Boost your sales with ecommerce marketing automation

The global ecommerce market is not just expanding: it is exploding. In 2023, global retail ecommerce sales reached an estimated $5.8 trillion (all figures USD) and are projected to surpass $8 trillion by 2027.

The pandemic also played a pivotal role in convincing — and in many cases compelling — individuals and businesses to shop from an ecommerce store vs. head to a store. In the U.S., ecommerce sales during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 climbed a whopping 43% year-over-year from $571.2 billion to $815.4 billion.

From the perspective of customers, the best online store experiences are simple and easy. However, for ecommerce businesses, the story behind the scenes is quite different. A series of complex and multi-layered marketing workflows are unfolding in areas such as:

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring
• Segmentation
• Preventing cart abandonment
• Cross-selling
• Upselling
• Order updates (status, delays, shipping, etc.)
• Syncing omnichannel experiences
• Customer retention (win-back)

Ecommerce marketing automation is an ecosystem of marketing automation software, marketing automation tools, and workflows that, once configured accordingly, take control of these repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This enables marketers to focus on high-value activities and priorities, and support more efficient and optimized automated marketing processes and campaigns.

We just mentioned that ecommerce marketing automation helps marketers save time and effort. Obviously, this is beneficial. However, the core reason why ecommerce marketing automation is essential is that it enables, enhances, and elevates the most important piece of the ecommerce puzzle: personalization.

Indeed, whether they are purchasing cosmetics, a computer, or a car, today’s customers want a personalized experience that is built around their needs and preferences.

Consider the following:

• 90% of customers rate personalization as “appealing.”
• Over half (56%) of consumers say they will repeat purchases after a personalized experience, a 7% increase year-over-year.
• 66% of customers expect brands to understand their wants and needs.

Clearly, customers want and expect a personalized ecommerce experience, and the ecommerce brands that cater to this requirement are — just as clearly — seeing major gains to their bottom-line:

• Brands that deliver outstanding customer personalization generate 40% higher revenues compared to brands that do not excel in this area.
• Around 4 in 5 marketers see a positive ROI when they use personalization in their campaigns.
• 3 out of 4 business leaders believe that personalization is critical to success

Nearly 69% of business leaders are increasing their investment in personalization despite challenging economic headwinds. Why is that? Because marketing automation strategies can benefit businesses in numerous ways like:

• Automating repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up email campaigns, updating customer email list information, and managing inventory saves time
• Analyzing customer data to create personalized digital marketing campaigns based on browsing history, purchase history, and preferences
• Sending timely and relevant communications, such as order confirmation notifications, shipping updates, and post-purchase follow-ups
• Tracking campaign performance, customer behavior, and ROI more effectively, enabling informed decision-making and continuous optimization
• Cross-selling and upselling, based on customer behavior
• Helping streamline workflow processes and marketing tasks, and ensuring consistency across different departments

Below we explore some of the most popular — and indeed, profitable — types of ecommerce marketing automation strategies:

1. Welcome emails
Automated welcome emails provide new customers with relevant information, such as confirming a newsletter subscription. In addition, these automated emails (enjoying a high open rate, with more than 8 out of 10 people opening them) make a positive, personal connection — and ideally spark a long-term relationship.

2. New customer onboarding
Only 29% of B2B customers feel fully engaged with their new providers during the onboarding process. This is an area where ecommerce marketing automation can make significant, rapid improvements, and set the foundation for a loyal, long-term customer relationship.

3. Social proof
Marketing automation can be used to help brands reach out and ask customers to share their feedback. Approximately 97% of customers check out reviews before they make a purchase and 49% of customers trust online recommendations as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.

4. User generated content
Another highly effective way for ecommerce brands to use ecommerce marketing automation tools is to tap into the power of user-generated content (UGC). This is material — such as videos, landing pages, or short articles that have a practical and educational “how to” flair to them — that is voluntarily created by enthusiastic customers. USG has been found to be 6.6x times more influential than branded content.

5. Cross-selling and upselling
Ecommerce brands can significantly help sales teams boost their sales by using email marketing campaigns to promote cross-selling (complementary products or services) and up-selling (similar but more expensive products or services).

