The Power of Automation in eCommerce Marketing

The online marketing world is fast-growing, and 2022 has been no different. Google Max has changed the way companies advertise on the world’s largest search engine; What3Words has humanised the way we share location coordinates; and now, automation has begun to shift the industry’s gears once more.

This new trend of handing more responsibilities to machines has opened up new ways to help eCommerce businesses sell more from their store and remain on top of the competition. Here at Brave Agency, we’ve cottoned onto this from an early stage and have seen how it’s progressed and innovated to take care of even more roles with greater customer success – it’s becoming a revolution driving sweeping changes in the world of digital marketing.

But what should we learn from this? What are the advantages of automation in eCommerce marketing? What are some tips to take away from this trend of leaving it to the robots? That’s exactly what we’ll take a look at in this article.

 

The Domination of Automation

Automation is a broad field with many facets, but for marketers, most automation takes place when it comes to communicating with the customer, most commonly through email automation. However, there’s more that marketers should pay attention to when it comes to automation.

Tools such as chatbots allow smaller teams to still give users a great customer service experience online without having to rely on physical workers to handle the role. For marketers, it still means they have access to a bevy of user data while being able to optimise communications and guarantee a successful touch point with the user, so it’s a win-win for every party involved.

It’s no surprise that automation has become so widely used, then. A study in February 2022 by research-based marketing firm Ascend2 discovered that over 75% of customer journeys on an eCommerce website passed through some form of automation.

The amount of customer data that can be gathered through the tracking built into automation programs is staggering. Marketers are able to gather more information on not just their returning customers, but potential buyers, too. They can set up alerts and follow-ups in instances where the user has abandoned their shopping cart via SMS, or send a reach-out email when the customer has been inactive for a set amount of time. Most impressively, automation can give them coupon codes depending on their history and behaviour on the site to further push sales.

More and more businesses are hopping onto the automation bandwagon, and it’s becoming plainer to see that those who don’t climb aboard soon will be at a huge disadvantage in the future.

 

Email Marketing Is Still Number One

As mentioned above, the primary way businesses are utilising automation for marketing is through email marketing. Since before the days of social media, email has always been a valuable asset to the arsenal of a digital marketing campaign. After all, there are 4 billion daily email users, and the opportunity to be a consistent presence in someone’s inbox is a fantastic way to stick in customers’ minds. Now with automation, email campaigns are delivering more salient results and gathering data on top of that.

This is different from a promotional email, however. Emails such as weekly newsletters, sale announcements and new stock messages are still the work of humans, in order to cement the brand’s tone while delivering warm news communications to the customer. Automation takes care of the email triggered by user behaviour, such as abandoned cart emails, newsletter subscription confirmations and purchase confirmations. According to Omnisend, “automated messages generated 29.6% of all email marketing orders with only 2.2% of the sends.” With just a handful of the workload, it is pulling a huge chunk of success for businesses.

For data-gatherers, the sort of intel that automated email messages use and collect is extremely useful and allows for personalised customer targeting. Stores are able to send messages that show past customers recommended products that others tend to buy next, similar to Amazon’s “customers also bought” panel below its products. Using what is known as granular messaging is the next step forward in convincing customers to buy into your business further.

 

Email automation in digital marketing campaigns

 

The Benefits of Automation

As well as the positive success rate automation has had on businesses, there are several other advantages that will please the eCommerce world to no end. These include:

Time-saving – strategies such as email marketing will be all taken care of, saving you time on tracking and sending for each customer.

Human error reduction – if set up correctly, automated processes will deliver a 100% success rate every time, which is near-impossible for humans to do

Increase in engagement without an increase in workload – the improvements that automation can provide is like hiring a new team of workers, without having to pay the salary. You can have your cake and eat it too!

Better customer insights – automation does it all and collects far more customer data than before. This will make it far easier to tweak and improve your campaign.

At Brave Agency, we’re experts in using automation software to enhance our clients’ customer pull. However, we also take care of the human aspects such as writing content for emails and blogs to improve your brand’s SEO standing. As a leading eCommerce marketing agency based in Peterborough, we offer fully-managed campaigns that will use both automated and human-made strategies to boost your online customer base. Contact the team today!

Written bybrave

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