E-Commerce Marketing Automation
The Ultimate Guide and Advisor to E-Commerce Marketing Automation
Here you will find an overview of marketing automation especially in E-Commerce with questions and answers.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to the automation of tasks using software that arises in marketing.
It doesn’t matter whether newsletters, campaigns, landing pages! Nowadays, marketing is finally automated and individualized.
Especially in E-Commerce, there is a lot of potential for marketing automation!
This is because there is more (automatable) communication in e-commerce than in the service or manufacturing sectors.
Order confirmations, newsletters, discount codes, etc. are just a few examples.
Voteile & Benefit
The Main Advantages and Benefits of Marketing Automation Software
The Advantages of Marketing Automation in E-Commerce at a glance:
- More and better qualified leads
- Higher marketing productivity
- Higher conversion rates
- Improved response rates and customer engagement
- Better audience segmentation
- Shorter sales cycles
- More visitors to the website/webstore
- Lower marketing costs
- Better customer retention
- Higher click-through rate
E-Commerce Marketing Automation brings many advantages!
Aside from day-to-day operations, E-Commerce merchants, in particular, have what feels like hundreds or even thousands of small 3 – 5 minute tasks every day. Although each one doesn’t take much time by itself, they all add up. So rarely do all the tasks fit into one day.
E-Commerce automation software saves you time. And that in both marketing and customer service.
Human errors are unpleasant, but with us humans only badly avoidable.
Have you ever sent an email without an attachment?
A marketing automation solution helps to avoid small errors that can occur involuntarily when recurring processes are done manually.
Once a marketing automation process has been planned, prepared, and set up, it improves customer loyalty and does so in a completely scalable manner without additional effort.
Software for automating your marketing is extremely important as it accompanies your business through its growth phase. With the right software, you’ll be prepared to target 1, 100, or 1000 customers per day.
Optimization is extremely important in online business and with the right marketing automation, it can be implemented.
The “right software” supports you with A/B tests and their evaluation. With this, you have created the foundations for optimization.
Why Should You Use Marketing Automation in E-Commerce?
Especially in E-Commerce, the use of marketing automation makes sense. In addition to the general benefits of automating your marketing and customer service, there are other reasons why marketing automation makes so much sense in e-commerce.
- Build brand awareness
- Strengthen user loyalty and brand loyalty
- Automate meaningful one-to-one communication
- Find out customer needs and behavior
- Increase conversion rate and customer retention rate
Function
How does Marketing Automation Software work in E-Commerce?
In the simplest case, you have on one side an e-commerce platform like WooCommerce, Magento, or Shopify.
On the other hand, you rely on marketing automation for your e-commerce. Now, these two platforms can be integrated.
This means that the two systems can communicate with each other.
As soon as something happens on one of the two platforms (e.g. a visitor orders something in the store or a contact in the marketing automation has not ordered anything for 30 days, etc.), the marketing automation can react to it.
A reaction can be flexibly adapted to your marketing. It can be a pop-up, an email or SMS can be sent, or a visitor to your store receives points for action.
However, circumstances are rarely that simple. Usually, a more complex system landscape exists.
You may have multiple sales channels, shipping software, a CRM system, and web analytics. In addition, the store and website are on two separate systems.
To use marketing automation for your e-commerce now, you still need integration. This time, however, the data is coming from different systems. You may even need a bidirectional interface for some systems.
One challenge here will be: Which system is responsible for what?
If the shipping software gets updates from DHL, Hermes, etc., should it send emails or should Marketing Automation do it?
And if it goes out from the shipping software, should the CRM know that this email has been sent?
As you can see, more complex system landscapes bring challenges with them.
It is always important that all relevant data is available in at least one system in order to implement the marketing strategy in the marketing automation platform.
Selection
How do you choose the right Software for your Marketing Automation?
Choosing the right Marketing Automation for your E-Commerce business can prove to be very difficult. There are several steps to consider and go through.
- Your requirements
- Your budget
- Market overview
- Select (your) top providers
- Analyze (your) top providers in more detail
Start with your requirements.
The more precisely you define what you want to do and which functions you need, the more accurate the subsequent selection will be.
Consider here both strategic requirements (where do you want to be in 3-5 years) and functional (SMS communication must be possible) as well as technical requirements (integration via API).
Your budget is important to exclude some vendors from the start. Determine both the one-time budget for setup and integration and the monthly budget for SaaS, maintenance and more.
Based on the requirements and your budget, you can now narrow down the market overview to the relevant providers for you. GetApp has over 300 marketing automation software applications listed.
So a restriction is indeed necessary!
Identify the criteria that are important to you and weigh them among the vendors. So it is now possible to select the top 2 – 5 vendors or software systems in your list.
Here you can even assign a rank or placement to the remaining vendors.
In the next step, you should take another close look at the top 2 or 3 systems.
Discuss exclusion criteria with the vendor and your team. Now try to select the right provider using a combination of lists, analyses, and gut feelings.
How much does Marketing Automation Software for E-Commerce Companies Cost?
Monthly prices range from 0.00€ for open source solutions like Mautic to Pardot and others for several 1000€.
Introduction
How long does it take to implement a Marketing Automation Platform?
49 minutes!
In my online video course, I show you how to install and configure the Mautic marketing automation software. In total, it takes less than an hour to install the software, set it up, and send a newsletter.
However, implementing all processes in an E-Commerce Marketing Automation software takes longer. Setting a time frame here is difficult without knowing the requirements.
If you work with a larger team in marketing, you will certainly have quite a few processes. These can then of course be implemented in a timely manner.
If, on the other hand, you are only a few people in the entire company, then there is rarely enough time for planning and optimization. Here, it is best to work iteratively. List important processes and work on the highest priorities. Several points play a role in the implementation:
Planning of the most important processes and campaigns
Installation / basic configuration
Implementation and testing of the most important processes and campaigns
Learn more about my E-Commerce Marketing Automation Beratung consulting services, where I help you on your way to more profits.