6. Transaction-related messages and updates
Marketing automation can help ecommerce brands provide customers with relevant and updated updates about their purchase, such as order status or shipping information. There are two key reasons why these communications are so important:

• They keep customers from guessing about their purchase. This is crucial, because in the absence of facts, plenty of them will assume something bad due to an unfortunate condition known negativity bias. Basically, as humans we are hardwired to recall and think about painful experiences more often and more deeply than positive ones.
• They proactively neutralize the seeds of buyer’s remorse by helping their customer base feel good and confident about their purchase by, for example, highlighting glowing testimonials or positive ratings. About 80% of customers say they have experienced buyer’s remorse at least once, even after performing careful research and due diligence.

7. Topical and subject-matter specific content
Marketing automation can help ecommerce brands identify the best-performing content (from subject line to call-to-action) and deliver that content to different customer segments to enhance engagement — and ultimately, elevate conversion rates. And speaking of customer segments, brands can also use automation to automatically sort and segment customers based on various factors that include demographic, firmographic (for B2B engagements), psychographic, behavioral, and geographic.

8. Reducing cart abandonment
For many ecommerce brands, the scariest phrase in the vocabulary is not “recession,” “competition,” or “inflation” — it is “cart abandonment”. Abandoned cart email rates hover around 70%, but they can be significantly higher in sectors like travel, fashion, and automotive.

The good news is that marketing automation can significantly reduce cart abandonment. Here are some simple examples:

• After a potential customer adds an item to their shopping cart, they are instantly presented with a pop-up highlighting positive reviews or ratings.
• A customer whose email address is known leaves an item in their cart. They are sent an email with a reminder for checkout, along with an incentive to complete their purchase.
• A customer whose email is unknown leaves an item in their cart. They return to the site and are immediately presented with a shortcut to their cart.

9. Customer win-back
Marketing automation is an effective way to try and re-engage former customers by introducing them to new products or services, offering incentives, highlighting testimonials, and so on. This type of email marketing automation can be quite lucrative: a research study found that in 47% of cases, customers who were re-acquired through effective win-back campaigns spent significantly more (as measured by customer lifetime value) after returning.

10. Social media
Ecommerce brands can integrate social media post management and content scheduling tools to drive engagement, increase visibility for campaigns and promotions, and ultimately boost sales. A recent survey found that 73% of social media users now prefer to shop for products and services through this channel.

11. Chatbots
By integrating chatbots into customer interactions, businesses can streamline communication processes, enhance customer engagement, and deliver personalized experiences at scale. These AI-powered assistants are available 24/7, providing instant responses to queries, guiding users through the sales funnel, and even offering tailored product recommendations.

No discussion of ecommerce marketing automation would be complete without a look at what, for many, is the most innovative and exciting development in recent years: generative AI.

Generative AI refers to models and algorithms that create new outputs — such as photos, text, 3D renderings, and code — from the massive amount of data that they are trained on. For ecommerce brands, generative AI has the power to deliver hyper-personalization, innovation, and intelligence across multiple business areas, including:

• Customer engagement by automating content and asset creation (including UGC as discussed earlier) for various marketing campaigns across multiple marketing channels and touchpoints.
• Marketing and store operations by elevating customer experience through more in-depth analysis of customer feedback (including complaints) via automated summaries.
• Workforce management by enhancing employee experience through automated report generation and workforce scheduling for store managers.
• Back-office management by improving response time and accuracy for internal communications, IT and HR helpdesk tickets, and procurement (e.g., intelligent inventory forecasting).
• Innovation by discovering new and profitable ways to apply automation technologies and tools to create product descriptions and email marketing content, retargeting messaging, onboard new employees, and the exciting list goes on.

Leading ecommerce brands are using marketing automation to deliver personalized experiences across the entire customer journey, while they increase brand equity, competitive advantage, and sales.

No, marketing automation is not a magic wand. But ask any seasoned marketers who does not wish to recall what their day-to-day experience was like before marketing automation, and they will assure you that it is the next best thing!

Looking for a marketing automation platform that will cover your ecommerce needs? Request a custom demo today!