February 21, 2020

7 Ecommerce Automation Hacks for Entrepreneurs & Marketers

Automation is nothing simply but a growth hack. While growth hacks might seem esoteric—a sacred term taken out from the Holy Book of Marketers—in reality, they are quite simple. Read on to find out how these ecommerce automation hacks will help you bid goodbye to the mundane tasks of ecommerce marketing and help you focus on better marketing.

It’s a challenge to find the right recipe to cook up an amazing marketing plan for an ecommerce store: In the initial stages, you shed sweat, tears, and blood to make it all work. While in this whirlpool, growth hacks are something that comes to the rescue. They are something that excites everyone, especially those on a bootstrapped budget, because they’re quick, not only in terms of implementation but also in terms of results. Ecommerce automation hacks are easy, fast and doable and are about outrunning the expected growth an ecommerce business can have.

Automation as a Growth Hack

Automation is the new buzz word. And why shouldn’t it be? The importance of automation in marketing is undeniable. 91% of successful marketers agree that automation is vital to the overall success of marketing across all channels. It has turned out to be the light at the end of the tunnel as 63% of businesses that outgrow their competitors use marketing automation. By 2019, the global marketing automation market will reach $5.5 billion.

Benefits of Ecommerce Automation:

  • Tackles Human Error
  • Saves Time & Effort
  • Increases Productivity

Marketers know their ultimate job is to increase revenue. Marketing automation can help by generating more and higher quality users, which will eventually turn into new customers. –Glenister Report

Marketing automation helps in managing multiple campaigns at the same time with ease. It increases the chances of engaging with website visitors, which has become quite a challenge in itself. Automation grants time to ecommerce merchants to strategize and focus more on customer interactions.

If there’s one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. –Jeff Bezos, Founder, and CEO, Amazon.com

Automation helps you focus on more impactful things such as customer experience. 77% of CMOs at top-performing companies say that they implement marketing automation to grow revenue. It has also observed that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.

Ecommerce Automation Hacks Ecommerce Marketers Should Use

Ecommerce marketers can’t afford to lose out on time doing extensive legwork. It is a very competitive industry out there and to rise above the competition, you need to concentrate on the important parts of running a business and let automation tools take over the grunt work. Here are 7 ecommerce automation hacks you can to implement right away to hack your growth.

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #1: Give Customers a Royal Welcome

Giving a warm welcome to customers is important to make them feel appreciated and wanted. It is the first step to engaging with your visitors, so you can’t lose out on this opportunity. But manually welcoming users every time they sign up can be a tedious task. You might be sending the exact same thing to every user, wouldn’t it be just great if you could automate it?

Only 57% of ecommerce stores greet new customers with a welcome note. This is an important number could be an indication of the manual labor involved. Everything is time-sensitive and it becomes crucial to engage visitors within 5–15 seconds of signup. The engagement rates on automated welcome emails are 400% higher than on all other emails. Web push notifications as an automation tool are helping users send welcome notifications in real-time to users who sign up. 50% of marketers saw higher open rates on push notifications versus email.

Welcoming users is the first step to creating a good impression. Check out these welcome email templates and 5 web push notification templates that you can make use of for your ecommerce store. What if you could take advantage of this and start interacting with your visitors more efficiently? Here is where drip campaigns come in. A series of messages sent with coupons, special offers and deals included can prove to be beneficial for you.

Drip Campaigns

Ecommerce merchants can make use of email, SMS and web push notifications to send out automated welcome campaigns. The whole idea of drip campaigns is to be in consistent touch with visitors and encourage them to make a purchase throughout the process. Here is a sample welcome drip campaign schedule you can try out:

  • Day 1: Once a new user signs up, firstly show your gratitude and reward them with exciting coupons.
  • Day 7: Remind them about the discount coupon and delight them with an exciting offer. Encourage them to revisit your website and make a transaction.
  • Day 14: Show them your love. Share expert tips, style guides and encourage them to experiment.
  • Day 21: Send them links to your social contests and send special deals.
  • Day 28: Show them the products you have available and encourage them to make a purchase.

Get started with web push notification as an automation tool with the push notification drip campaign template here. See how you can sequence your marketing with these email marketing templates and check out these 10 SMS templates that you can use for your business.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #2: Create FOMO via Social Media

Limited and seasonal-based selling attracts users, especially if something is tagged as being limited edition. This encourages visitors to make an instant purchase if they like a product because they know it won’t last long.

