E-commerce And Marketing Automation
In one way or the other, marketing technology has essentially been designed to allow you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time that will prompt him or her to make a purchase. This process has been cumbersome and a case of hit and miss for many years. However, with the advent of marketing automation, grabbing the attention of a potential customer and retaining it has become a lot easier than before.
Over the past few years as the internet has become more and more indispensable in our lives, according to Statistica, in 2017, around 1.66 billion people worldwide made purchases online. In fact, in the Asia Pacific, 12.1 percent of retail sales was accounted by e-retail sales.
It is not surprising that so many e-commerce platforms have popped up in hopes to get people to avail their services and buy their products. After all, it is a great way of establishing a market presence and availing a cheaper yet more efficient distribution chain. Because it is so easy for just anyone to create an e-commerce website, there are so many of them! So how do you ensure that you stand out from the plethora of online stores available to a potential customer?
In a study commissioned by Altman Vilandrie, it was seen that ensuring a standardized process of handing off leads to the next team (say from the marketing team to the sales team), making use of automation for scoring these leads, reevaluating customer maps, and sales and marketing coordination are the four pillars that will increase conversion rates by 25%.
For all of this, and for marketing automation to bring in the best results, you need data which you can find in every action that someone takes online. Be it visiting a website, looking at a product, buying an item, clicking on an email- all of it is available to you as a marketer. This is what makes marketing automation strategy so effective. It understands your customers and their behavioural patterns thoroughly to come up with solutions that you could employ to increase your ROI by multi-folds. It is an easy way of streamlining, automating, and measuring marketing tasks and growing your revenue at a faster rate.
The same study by Altman Vilandrie showed that although 80% of the polled members used lead scoring, very few of them employed marketing automation for the same and this set them back by a lot.
Today, marketing automation is not just another industry trend and is not exclusive to e-commerce giants. We are at a point in time where it is possible for every serious marketer to invest into marketing automation and see real growth. True, it has become harder to have your voice heard in the noise that overwhelms the potential customer everyday but the only way to combat it is to relay such a message to your customer that they just can't ignore it.
Attila Kecsmar, the CEO of Antavo Loyalty software says, “The competition is bigger from year to year in the world of eCommerce and retail. And you can only keep up if you’re able to scale your business. And scaling applies to marketing communication, too. That’s only possible for companies using some level of marketing automation. Basically, it’s a natural process. Those companies that don’t have marketing automation in their strategy will struggle to survive.”
In a study published by Emarsys, it was suggested that e-commerce sites should at least focus on building audiences and datasets and take necessary steps that will help them build a more personalised sales funnel. This was in response to the 80% of polled marketing decision-makers who said that they believed that AI would play a fundamental role in boosting efficacy and efficiency.
Some practices through which marketing automation can help your e-commerce business and its growth are:
- Make a good first impression by including a welcome email workflow. This way you can immediately make contact with the customer right after they have signed up, making you reach them at the right time.
- Make your customers feel special by including a reward or loyalty program; lead-scoring workflow will let you do exactly that.
- Automate list segmentation on the basis of purchase behavior, which will not only save you a lot of time but will also help you create relevant segments with ease.
- Reach out to not only the regular customers but also the less engaged ones, which is possible with the automated workflow.
- Automatically send targeted messages and enhance authentic interactions with customers, thereby improving your relationship with them.
- Effectively segment your customers to have them convert at the right time. It will help you nurture high quality customers by providing them with personalised product recommendations.
Jonathan Midenhall, the CMO of Airbnb has rightly said that amazing things will happen to you if you listen to the consumer. Sadly, more often than not, marketers get caught up in enthusiasm and end up choosing a software that is too complicated or too basic. Remember, any software you employ must enable you and not slow you down. And that is what a good marketing automation platforms does: it enables you to comprehensively use the data at your disposal and helps you come up with better marketing campaigns that will ensure your growth.
But how do I know the right platform for my business? That's where Transfunnel comes in. We are a company that will help you assess your needs, guide you through the process, and ultimately help you choose just the right software amongst our top marketing tools - Hubspot, Marketo, SalesForce and LeadSquared.
