Automation is nothing but automating your repetitive marketing tasks with tools to save your time and effort while boosting the efficiency. Marketing automation makes it possible for you to manage your marketing campaigns without keeping you from dealing with other critical duties.
When you’re wearing the hats of administrator, salesperson, marketer- and the list goes on and on, this is an invaluable resource. Marketing automation creates a highly efficient, time-saving environment for the creation, administration, and automation of essential marketing functions and conversations, across various marketing channels.
If you want to learn what is marketing strategy and gain enough information to start automating your marketing processes, you need to read the “Mastering Ecommerce Marketing Automation” article.
Marketers say that the biggest benefits of Automation are Saving time (74%), Increased customer engagement (68%), More timely communications (58%) and Increased opportunities including up-selling (58%) – Adestra Marketer vs Machine (2015).
Escape the mundane & be creative:
Be more creative while doing less repetitive work. How much time do you spend manually posting your products one by one on Social media or sending a thank you email every time someone makes a purchase on your store? By handing over these repetitive tasks to the software you can focus on what actually matters, Innovation and creation.
Tap into new marketing channels:
When a software can take care of your marketing tasks for a channel for a fraction of an employee’s cost, you can actually venture into any marketing channels you wish to explore without investing a lot of time and money.
Take data-driven decision:
For any effective digital marketing campaign, it’s very important to measure what’s working and what’s not. In many cases, the reason for failure is not that the campaigns lack creativity, but because of their failure to monitor the success.
A smart software doesn’t only accomplish the job efficiently but also helps you measure the impact. With the right data, you can easily optimize your campaigns and ultimately optimize your overall marketing strategy.
Experiment Marketing automation in order to experiment success:
With the capability to measurement comes the opportunity to experiment. Isn’t it great to know that the open rate of an email with emojis in the subject line is much better than the one without emojis? When you have the data to validate your idea, you will be more confident to experiment.
Be consistent with your brand’s image:
Are you sending emails to your loyal customers regularly? Are you posting on your social media with the same frequency each day? Do you know what’s the major difference between a successful marketing strategy from a failed one? It’s majorly consistency alongside some other factors. Automation makes sure that you be consistent in your presence and reaches in the market.
Grow your business:
It’s easy to handle your marketing efforts initially but when you grow, you have more sales on your store, more customers in your database and a lot more things to manage. It’s impossible to manage these numerous tasks without automation.
Tools to for Marketing Automation
Keeping these perks in mind if you are now ready to automate your marketing campaigns, here are some tools which will help you out.
Klaviyo (Email marketing and Marketing Automation)
Klaviyo is a powerful email marketing tool which unlocks the power of your customer data. It allows you to communicate based on data-driven events rather than guesswork and assumptions.
Some interesting features of Klaviyo:
- It integrates with your e-commerce platform, payment channel or your CRM software to collect data and use it for data-driven campaigns ;
- With Klaviyo you get total control of email designs with prebuilt templates and the drag and drop editor ;
- As its specially built for e-commerce, it has built-in workflows based on your customer’s behaviour from which you can easily select one to start your email campaigns ;
- Klaviyo’s advanced behaviour tracking enables you to target people more intelligently ;
- Not only email, but you can also even create customized campaigns on Facebook to target your customers.
Store Integration:
Klaviyo has separate app/plugin for pretty much all major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Bigcommerce, Volusion, 3dCart, and more. It also has API for custom integration.
Another notable tool with similar features is Getresponse. With options to integrate with major e-commerce platforms, it’s a quite powerful tool not only for email marketing but more than that.
Around.io (Social Media Marketing and Marketing Automation)
According to a survey report published on Socialmediatoday, 43 per cent of small business owners spend about six hours per week on social media (almost the equivalent of a full workday) to promote their business. How much time do you spend?
With Around.io you can manage the social media marketing for your store in a fraction of the time you spend doing it manually.
How Around.io helps you to automate social media promotions
- It connects with your store and your social accounts to fetch your product details inside your dashboard from where you can easily share or schedule on multiple social media platforms;
- Schedule a day/week full of social media posts automatically from your product listings with the Day/Week Planner ;
- Create a collage with product photos, upload images, or create posts to save and share later ;
- Find popular content, GIFs, or RSS feeds right inside your dashboard to share with your friends and followers for better engagement.
Store Integration:
Around.io works with Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce, eBay, Bigcartel, Ecwid, Storeenvy, Lightspeed and Zepo stores.
ReferralCandy (Referral Programs)
Several studies have proved that referral marketing is one of the best forms of marketing when it comes to sales and conversions. For effective referral marketing, you need to have a proper tracking and management system in place.
ReferralCandy gives you the flexibility to set up a variety of rewards and incentive programs for your e-commerce store.
Here are some interesting features of ReferralCandy:
- ReferralCandy makes it simple for new advocates to join your program with embedded Signup forms, custom landing pages or just sending your customers their unique referral link ;
- With Referralcandy you can create various types of incentives like a discount coupon, give-and-get offer, or some commission on purchases for your customers ;
- You can easily customize the look and feel of your local program ;
- Once you set it up, it can automatically detect, track, and pay out rewards to your Advocates and their referred friends.
Store Integration:
Referralcandy has dedicated integration for all the major platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Bigcommerce, Volusion, 3dcart, Celery, and Yahoo. Also, it can be integrated with almost any cart system with its javascript tracking code.
[irp posts=”10190″ name=”ReferralCandy Review: How to create an affiliate network for your ecommerce”]
Beeketing Apps (Conversion and sale booster)
Getting traffic to your store is a challenge but converting the traffic into sales is the biggest pain of an e-commerce seller. Here are a few apps from Beeketing that help you boost your sales and revenue. These apps are:
Personalized Recommendation:
Based on each customer’s behaviors, this app will suggest the most suitable products that your customers are more likely to purchase. All recommendations are different to each unique visitor. Working like Amazon’s shopping experience it boosts average order value.
Boost Sales:
Do you know that 35% of Amazon’s total revenue comes directly from Upsell and cross-sell offers? You can also create similar Up-sell and cross-sell offers with this app.
This Beeketing app helps you to
- Increase sales from every order by Up-sell & Cross-sell popups for your online store ;
- Automated smart recommendation to suggest products customers most likely want to buy ;
- Motivate customers to buy more than planned to get an extra discount with Sales Motivator’s smart coupon pop-ups.
Kudobuzz (Review management)
There are various ways Kudobuzz helps you collect reviews from your customers. You can adopt any of these approaches to get reviews:
- Sending out review requests via emails after a customer makes a purchase ;
- Collecting posts and reviews from Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, Google+ ;
- Review request links that sellers can broadcast to collect reviews.
Once all this User Generated Content (UGC) is collected, Kudobuzz allows the businesses to select which content to display on their sites, share on social media, or use in promotional campaigns.
Store Integration:
Kudobuzz has ready integrations for e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce, Storeenvy, Tictail, Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace but it can also be integrated with any other platforms.
Few other tools worth a try:
Marketing automation comes in many forms, and some tools focus on certain aspects of marketing automation to give you more precision. Here are 5 more tools that can help with automating the finer details:
- Soundest – Email marketing ;
- SEMrush – SEO, PPC, Keywords and more ;
- ADSTAGE – Paid campaign automation and reporting ;
- Kevy – Marketing personalization ;
- Sweet Tooth – Loyalty program for e-commerce ;
Hopefully, you are already using some kind of automation for your store’s marketing. Please let me know if you have found any automation tool which has been really useful to you that isn’t mentioned.
Did we miss your favourite tool? Tell us below or tweet us!