To create the “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) feeling within your store visitors, show them ads or popups of what everyone else is grooving over, or your bestselling products that other customers are loving. This will make your visitors want to check out what it is that everyone else is buying which, ultimately, might cause them to make a purchase as well.

Check out these 4 easy tactics by AdEspresso to induce FOMO in your social media campaigns.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #3: Automate Referrals

Let your customers do the selling. Entice them with offers not only for them but also for the one that is being referred. This makes it easier for the users to refer others as they too can avail of a benefit. Wharton School of Business found that a referred customer has a 16% higher lifetime value.

Referrals can be sent out encouraging a purchase, with users getting a discount. They can be prompted to refer after they complete a transaction, as well. By then, they would genuinely want to tell their friends and family about your website. Check out this definitive guide for referral marketing and examples of referral programs you can try out.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #4: Retarget Abandoned Carts

Ecommerce stores experience around a 70% shopping cart abandonment rate! Such a high abandonment rate shows that a large number of customers add products to their cart and do not proceed to purchase. But how can you reach out to ALL of them? It is difficult to manually reach out to all of them and encourage them to transact. Well, that’s why we have automation.

You need to target users according to the actions performed on your website and retarget them effectively. You can send out a live trigger to grab them just before they are about to leave but sometimes it just so happens that they are not sure about the product, or maybe it is the end of the month and they don’t have enough cash to splurge on it. In these scenarios, you can get in touch with them in a couple of days and remind them that they still have an item in their cart. You could send an email, SMS or push out a notification to retarget users.

For this, you need to segment your users intelligently and reach out to only those users who have added to cart but not transacted with a personalized message. Show them the product they have abandoned and reach out to them within a few hours of them abandoning the cart.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #5: Verify UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is a fairly new concept but is doing wonders for ecommerce stores. It boosts authenticity, builds trust among other users and amplifies social proof. 70% of users consider peer recommendations and reviews above professional content. It gives other users assurance that the products are real and increases your credibility as a brand.

You can ask users to write reviews for you, showcase customer photographs or videos of them with the product or share customer stories. You can leverage social media campaigns and display ads with UGC to lure other visitors to your website.

All that being said, you need to verify the content that you receive. Some people might spam you and just ruin things for your brand. You also need to be sharp and vigilant to make sure unjust reviews do not end up being published. After a point, you might also be flooded with submissions so you need a way to curate and filter out the real reviews. An automation tool can comb out your reviews, photos, and videos, and prompt them on social media to the right audience. Check out this UGC playbook to avoid mistakes marketers usually make when it comes to user-generated content.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #6: Make Use of Popups

Popups are one effective way to engage your users. Time-based popups are the best way to leverage the benefits of a popup. Popups that appear at the right moment can nudge visitors to make a purchase by giving out exciting offers, sending them a thank you note, asking for feedback or even making them stay on your website when they are about to leave.

These are the different types of popups you can use on your website:

  • Exit Intent Popups: 5 exit popup hacks you need to try to increase sales.
  • Sale Popups: Tell customers about current offers or deals going on in your store.
  • Thank You Popups: Thank customers after they’ve signed up to your email list, make a purchase or referred a friend with a special thank you popup.
  • Customer Purchase Follow Up Popups: After a customer has made a purchase, show them a popup to make a review or rate their experience on your website.
  • Email Capture Popups: Popups work very well for collecting customer emails, which you can then use to build an email list to help you retain customers and contact them at a later date with news, offers or announcements.

Automation Tools

Ecommerce Automation Hacks #7: Enhance Customer Communication with Chatbots

It is a common misconception that live chat is used only for answering queries and helping out users post-purchase. It more than just that. Live chat interacts with customers and encourages them to make a purchase.

But, you can’t be online all the time to manage your live chat widget, can you? Plus, how will you respond to all the customers using your live chat?

Chatbots are online 24/7 talking to customers, prompting them to convert and clearing their doubts. With artificial intelligence, they can even provide store visitors with a personalized experience as they can remember previous conversations and show users recommended items according to their previous visit. They can help visitors find products, cross-sell and upsell products, provide product comparisons and they can even talk to multiple users at the same time! Amazon and other businesses use chatbots to keep visitors engaged, check out this article to learn more about how ecommerce brands succeed with chatbots.

Automation Tools

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this roundup of 7 ecommerce automation hacks you can use to make your job easier as an ecommerce entrepreneur and to make your website experience more streamlined for your customers. Over two-thirds of top-performing small businesses utilize automation so don’t fall behind! Leverage these 7 ecommerce automation hacks and engage with your visitors like never before.

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