When you able to own a business, time becomes worthless resource — but, time is limited, and a bundle of tasks are there that are waiting for becoming noticeable for you. You are required to make sure the right products are listed on your website, that you are complying payments and orders 24/7, and that you are managing efficiently the processing and dispatching…. All while keeping top focus on marketing campaign, user reviews and customer service. When you scale up your business as ecommerce store all requirements becomes more demanding and competing.
So, how can you manage your time effectively to fulfill your tasks that can make your business smooth-running as well as brings more customers?
Here is the answer, yes, that is ecommerce automation.
In evolution of tech, automation has an important part and it is not shocked when we observe the magic of its tools in ecommerce businesses. As an ecommerce store owner, your time-saving secret is to putt your time-taking tasks on auto pilot.
We are going to explain what is E-commerce automation is, and then illustrate you what it seems by implementing these ways to automate your online store.
What is ecommerce automation?
Changing the manual tasks into automated workflows via software is called automation. These workflows can generate notifications, emails or actions by setting up multiple conditions that need to be true to ensure every task work properly.
Ecommerce automation saves yours and your team’s precious time that can be consumed for the customer interactions, big-picture strategies of marketing that matter a lot in boosting your business.
Let’s start from the best ways to utilize marketing automation for ecommerce businesses whether you are using WooCommerce, Shopify or another platform.
14 Effective Ways To Automate Ecommerce Businesses
Improvement of Customer Experience & Management Automation
- Track and offer special rewards to your loyal customers
Do you reward your most engaged customers? Retention of customer is greatly valued for all businesses, in ecommerce too. You can increase your profits from 30 to 90 percent by increasing your retention rates by just 5 to 10 percent.
If you want to reward your loyal customers, you could make a setup to add a free gift or offer of free delivery to order over RS 1000. You can also send them emails having reward’s good news.
- Sync the customers to a Mailchimp list
In all ecommerce platforms, including WooCommerce and Shopify all have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you want to get advantage from the popular email marketing tool to send your newsletters and other marketing workflows, you have to ensure to sync your accounts.
With Mailchimp integration, email addresses of interested customers can automatically sorted into a specified Mailchimp list that helps you to keep them alert with their most awaited products and offers.
- Collect feedback after a purchase
Every ecommerce business holder is well aware how positive reviews and honest feedback matter. These factors can build or smash your business. By encouraging your customers in giving powerful feedback, set up automated email workflows for sending follow-up e-mails after a specific time whenever they shp something from your online store. You can request for true feedback and share a link to them so they can post their valuable reviews.
- Reach out to negative reviews.
Unfortunately, if you get 1-star review, you can reach out them quickly to amend or at least listen or understand the situation by setting up automation in your helpdesk software.
- Tag & segment customers based on their buying behavior
Stay on top by understanding your customer’s need by segmentation. Using CRM, you can segment or tag according to number of orders, milestones, memberships etc.
Inventory Automation
- Automate inventory management for low-stock items.
Out of stock products means neglected income and irritated customers. For staying away from such situation, automate your inventory management that alarms you when a product is shorted in stock.
With Woocommerce you can get instant notifications of low stock and out of stock, then you can reorder these products from your supplies.
Order Management Automation
- Send abandoned cart emails.
Most of carts get abandoned often. Abandoned cart reminders assist you bring customers back to your ecommerce store — and with automation, you don’t have to take headache of anything.
With the help of Integration of your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an effortless technique to send abandoned cart emails. You can also make analysis of other native integrations between your ecommerce platform & transactional email providers.
- Try dropshipping and compile your income
There are some ecommerce businesses that automate order fulfillment and delivery that is dropshipping—a way to get products, add these product to your ecommerce store, and deliver them to your customers without taking any tension of inventory or any type of risk. The major confront with dropshipping is to find the product that matches your online store’s branding and quality standards.
- Print Shipping labels & send out tracking numbers in just one click.
By integrating WooCommerce with ShipStation, only a single click is required to complete your time-taking tasks.
- Your orders can be sync with ShipStation.
- You can create & print labels for your orders.
- All orders can be marked after completion.
- Tracking numbers can be generated and sent.
- Send reminders to your customers to re-order.
If you are selling food, beauty or health products, your customers might be wanted to purchase consumables when they run out. Set up automated workflow for sending them reminders after a specific time of their purchasing.
Marketing Automation
- Watch over leads into customers via email marketing.
You don’t always get customers instantaneously. Your brand will have its usual or regular customer journey, because people spend time in exploring and deliberation before spending their money. Yet, if they have provided you their e-mail address, it means they are giving you the permission to interact with them. You can nurture this track by using as marketing content. But always remember that products you are sending them is of top-quality and important, perhaps having free gift or discount offers.
- Scheduling of social media posts automatically
If you have not enough time to look at social media posts, there are many tools to streamline their processes. You can use Shopify app or Post Studio-Auto Posting that helps you to save your time by posting your company’s products to your Facebook and Twitter pages at daily basis. Using Buffer app you will be able to schedule messages and content according to performance in less time.
Business Management Automation
- Attach tasks to Trello, Asana, or Slack
If you are using automation for finding a product that is low in stock or when a consumer left a negative review, you have to inform your team so they can do something about it. Another advantage of automation is that you can inform your team to deal with internal matters by using Trello, Slack or Asana.
- Select powerful help desk software
If you have an ecommerce business at large scale, it is very important to assist your customers in a better way by providing non-stop customer services. It is possible by implementing help desk software that can do it efficiently. This helps you to centralize your customer support by using different options of automated tools. Automation ensures to improve your customer experience that is very essential to achieve your business goals.