Why marketing automation rocks?
It’s a buildup to the actual thing, but it’s crucial as to why this is worth your and your company’s time.
- It’s a one time effort. Well mostly 🙂
- Low maintenance. Until you decide to change your logo and colour theme. Even once a month number checking and tweaking will do. No harm in doing more but one day a month is more than enough for these.
- Highest ROI activity.
- Low Running Cost (If you are paying by per email costs)
- Low intrusions for the customers. Leading to lowest unsubscriptions from the customers. The most customer expects a touch of personalisation. They feel special and cared for.
What is marketing automation?
By simply adding one and one together, it’s making your marketing automate.
But you can automate almost anything which humans are doing? So what’s the fuss?
It’s setting up an automatic marketing structure around the stages of your customer journey.
Marketing for every moving part of the customer.
Features of marketing automation –
Given the confusion in the industry around every buzzword. It’s not very much clearly defined.
But you can tell by looking at it by its features. But given the freedom, it’s very much freely used.
- Personalised for every customer.Highly segmented communication.
- Real-time marketing. Timing is very, very critical in this marketing automation.Everything is Action ↔ Reaction in marketing automation
- A single view of the customer. So marketing is more around the customer journey than marketing campaigns planned by the marketing team. It’s a more nuanced approach to marketing.
How to use this series –
- This is tool agnostic. Another day another SAAS company. So I might not be able to do justice with tools available on the market. W
- This is platform agnostic. Whether you are on Magento or Shopify or OpenCart or custom platform, these are strategies, and you can use them in whatever sense and format as you please.
- You don’t have to do all of this. Try some, see numbers improvement. Remove those not working. Add some more. Not overdo it in the start. Build on it. I mean start with the first ten and then ten and then 10.
Customer Engagement Tools Used in this series –
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Web Push / App Push
- Banner Customisation
- Sticky Banners
- Referral Program
- Loyalty Program
12 Automation Workflows For Ecommerce
1. Capture Emails On The Website
Goal – To Establish Communication
To establish a mode of communication for anything to build on. In simple words, capture email/phone number /. Web push access / create an account or anything which will help you to do something else in the future.
You don’t have anything till you have this. You need to establish a communication channel for any further communication to happen.
Flow # 1
Hello Bar
Flow #2
2. Expedite Discovery Series
Goal
There are some hacks that can be used to expedite the discovery of the main objective of the customer.
Why make them click five times before giving them a lead form?
Why show signup form for your audience when you know they have come from Facebook and will happily do the “Connect with Facebook” instead of “Connect with Google.”
3. Welcome Series
Goal – To welcome the user into the ecosystem. Onboarding is very important for the customer.
4. Attract Repeat Visit
Goal: To attract the second visit from the customer. Sending them relevant information.
5. Personalise Repeat visit
Goal: To personalize the repeat visit and expedite the process.
6. Cart / Save For Later Abandonment
Goal: To improve the cart abandonment rates.
7. Upsell (Increase Cart Size)
Goal: To Increase cart Average order value.
8. Checkout Abandonment
Goal: To improve checkout abandonment rates.
9. Successful Order Experience Series
Goal: To give a good purchase experience.
10. Next Order Series
Goal: Get second order from the customer.
11. Loyalty Program / VIP Users
Goal: Long term association
12. Referral Series
Goal: Get word of mouth from a happy customer.