, constantly working on marketing campaigns is critical for eCommerce business owners.

A smart eCommerce entrepreneur will automate their marketing to grow their website. At least wherever it’s possible.

So that they can focus on problem-solving and new strategies to attract customers.

In this post, I’d like to share ways to automate eCommerce marketing. We’ll look at simple things like adding opt-in popup forms to something more elaborate, like using AI to manage customer support.

The Skinny on eCommerce Marketing

What does eCommerce marketing consist of anyway?

In general, marketing is the overall practice or function of drawing people to a business. And it overlaps with sales. However, sales is almost separate from marketing because it’s about closing and getting people to take action. While marketing is all the steps before closing sales, and it’s about building everything that makes a sale possible.

When it comes to eCommerce, sales is the lifeblood of the business.

With so much invested in hosting, inventory management, product building, logistics, and so on, marketing needs to be conversion-oriented and hyper-focused on sales.

So, we’re going to look at marketing automation that supports sales as the end goal. We’re also going to look at ways to build trust, authority, and more because virtually no one buys anything on a whim.

People go through several stages of research and contact with a brand before buying from them. Knowing this, you should leverage the appropriate marketing automation tools to make sales faster and easier. Let’s take a look at what eCommerce marketing automation tools look like.

1. Push Notifications

Typically, opt-in popup forms go at the top of the list for me when it comes to lead generation and marketing automation.

But, to my best knowledge, eCommerce businesses are best served by using push notification tools as a primary means to collect leads and communicate with audiences.

Push notifications, done correctly, are instant messages that pop up on mobile and desktop browsers. And they are great for engaging audiences and sharing key information with them, for example:

• When a product is on sale
• When something is trending
• To offer discounts and special offers
• To bring back people to finish shopping on their abandoned carts

And so on. Use a push notification tool or plugin, and set them up so that they activate on specific triggers. These triggers could be a welcome push notification when a person signs up, abandoned cart activities, RSS feed campaigns, and so on.

In this way, an eCommerce business can relay important information and timely content automatically. Once the setup is done at the start, you can easily reach more people and offer personalized experiences via push notifications.

2. Drip Email Marketing

Remember that getting customers to buy from you is a journey, not a single trip. Another analogy you can use is thinking of the process of selling as a campaign spread over time rather than a single skirmish.

In terms of marketing, you need to have a sequence of communication set up and ready to go at the right time, to the right people, in the most optimized format.

One of the most powerful ways to do this is to use your email marketing, and set up a drip campaign.

A drip campaign is a series of emails that you can send when a trigger is hit.

For example, when a new subscriber signs up for your email list, you could launch a drip campaign with a welcome email, an email with news one week later, a free offer a few days later, some kind of promotion afterward, and so on.

Other triggers for drip campaigns are when your user adds a product to a cart and abandons it. Or if a user hasn’t logged into their account for a while.

Drip campaigns are automated, personalized for different segments and situations, and engaging.

They’re necessary if you want to boost sales over time and do so automatically.

3. Automated Customer Segmentation

Personalization is the key to hiring sales in eCommerce. Segmentation is what makes personalization possible.

Segmenting is the process of grouping your audience according to similar characteristics and behaviors.

However, you should note that in eCommerce marketing, segmenting is refined, dynamic, and often granular. Meaning that successful eCommerce brands don’t just group their audience according to wide age groups, income levels, and so on.

They use powerful tools and data to segment customers based on many factors. Some B2B segmenting tools can generate hundreds of segmented groups from a given set of audience data.

The factors by which you can and should segment your customers include transactions, time spent on your site, engagement on multiple platforms, demographic information, and so on.

You can combine these factors in hundreds of ways and get information to craft highly personalized emails.

As a result, you get more engagement and more sales. However, you can imagine how complex this activity can get with just a few hundred customers. Much less with millions.

And this is where AI and automated customer segmentation comes in. Tools like Convertedin and SalesForce enable such automation. And an eCommerce site that wants to succeed must leverage segmentation to get better engagement from customers.

4. Social Media Automation

Many eCommerce business owners think of social media as a simple and easy activity. And not many believe that social media can impact sales.

However, when done correctly, social media is a powerful means for eCommerce companies to turn audiences into buyers.

For example, 85% of Gen Zers use social media to learn about new products. 25% of shoppers in the US consult social media sources before making a purchase. And finally, when people buy on social media, the average order is quite high - $65 on Instagram, $55 on Facebook, and $38 on YouTube.

So, it is critical to not only be present on social media but to optimize your presence on it.

If you think about it, being present on multiple platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, and goodness knows what else is hard enough.

But then you also have to be present on them and create content regularly. The bare minimum is to create daily posts. But the reality is you should create multiple posts per day for each platform.

And if you want to drive engagement, you should create videos and respond to comments.

If this doesn't sound exhausting already, you should pay attention to brand mentions, your competition, and major trends and activities related to your industry.

As you can imagine, a full-fledged social media team, an agency, or at least one person dedicated to your social media work.

And this is where automation becomes a boon.

Platforms like Sprout Social, Buffer, Later, and HootSuite enable content scheduling and content planning. They also automate the distribution of your content at the right time for your location.

And so, including social media automation as part of your E-Commerce marketing is invaluable.

5. Chatbot Automation

Millennials and Gen Z-ers prefer texting as a way to communicate.

By offering live chat and chatbot automation on your eCommerce site, you essentially communicate at the level of your audience.

There are many chatbot automation platforms that make it easy for you to integrate chatbot facilities into your online store.

And you can train them using your in-house material, such as customer support tickets, brand guidelines, and so on, to ensure that these chatbots match the tone of your brand.

These are extremely useful for answering that can be extracted from a database or are very minor.

For example, someone who wants to initiate a refund or a return or wants to know the status of their delivery will benefit from the quick solutions a chatbot can provide.

Your customer support team can focus on more complicated tickets and issues that deserve a personal human touch.

This form of marketing focuses on enabling communication and providing information fast. It's also a game-changer for creating sales and lead generation on eCommerce websites.

Over to You

I’ve shared five different ways that an eCommerce platform can market itself more effectively using automation.

It can take time and training to implement these options on your site, but when they are up and running, they work on their own for the most part.

You can focus on strategy and excellent customer service which will lead to increased purchases and overall growth.

So don't hesitate. Get on board with automation today.