Ecommerce marketing can be extremely tedious, not to mention time-consuming.
And this is where marketing automation comes into the game.
When it comes to marketing for your ecommerce brand, automation can help you get a lot done in a lesser amount of time with a better overall revenue.
Seems like a win-win situation, right?
No wonder a majority of brands are implementing marketing automation today.
If statistics are anything to go by, 77% of CMOs at top-performing companies claim that they implement marketing automation to grow revenue.
Interested in implementing marketing automation for your ecommerce store? But first, let’s see why marketing automation is so beneficial for increasing productivity.
1. Allows You to Offer Better Customer Service
The happier your customers and prospects are, the better your revenue will be.
Really, it’s not rocket science.
When your customers and prospects get quick solutions to their queries and problems, they are more likely to remain with you as your permanent loyal customer.
Marketing automation allows you to send out extremely personalized as well as effective content at each stage of your customer’s journey. It also gets the right content at the right time to the right prospects. Take behavioral triggered emails and personalized chatbots for instance.
Automation in marketing has bridged the gap between the customer and the enterprises. For instance, now the customers don’t have to wait for days on end to get in touch with the customer service representative. They can simply shoot out a message on one of your social media channels or through your live chat, and they will get an instant reply.
2. Better Customer Insights
Marketing automation can effortlessly help you get useful insights on your customers. From their product preferences to their date of birth, you can collect all the important information and utilize it to serve them better.
Moreover, many marketing tools on the internet even allow you to collect insights on your website visitors including information like their time of visit, the product they spent the most time looking at, bounce rate, and more. You can easily leverage these smart insights when it comes to running your marketing campaign.
3. Lead Nurturing
Do you know that more than half of the leads that you generate are qualified, yet not ready to buy?
This means that marketing professionals actually waste a lot of their time on their lead generation process. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
As we already mentioned, marketing automation functions like personalized and targeted email campaigns engage customers in such a manner that they get compelled to respond. This eventually allows you to push them further down the sales funnel.
4. Omnichannel Monitoring
Omnichannel marketing is astronomically rewarding — there’s no doubt about it.
But as lucrative as omnichannel marketing is, it is equally difficult to monitor. It is humanly impossible for you to be present at each platform at all times. However, it gets extremely easy with marketing automation.
With marketing automation, you can easily monitor the channels that you use to interact with your prospects and customers. Bots and automated software tools can provide you detailed insights on your customers and about their activities on each of your channels, within minutes.
5. Saves Staff Costs & Increases ROI
One of the most noticeable benefits of marketing automation is that it helps you generate more ROI on your employee costs. It, by and large, reduces the need for manual power for receptive and redundant marketing tasks such as taking customer calls, filling in data sheets, scheduling emails, and so forth.
Now, you only need to hire employees for the tasks that not only bring more revenue to the company but also have a higher overall impact.
For more details on costs, check out our 2019 Marketing Automation Pricing Guide.
6. Helps you retain existing customers
Sales representatives often overlook retaining their older customer in favor of new leads. What they fail to realize is that to boost your revenue, you have to make sure that your existing customers not only continue to use your services, but also make an upgrade on their purchase.
With marketing automation, increasing customer loyalty becomes easier. From seeking feedback to sending discounted offers, marketing automation engages the customers and offer incentives so as to nurture your relationship with your customers hence retaining them for a lifetime.
Conclusion
I have listed and explained some great benefits that you can incur if you automate your ecommerce marketing functions.
I know that many folks are a bit skeptical about the impact marketing automation is going to have on the ecommerce industry. However, I hope that these benefits alleviate your doubts to some extent.
If humans and machines work together in sync, a lot can be achieved in a very short time including better customer service, more productivity, and so forth.
That’s why I say — don’t delegate, automate!
Author Bio: Whitney Blankenship is the Content Marketing Manager for Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Whitney is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and social media trends. Obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal. Powered by coffee. Fastest Googler in the West.