We can all agree that technology has made life—and a lot of other things—easier than it used to be in the past. It also applies to our marketing processes today.
Running a business is no longer as tedious. Digital marketing is rapidly phasing out the traditional ways of marketing products or services. Business owners now leverage marketing automation strategies to create brand awareness and sell their products to their customers.
As an eCommerce business owner hoping to scale your business successfully, you need to take advantage of the technology as a gift. Statistics show that about 55% of eCommerce marketers leverage email marketing or marketing automation software to grow their businesses. Incorporating a marketing automation strategy into your business model gives you time to improve other business areas.
In this article, we will share how you can automate your eCommerce business for fast growth. We will also share the benefits of automation and examples of some automation tools. So if you'd like to know how to achieve this, read on.
What is eCommerce?
Electronic commerce (eCommerce) simply refers to the sales of products or services online. Any business that involves you buying or selling goods or services over the internet is an eCommerce business.
The beauty of this business model is that it doesn't require aspiring business owners to own expensive buildings or physical stores—you can efficiently run your business on your mobile devices from the comfort of your home. All you need to do is register on the marketing software you would love to buy or sell from, and you will have access to thousands of customers or clients from anywhere in the world.
You can operate your eCommerce business in the major market segments:
- Business to Consumers (B2C)—selling your products or services to your customers.
- Business to Business (B2B)—selling your products or services to other businesses.
- Consumer to Consumer (C2C)—involves individuals selling their products or services to other consumers.
- Consumer to Business (C2B)—individuals selling to businesses.
Notable examples of e-commerce businesses are Shopify, Amazon and eBay.
What is Automation in eCommerce?
Automation refers to technological applications that minimize human input in processes. Therefore, marketing automation refers to tools or software designed to handle marketing tasks and processes with only little human input.
The idea behind marketing automation or automation in eCommerce is to simplify or reduce the workload of the different teams and avoid repetitive tasks to ensure a memorable customer experience.
Today, many marketers and business owners use different marketing automation software for most of their daily marketing activities, like:
- Sending emails
- Sending automated messages and texts
- Following up on leads
- Posting content on social media sites
- Creating content
- Creating quotes
- Ad campaigns
- Generating automated product descriptions
- Detailed reporting
- Managing inventories and more
Automation is one of the most important digital marketing trends, and any eCommerce business hoping to scale fast needs to leverage its many advantages because it is here to stay.
Benefits of a marketing automation strategy for your eCommerce business
Automation is becoming more popular as more eCommerce businesses in different sectors embrace it because of its many benefits. A report by Salesforce reveals that 84% of marketers used marketing automation in their businesses in 2020. Below are a few ways your eCommerce can benefit from automation.
1. Saves time
A successful marketing automation model in your business saves a lot of time. It eliminates the need for repetitive tasks and gives you more time to focus on other business areas.
There are many time-consuming tasks you do not need to spend your time on. For instance, we know most businesses struggle with creating relevant content for their businesses because of how repetitive and time-consuming it can be—not to mention the time spent on market research.
With a natural language generation tool like AX Semantics, you can easily automate content for your business in about 110 languages and save about 80% of your time on other essential tasks.
2. Boosts productivity
When your sales and marketing teams are no longer burdened with time-consuming, repetitive tasks like social media posting and creating personalized content, they channel their time and resources into being productive in other business areas.
Digital marketers are more creative when they have enough time to brainstorm and analyze their marketing strategies to convert potential customers, and marketing automation makes this possible for them.
3. Increases customer satisfaction
A marketing automation strategy helps you serve your current customers better and improve their customer experience. With automation, you can create and send personalized content to leads at whatever stage they are in their buyer's journey.
Automation helps you to understand your customers better and to know their preferences. With this, you can improve your services to serve them better.
An example of how to increase customer satisfaction with marketing automation is sending automated email sequences about the best ways to use your products or special offers and discounts to email subscribers on your list. That will help them use your products better, giving them a memorable experience.
We all know that satisfied customers are returning buyers.
4. Reduces human error
Nothing points out incompetence more than sending the wrong details to a client. Human error is inevitable, and even experts are bound to make them. Juggling too many repetitive tasks can be tiring, even when used to these tasks. Incorporating marketing automation tools to carry out these tasks reduces the chances of errors.
Automating specific marketing processes makes it easier for you to process a large amount of customer data seamlessly, and you don't need to be worried about mixing details. With automation, you can send timely messages to clients and carry out many tasks without the fear of making errors. It also increases the efficiency of your marketing team.
