How to automate your E-commerce Store
Time is your most valuable resource when it comes to running a business, yet it is limited, and many things are vying for your attention. While maintaining an eye on marketing initiatives, user feedback, and customer support, you must ensure that the appropriate products are featured on your website, that orders and payments are processed 24/7, and that packages are efficiently processed and dispatched. Your e-commerce operations will also get more demanding as you grow.
How then can you balance maintaining things on schedule with finding time for the job that attracts more clients through automated e-commerce?
The importance of automation in technology is crucial, so it’s not surprising that eCommerce business solutions are increasingly incorporating it. It’s how you, as a store owner, put time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot.
In this article, we’ll define eCommerce automation and then demonstrate 14 techniques to automate your online business.
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Ecommerce automation – what is it?
It entails employing software to create automated workflows out of manual tasks. These routines can start new support requests at your help desk or send out internal or external emails, notifications, or other actions in other apps. You can set several conditions that must all be met for the workflow to function so that everything runs smoothly.
Ecommerce automation can save you time, but it doesn’t mean you have to fire your staff or yourself. Instead, it gives your team more time for crucial customer interactions, creative thinking, and strategic planning.
Here are some of the most effective ways to use marketing automation for eCommerce to get you started, and some features in eCommerce websites that can help you, whether you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform.
Automating Customer Experience & Management in E-commerce Businesses
Monitor and honor your most loyal clients
Do you offer rewards to your top clients? All businesses, especially e-commerce, benefit from maintaining their current customers.
It turns out that by only raising your retention rates by 5 percent, you may boost your earnings by anywhere between 25 and 95 percent.
You might automatically add a gift or free delivery to orders over $100 to recognize repeat business from customers. Customers can be divided up based on their lifetime spending using a solution like Active Campaign, and you can send them automatic emails with incentives inside.
Add a Mailchimp list with your customers on it
Native Mailchimp integrations are available for all of the leading e-commerce platforms, including WooCommerce and Shopify. Therefore, be careful to sync your accounts if you use the well-known email marketing platform to distribute your newsletters and email marketing workflows.
With the use of a connection with Mailchimp, you can automatically add the email addresses of customers who express interest in your emails to a particular Mailchimp list, allowing you to keep them informed about your most recent offerings.
Request feedback following a purchase
Every online retailer is aware of the influence that reviews and sincere comments have. Your company could be made or broken by it. Set up automatic email workflows to send follow-up emails for a specific period after a transaction is completed to promote reviews. Share a link to a place where they may publish their review and ask for their frank input.
Speak to unfavorable reviews
Make sure to respond to reviews that are unpleasant 1-star ratings. To make it simpler to get in touch fast and make amends—or at the very least, listen and understand what happened—you may set up an automated system to create a support ticket in your helpdesk software.
Group and tag clients according to their purchasing habits
You may better understand your clients and keep track of any particular needs they might have by segmenting your market. With a CRM, you may categorize or segment based on demographics (such as gender or geography), lifetime order value, milestones, the number of orders, or any subscriptions or memberships, for instance.
Automate low-stock item inventory management
A product running out might result in lost sales and irate customers. Automate your inventory management so that you are aware of when a product is running low on supply to prevent this.
You can use Woocommerce to start low-stock notifications and out-of-stock notifications based on thresholds you establish. In this manner, you can quickly determine which items in your inventory need to be replenished.
Send emails to customers who abandoned their carts
A whopping 75% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Reminders for abandoned carts can help you entice clients to return to your website, and thanks to automation, you don’t have to do anything.
Sending abandoned cart emails is simple when your e-commerce software is integrated with a mailing service. You might investigate further native connectors between your transactional email service providers and your e-commerce platform.
For passive income, consider drop shipping
Did you know that some online stores use automation for order fulfillment and delivery? With dropshipping, which allows you to select products, add them to your online store, and send them directly to your consumers without keeping any inventory or taking any risks, it is conceivable.
One of the top dropshipping solutions is Oberlo, which Shopify purchased in 2017. As anticipated, it seamlessly interacts with Shopify, allowing you to add drop shipped products to an already-existing Shopify store or start a new one specifically for your drop shipped products.
Finding goods that adhere to the branding and quality criteria of your shop is the biggest problem with dropshipping.
Use email marketing to nurture leads into paying customers
Not everyone immediately becomes a customer. People will go through the traditional customer journey with your business, taking their time during the phases of consideration and investigation before agreeing to give you any money.
However, you can nurture this process along with marketing content if someone has provided you with their email address and permitted you to contact them. Just make sure that whatever you present them is of the highest caliber and worthwhile including offers for gifts or discount coupons.
Automatically schedule posts to social media
There are many methods available to speed up procedures if social media consumes too much of your time.
To automatically add products to your Facebook and Twitter sites each day, use the Shopify app Post Studio Auto Posting.
Select a strong help desk application
Make sure your customer service is covered as you grow your e-commerce firm. One of the greatest ways to do this is to implement help desk software.
You’re in the greatest position to concentrate your customer assistance in one location and receive a clear view of tickets from all channels with a help desk platform. These solutions also allow you a wide range of automated customer experience improvement alternatives, like chatbots and satisfaction surveys.