Embracing marketing automation is the key to achieving growth for your eCommerce business. With customer expectations leaning increasingly into  personalisation and convenience, and businesses looking for ways to streamline customer communications and striving for operational excellence, automation can improve the shopping experience for customers and companies alike. 

In this article, we will explore what marketing automation means for eCommerce businesses, and how best to harness the power of automation to grow your customer conversions. 

What is marketing automation for eCommerce?

Automation in marketing means utilising software to handle repetitive, often time-consuming tasks that traditionally would have to be done manually. 

In eCommerce marketing,  tasks that can benefit from automation can include customer-centered activities, such as email campaigns or product recommendations, or operational tasks, like cross-channel integration and data analysis. 

E-Commerce marketing automation unlocks lots of opportunities for online businesses to improve their communications with customers as well as streamline processes informed by real-time data to make informed decisions and continuously grow. 

How marketing automation can help eCommerce brands achieve growth

In an increasingly challenging market, automation could be the key to unlocking growth and future-proofing your online business. 

Personalised product recommendations 

Personalisation is a must have for growth in eCommerce, with benefits to the customer and your business. 

For customers, it is a time-saving tool leading to more efficiency when shopping online. Personalisation is welcomed by savvy shoppers, with almost one in two (48%) believing that data-informed technology and audience segmentation will help them to reduce the time it takes to search for products, instead preferring companies to recommend products. 

For companies, it can improve your AOV (average order value) by recommending products that customers can add to their order, or that will compliment previous orders. 

The beauty of many automation and AI-powered tools is that it continuously learns, meaning your customer product recommendations will only improve and become even more accurate. 

Smarter segmentation 

Another area that can benefit from automation is in email communications and campaigns. 

Automation can help you strategically segment audiences, enabling you to create tailored customer communications and journeys based on shopping behaviours, such as their spend, their frequency or their other interactions and engagements with your brand. 

Triggered campaigns, such as ‘abandoned cart’ can also benefit from segmentation to further improve conversion rates. Automation can help to create targeting abandoned cart emails based on customer behaviour or progression through the purchase path. 

Integrated, omnichannel customer experiences

From an operational perspective, automation can help you to create seamless integrations between all of your platforms and streamline your customer engagements. 

Automation enables integration between all of  your e-commerce platforms and channels, from customer relationship management (CRM) to social media and analytics. This can help  you create consistent customer experiences across various touchpoints and can aid the creation of cross-channel campaigns.

This reduces the need for manual integration, freeing up your team to think more strategically and make data-driven decisions. 

Schedule regular reporting and improve data visualisation 

Data is central to creating results-driven eCommerce strategies.

Automation gives you the ability to automatically schedule reports at set intervals with varying degrees of detail. From monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly reporting, you can access accurate, real-time customer and sales data.

This level of reporting can help businesses to remain agile in an ever-changing industry, and adapt their strategies quickly. 

Automation can also enhance data visualisation and analysis, helping you to communicate results and reports in an engaging and accessible way to key stakeholders, increasing senior leadership confidence in your strategy and further proving your results. 

Final thoughts 

When it comes to the future of eCommerce marketing, automation can improve your efficiency and positively impact your customers experience when shopping with your brand. 

From personalisation to data visualisation, using automation in your marketing strategy can improve conversion rates and lead to making data-driven decisions with growth in mind. 

Want to know more about how marketing automation can help your eCommerce business? 

We are experts in creating results-driven ecommerce Solutions to help you to scale and grow. Get in touch.