5. Lead nurturing
Sending relevant automated messages and drip campaigns to your potential customers at different stages of their buyer's journey nurtures them into becoming paying customers. With an automated strategy in place, you can connect with your customers deeper by sending timely marketing campaigns and messages.
A drip campaign is a popular example. Drip campaigns are automated emails sent to potential buyers based on their particular actions on your website. Imagine website visitors getting emails about carts they abandoned a few days back while visiting your website; they will most likely rush back to complete their orders.
6. Creates personalized content
Personalization makes a difference in any marketing strategy, so you need to be intentional about your marketing efforts. Customers love to feel special and seen; they respond more to messages and descriptions tailored for them, as opposed to regular generic ones.
Research shows that 80% of potential customers are more likely to buy from brands that offer a personalized experience. To stand out from your competition, you need to leverage a marketing automation tool for adequate content personalization to give your customers a unique experience in their customer journey.
AX Semantics, delivers automatic content personalization by exploiting real-time behavioral user data to produce content, such as product descriptions, personalized to each unique visitor. Every product page on a website transforms into a highly tailored sales pitch based on the customer's motives and preferences.
3 ways to incorporate marketing automation strategies for faster growth
You are probably eager to know how to automate your eCommerce business for faster growth. Not to worry, as we will tell you how to achieve that shortly.
There are several ways to use marketing automation for your businesses to achieve the best results. The right marketing automation strategy can improve different aspects of your eCommerce business, including:
- Sales
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Customer service
- Content marketing
- Inventory management
- Reporting
Our article will highlight three ways to automate your eCommerce business.
1. Email marketing
Have you ever gotten an email immediately after purchasing an item from your favorite online store, showing details of your order? Or have you received an email reminding you of your abandoned shopping carts when you forget to complete an order? You probably have. These are typical use cases of email marketing automation.
Now, imagine your sales team having to sit behind a desk to send emails to hundreds or thousands of customers whenever they purchase an item. Exhausting right? With email automation, you can organize your email marketing processes and have a reliable and efficient system to satisfy your customers better without stressing.
Email marketing is the foundation of most marketing strategies. Successful companies have used it for several decades to keep in touch and share important information with their customers. Your marketing automation strategy is incomplete without automating email marketing for your eCommerce business.
Leveraging email marketing automation solutions come with many benefits, including:
- Saving time and cost
- Generating leads
- Nurturing leads
- Engaging your customers
- Customer segmentation
- Organized email marketing processes
- Tracking your customer's responses and understanding their user behavior
- Converting potential customers to buying customers
- Personalizing your customer's experience
- Improve user experience
- Increasing sales and boosting your revenue
Ways to use an email marketing automation strategy
1. Welcome message: You can automate personalized welcome messages for your customers whenever they subscribe to your mailing list. Customers love to feel seen, and there is no better way to make them feel special than a warm welcome message.
2. Follow-up emails: It is not just enough to send your customers a welcome message; you can also follow up on them from time to time and also re-engage inactive customers. It builds trust and loyalty.
3. Transactional email: These are digital receipts you send to your customers whenever they purchase on your website. These emails could also contain details about the purchased item(s) like quantity, order number and the likes.
4. Emails about special offers or events: Automating marketing messages about sales, offers, or exclusive discounts is one way to get a potential customer hooked on your business. Getting the right automated content at the right time can make an enormous difference in a buyer's journey.
How to set up your email automation workflow
You can easily set up your automation workflow for your eCommerce business with the following steps.
- Choose the email automation software that suits the needs of your business
- Determine your target audience or potential buyers
- Draft out your goals for the email
- Build your segmented lists
- Develop and customize the emails to fit the customers
- Automate your drip campaign
- Automate a test run first
- Launch your campaign or schedule accordingly
- Study the metrics and analytical reports afterward
Email marketing automation software includes MailChimp, HubSpot, MailerLite, AWeber and ConvertKit.
2. Content generation
Have you ever wondered why most people refer to content as "King"? That is because content marketing is an integral part of any business, and it is vital in every stage of the customer lifecycle.
A potential customer will buy from you or hear about your business because of your content, whether on your website, emails, or social media sites. It is why digital marketers and eCommerce business owners are intentional about the content they create - especially product descriptions.
Creating the proper product description that attracts, engages and converts qualified leads for your brand is not always easy. It is time-consuming and repetitive, even for the best marketing and sales teams. Therefore, having a content marketing automation strategy is the best way to achieve success in this area.
