Online Marketing

Marketing Automation is Absolutely Essential for Growing Online Sales

Are you losing out on sales opportunities online because your e-commerce system does not send out automatic reminders for abandoned carts? Are your subscribers and customers regularly notified of trending products and new additions to your product catalog? When users take certain basic actions on your website, are you able to convert those actions into sales? Please continue reading if your current e-commerce platform does not help you with these or if you didn't know this was possible.

What is Marketing Automation?

Let us understand marketing automation with an example. Have you ever noticed that when you sign up for certain services online, you receive a welcome email from a real person just minutes later? This person keeps sending you emails every few days reminding you of the actions you should take to complete your account set up. Sometimes they even offer to set up virtual meetings and demos. If you respond to those emails, you do end up getting connected with that person to discuss the next steps. So how does this person keep track of hundreds and thousands of people signing up for the service and nurture all those relationships? The answer is, with the help of marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a piece of software that automates repetitive marketing work. In the above example one needs to onboard a new user on to a service platform, and for that, the company needs to send out a series of emails as reminders and follow ups to encourage the user to take the required steps towards increasing the user engagement, eventually leading to a paid upgrade. In other words, marketing automation helps improve the efficiency of your sales funnel and increases your conversion rate.

When it comes to e-commerce, there are a few very important use cases where marketing automation is absolutely essential for the growth and success of your e-commerce business. In this article I am going to cover them one by one below.

Abandoned Carts

It is very common for people to add items to the cart and not complete the checkout process for various reasons such as:

They could get distracted with something else that needs immediate attention.
They may have second thoughts on their purchase and may decide to do it later.
There could be connectivity issues that causes a longer wait time to finish the checkout.
They may decide to research more products to go along with what they are buying.

There could be many reasons because of which a person may abandon the cart and leave in the middle of the checkout process. These occurrences do not have to end up as a lost opportunity. With a constant reminder it is possible to bring back such shoppers to the site and help them complete the checkout process. This is where marketing automation plays a significant role.

You as the online store owner can create a series of automated messages to be sent out at various frequencies as a reminder to all the shoppers with abandoned carts. These emails start going out every few days with various suggestions and offers to encourage the user to complete their purchase.

This is a highly effective technique used by many online retailers and is sure to increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website.

Product Suggestions

Many businesses struggle with creating fresh and engaging content due to budget constraints and lack of marketing resources. What if there was a way to create recurring newsletters that go out to all the website users once or twice a month, with suggestions on newly added products, trending products or products related to their previous purchases? Well there is a way to do that on the Cart2Order platform. This type of automation greatly reduces the burden of keeping up with manual content writing. The system automatically picks up the product images, descriptions etc. and adds them to the newsletter, and sends it out once or twice a month depending on the frequency set up by the online store manager.

Not just the product suggestions, recurring newsletters can also be used to include recent or featured blog and news articles to add more helpful content about the business. This not only helps improve your brand but also helps you compete better with bigger players who have more marketing horsepower in terms of budget and resources.

Automated Follow Ups

There are many different ways to capture a website visitor's email address. You could offer a free e-book or a free training. You could offer discount coupons and other offers via email. You could even offer personalized pricing on your website. All these techniques help capture new leads and their email addresses. These are potential customers who you need to stay in touch with.

You can set up a series of automated follow up messages for each of these use cases to nurture the relationship with your potential customers.

Relationship Builders

People feel special when you wish them on their birthdays, anniversaries and other important life events. They will even better if you combine a gift offer with your wishes. You can collect more information about the important days in your customer's lives through various promotional emails and popups and store this information automatically for future use.

Our system sends out birthday and anniversary wishes automatically and you can easily add promotional offers to these emails. Other life events can also be configured very easily. Using this strategy you can build long term relationships with your customer base.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a great way to increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website. The good news is that Cart2Order provides all the tools you need to set up both manual and automated workflows to streamline you marketing tasks.