The best thing about owning an eCommerce store is how easy it makes repetitive work easier. For example, you can use a platform that automatically integrates with shipment carriers to calculate rates and ensure you’re making the best shipping decisions.
That’s just one of the many places you can automate your business, and then, once you have reliable and automated workflows in place, you can focus your attention on the tasks that grow your business, like effective marketing and advertising.
Here are some tips to help automate your online business.
Find the best areas for automation
The workflows of ecommerce businesses will differ and therefore require different automation requirements. As you decide where your focus should be for automation, it is important to consider your particular business, your products, and the customers you target.
For example, if you make the products you sell, then this is something you’re probably not going to be able to automate, so you’ll focus on other areas and then spend your time creating beautiful high-quality products. On the other hand, if you’re a dropshipper or white labeler, you can automate nearly everything and then just think about how to scale up your advertising and marketing.
It is also important to consider your needs and preferences. If you’re good at one area of your business, but there’s something else you don’t enjoy or don’t excel at, automate those tasks you find burdensome first and foremost.
These are some of the best places to automate:
- Fulfillment—this is a big one, and along with automating this area of your business, you might do the same to manage your inventory levels. For instance, your company could be set up to make out-of-stock products unpublished automatically. On the other end of that, you might automatically re-add out-of-stock products to your store when they’re available again.
- You can automatically tag high-value customers with customer loyalty automation. You can then automatically know when you should send personalized thanks messages, or invoke discounts or other shipping rules when the customer has been appropriately tagged.
- An order with high risk can cause problems for your business. However, automation allows you to flag the order immediately.
- Automate sales and promotions as well as price changes based on time frames you have set.
- You can use email marketing software to create automatic messages that are sent based upon the triggers set.
We will now look at some more precise tasks that can be automated.
Emails to abandoned cart
Customers often add products to their shopping carts but don’t end up purchasing them. Estimates show that nearly 75% of all carts are abandoned online, so it’s a big challenge for online retailers.
It is possible to automate reaching customers who abandon carts. Shopify is one of many online platforms that offer tools to automatically send out cart recovery emails.
If your eCommerce platform doesn’t offer a solution to automate abandoned cart emails, there are other options you can integrate with your store. You have the option to use A/B testing with a lot of these solutions, so you’re figuring out what works in your messaging and what doesn’t.
Loyalty programs
Customers who are loyal to you will be a huge asset for your company. You want customers to keep returning because it’s less expensive than getting a new customer. Relationships take time to build, and that’s where automation comes into play.
It is possible to set up your loyalty programme, which will track and reward customers for buying from you.
Fulfillment and Shipping
The more you can automate shipping and fulfillment, the better it’s going to be for you as you run your business, but also, the better it’ll be for customers. You have many options to automate these functions.
Shipping and fulfillment platforms allow you to create labels anywhere you want, print multiple items at once, see shipping costs, and even track your shipment status.
Marketing
You will likely want to focus more on marketing if you already have your workflows automated. However, there are still aspects you can automate that may be important for your business.
Marketing automation is possible at any stage of the marketing cycle. It can be used to plan and implement, manage your marketing tasks, or even automate them. This can help you improve your ROI, particularly if they are tedious.
Automating marketing tasks can allow you to find new revenue streams as well as cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
There are several ways that you can automate certain marketing tasks, including:
- As a method of increasing customer engagement, dynamic content is possible. You can use dynamic content references to personalize the content you provide for visitors. Dynamic content can refer to images or content that adapts to user behavior, data and other characteristics. This will allow you to reduce bounce and increase conversions, as well as create personalized experiences.
- Marketing automation can include abandoned cart emails. We have already discussed this. So customers can know where to go next, they will be able to send them a number of abandoned cart email.
- If you haven’t had a customer make a purchase from you in a while, you can set up targeted email campaigns to win back their business. Email campaigns can be automated based upon certain criteria. For example, if a customer has not been on your website for a specified period of time.
- You can automate reaching out to old leads who once showed an interest in your products but have since lost touch. You might offer discounts that have a fixed expiration date.
Customer service, which is a prime area for automation is a strong one. Chatbots can be a great place to start is it. Chatbots allow you to interact with customers at any time and provide a personalized experience. A chatbot can communicate with customers more often, resulting in more personalized delivery.
Entrepreneurship Life published the article Tips for Automating Your eCommerce Businesses.