Automated content generation is becoming a trend for most business owners. Thankfully, our content generation software solves this problem. AX Semantics uses NLG to help you create hyper-personalized content and product descriptions that give your customers a unique customer experience and help you achieve higher conversion rates.
Our tool achieves this with these straightforward steps below:
- Upload data: First, you upload the data on our tool. These data could be product features and other information.
- Configure a ruleset: After uploading the specific data, you configure a ruleset to suit your brand tones and voice to generate relevant content.
- Generate content: Finally, you generate engaging and SEO-friendly content that is bound to convert and boost sales.
So you can generate thousands of texts for product descriptions, financial reporting, CSR reports, or even data-based journalism.
Other ways you can use content automation for your business include:
- Grammatical aspect and accuracy
- Optimizing content for SEO
- Translating content
Content automation takes the stress off your back and increases your efficiency. You can sign up for AX Semantics now to automate your content generation process.
3. Inventory management
Tracking and organizing your stocks, sales and supplies manually doesn't seem like much work when you run a small business, but this can be challenging when you run a successful eCommerce store.
Repetitive tasks like this can give room for errors; you or your sales team can quickly lose track of items or order excessive items. To run your eCommerce efficiently and stay on track, you need to automate your inventory management workflow to achieve the best results.
An automated inventory management workflow reduces errors and gives you detailed records about your products, but it also enables you to serve your customers better. Nothing annoys customers more than delayed or wrong deliveries. Customers can stop patronizing a business because of its disorganized inventory system. Automating your inventory management system solves this problem.
With the right automation tool, you can:
- Reduce errors
- Save time
- Keep track of supplies in real-time
- Track sales
- Track returned orders
- Optimize logistic workflow
- Generated detailed reports
- Save costs
- Serve your customers better
- Update your products online accurately
How to automate your eCommerce with our automation tool
AX Semantics is an AI-powered content generation software for eCommerce that helps you create all the content you need to meet your business needs, including product descriptions. Our self-service tool is 100% SaaS, and it doesn't require programming skills or expert IT knowledge to use.
In simple terms, our tool gives you the superpowers to turn your copywriting game around for good. AX Semantics uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) to turn generic product pages into personalized sales pitches.
You can create your human-like content by simply inputting your data, configuring rule sets and ensuring the content matches your brand voice and tone. Then the tool generates the perfect content for your brand. In this way you have complete control over how your content sounds to customers, and you can save 80% of your time.
The following steps show how to achieve automated yet personalized content generation.
1. Gathers data: We collect behavioral data from website visitors like the products they visit, their status, time and location. We store all the data on our site only, and we do not transmit customers' personal information anywhere or to anyone else.
2. Analyzes data: We analyze these behavioral data to understand the customers better with our AX Metrics. With this data, we identify the content objective based on the customer journey of the lead, and we generate unique and personalized content for them.
3. Performance reporting and analytics: With the help of AX Metrics you can see how well your content is performing.
With our tool, you do not have to worry about Google flagging your content; we ensure that content is human-like and follows your desired rules, brand voice and tone.
Conclusion
With the many benefits that we have highlighted so far, we can all agree that automating your marketing processes is the best thing you can do for your business. There is no need to stress yourself or your marketing team when you can automate several processes efficiently.
Suppose you are a business owner in the eCommerce, publishing, banking, finance or pharmaceutical sector. In that case, you can save money and time from writing content for your brand and automate your content generation process with our tool.
AX Semantics generates content in over 110 languages and allows you to configure the rules, variances in your desired style, and linguistic elements to receive unique text for your needs.
You can try our tool for free by signing up to leverage the best content writing solution for your eCommerce.
FAQ
The primary purpose of marketing automation is to minimize human input, save time and increase efficiency. With an automated system, you get a seamless workflow that can help you generate leads, boost sales and improve customer experience.
Yes, you can. Tools like AX Semantics can help you generate thousands of texts in different languages for your brand. The software is intuitive, and you can use it from your desk via your web browser without prior knowledge of programming or software development.
Marketing automation uses specialized software to carry out marketing processes without human input. Some notable examples include:
- Email marketing automation: You can send personalized automated emails to your leads and customers in your sales funnels.
- Social media automation: You can schedule your social media posts days, weeks, or months ahead without posting manually.
- Content generation: You can generate content in different languages for your products with the right content automation tool, like AX Semantics.
- Inventory management: With the right marketing automation tool for inventory management, you can track your goods, track sales and optimize your logistics workflow.
