For many companies who are working in the field of e-commerce, marketing automation has long shifted from being desirable to being mandatory. If you are unable to convert potential leads into prospective customers, it’s about time to pay closer attention to your marketing automation strategy. It’s the only way you can increase marketing efficiency and gain a competitive advantage.
So where do you start? First of all, find a partner who is fully competent in software engineering, and can provide you with valuable content. But finding a competent vendor is not an easy task nowadays, for the solution market for marketing automation is growing rapidly every year.
What Is Automation?
When getting started with automation, you should first analyze the existing processes which are carried out manually. This will allow you free up the resources in your daily activities. Perhaps you now have some unautomated campaigns, like those for a weekly distribution of welcome emails to new subscribers, or for sending survey, invite offers to new customers twice a week.
As your following step, we recommend you to look for new opportunities to communicate with your clients within automated, timely, multistage, and multichannel campaigns. Since the opportunities are almost endless, let’s start it simple from the earliest stages of the customer lifecycle.
The greeters
The greeting program is already a good practice in digital marketing campaigns, and using such campaigns is now compulsory. Besides your website, the “greeter”, or your welcome email, often is the first contact your customers have with your brand. These programs should not only be kept friendly but also timely. Positive and friendly formulations will help set the tone and lay the foundation for a close relationship with your subscriber. Your welcome email should be sent right after the registration. Then, ideally, you should work more closely with the subscriber for a few weeks, describing your services and benefits. The most effective welcome programs usually include several campaigns. Emails can be sent daily, but to optimize the communication intensity, we recommend you conducting separate A/B testing.
Surveying new customers and collecting product feedbacks
Purchase-associated campaigns include surveys that offer bonuses. These surveys are focused on new customers and are becoming an important source of valuable analytical information. They can also help you stimulate repeat purchases. Additional personalized campaigns which are targeted at customers of certain products or product categories generate unique opportunities for cross-selling and selling more expensive goods. To generate additional revenue, you should analyze your customers’ behavior. By doing so, you will know exactly what products you can offer to different kinds of customers.
Abandoned carts
If your business is focused on e-commerce, you should first of all think about automating the campaigns which are associated with abandoned carts. Although this classic strategy guarantees the increase of economic effect of investment, many online retailers still do not use these opportunities.
Actions to Take On the Web
Track customer behavior on your website. Doing so, you can use this information for the effective interaction with your customers. The best example to that is sending automated emails to the clients who viewed a particular product or product category and left your website without completing the purchase.
Invaluable at this point are your brand’s followers on social networks. That is why you need to provide all your possible subscribers with the opportunity to share easily the information they receive. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract new subscribers, promote your brand, and increase potential revenue.
Recovering Lost Customers and Increasing Customer Loyalty
When tracking your customers’ lifecycle, you will certainly want to recover lost and inactive customers. If you don’t do this, you will keep loosing money.
You should also repeatedly reward your most active and valuable customers, which will help you add to their loyalty. But only a few companies pay any attention to this.
We have mentioned only a few of the most popular campaigns in the field of electronic commerce, but the potential opportunities to personalizing and supporting strong customer relationships at every stage of the customer lifecycle are virtually endless.
Finally, keep in mind that all campaigns should be analyzed from the point of view of a multichannel strategy. For example, to bring back inactive customers, you may also use SMS campaigns which are quite useful in cases when the subscriber ignores (or doesn’t receive) your emails.
Such multi-channel approach allows you attract more customers and collect large volumes of transaction data for implementing strategic initiatives aimed at increasing profits.
Which email marketing campaign do you think is the best one to increase revenue? – Let us know in the comments.
Kristina Pototska is a CMO at TriggMine, email marketing automation service. She is great when it comes to email marketing tips & increasing conversions. During the past two years, she successfully launched more than 50 email campaigns for e-commerce websites. She’s also the voice of TriggMine. Kristina performed as a speaker at 100+ events in Europe & Asia. She believes that email marketing rules and data are the king.
