Marketing Automation Tools for ECommerce

When it comes to marketing, ecommerce businesses face unique challenges. You have to move quickly, differentiate your brand, offer a seamless customer experience and (most importantly) incentivize purchases. Ecom marketing is a beast that requires a deft touch, and marketing automation can help make sure you’re making the best impression of your brand.

Four Tactics You Need to Know

We’ve rounded up four ecommerce marketing automation tactics that are sure to make a great impression on your prospects, new customers and loyal repeats alike.

1. Welcome Email Flows

Your newest email subscribers and most recent purchases are the best opportunity to make a good impression for your brand. When a new user visits your site, consider offering a promo code for their first purchase if they opt-in for emails. Once they do, you can add them to a sequence of welcome emails that includes brand information, best-selling products, current promotions and personalized discounts.

The same welcome email philosophy applies to your newest customers. Once they receive their receipt, you can continue to send them status updates about their order, complementary products and returning customer discounts that might trigger another purchase.

2. Abandoned Shopping Cart Notifications

If a user adds items to their cart then navigates away from your website without making a purchase, you need to take action to recover that potential sale. With marketing automation, you can send opted-in users a direct email message with a reminder that they’ve abandoned their cart. You may want to include a coupon code with this message, as many abandoned carts occur based on cost.

If your users haven’t opted-in to emails, they still become eligible for remarketing campaigns on paid search, display ads and social media. Marketing automation ecommerce tactics shouldn’t shy away from these highly valuable remarketing tactics. This includes reminding a user that they took the time to browse your site and collect a cart, which will help keep your brand top-of-mind.

3. Automate Segmentation Based on Purchases

Your ecommerce marketing automation efforts can and should be powered by your user data and your product features. By segmenting your list of existing customers based on purchase frequency and products purchased, you can serve them specific content tailored to their history, including complementary products and discount codes to repurchase their favorites.

In addition to continuing to nurture your existing customers, you can use these audience segments to create lookalike profiles to identify potential new customers. You can then run marketing automation ecommerce campaigns specifically around the products that are likely to be most interesting to people who are similar to your existing customers.

4. Offer Loyalty Rewards and Referral Codes

Your most loyal customers are the best marketing tool in your arsenal. In order to incentivize brand loyalty and expand your user base, be sure to employ a loyalty program as part of your ecom marketing. Many ecommerce automation tools have capabilities for loyalty programs based on CRM data and purchase history.

In addition to incentivizing repeat purchases, turn your loyal customers into brand advocates by offering a referral bonus through individual, dynamic codes. In most scenarios when this code is used, a specific discount will be given to the new customer while the referring customer receives a store credit or percentage discount on a future order.

Marketing Automation Tools for eCommerce

While there are a variety of ecommerce automation tools available, it’s absolutely critical to have a centralized marketing platform to fuel your efforts. When you are looking at different ecommerce marketing automation tools and trying to decide on the best fit for your business, be sure to look for a solution that integrates easily with your primary sales platform for easy data transfer between marketing and purchasing activities.

By effectively sharing this data across multiple functions in your organization, you can continue to grow your business through ecommerce marketing automation that offers a great experience and keeps customers coming back for more.

SharpSpring, Inc. is a full marketing automation company that can help your business use marketing automation tools for ecommerce to serve your customers better. For more information or to request a demo, visit our website today.

Ready to see marketing automation in action?

Schedule a personalized, live SharpSpring demo today.

Schedule My Demo