Retailers constantly develop complex methods of marketing in an attempt to appeal to their target audience. With so many facets to consider such as mobile users, showrooming, Search Engine Optimization, social commerce and omni-channels, retailers need some help.
Enter marketing automation software – software that can track end-to-end ROI for all of your marketing efforts in a single platform. The benefits of including marketing automation on an ecommerce website are increasing over time through innovation and research.
Let’s take a look at some of these benefits and features.
The Benefits of Using Marketing Automation
Marketing automation offers several benefits to e-commerce. Here’s some of the tasks it can accomplish:
- Manage multiple email campaigns and integration with your CRM and shopping cart tool
- Lead nurture people who have been to your website and shown an interest in your product
- Capture relevant and recent data from online forms to gather quality leads
- Categorize or score website traffic based on visitor activity on your website
- Target specific demographics based on email interaction
- Integrate sales and marketing efforts
- Develop a list of prospect profiles, identifying the best leads
- Segment inbound leads into lists and dynamically update current data
The Features Useful for E-Commerce Growth
The wide range of features available make it hard for retailers to know which specific features would benefit them the most, and know they need help with their business problems and want guidance to become more successful.
Some of the features to look for in marketing automation that can help retailers become more successful with e-commerce include:
- Consumer Engagement Features: Lead scoring and other engagement features provide insight into the lead’s interests, engagement levels, and likeliness to buy.
- Connect and Identification Features: You can sync purchase, product, and customer data from multiple ecommerce solutions from social media.
- Analyzation Features: The data you capture is useful to finding out what your big ticket items are, who your big customers are, who your most frequent shoppers are, and more.
- Personalized Communication: This means no more cold calling or mass emails to people uninterested in certain products or services. You can send tailored email campaigns to customers showing exactly what they are interested in and spend your marketing dollars where they count.
- ROI Analysis: You can create reports that will help you understand your success rates during a certain time frame and analyze a customer lifetime value and the average order value.
- Sales Cycle Features: By using marketing automation, you can send relevant content to your leads and cut down the buying cycle.
- Sales: When you make a sale online you can track it through marketing automation software to capture the full transaction history.
From this, your sales department can pull relevant information such as the demographic, purchase type, amount of purchase and more to generate customized ad campaigns and distribute them in the future. This keeps your marketing or sales department from having to manually enter it into a CRM database or whatever other method of tracking you may currently use.
This information is valuable to the companies when they attempt to assess which campaigns are effective.
Invest Now, Save Later
Overall, e-commerce can benefit from marketing automation in multiple ways. While some marketing automation solutions on the market aren’t specifically tailored to all e-commerce businesses, the common automation features are useful for saving time and money in the long run.
SharpSpring has been developed for agencies and small businesses alike! Sign up for a free demo and experience how one platform can transform your e-commerce business today!