Ecommerce Marketing Automation: Automation Strategies and Tools to Use with Shopify
If you’re not investing in ecommerce marketing automation strategies yet, you’re missing out. Marketing campaigns are crucial for driving attention to your Shopify store, products, and solutions, ensuring you can consistently increase sales and revenue.
However, if you’re not lucky enough to have your own dedicated marketing team, it’s often difficult to keep on top of all the marketing tasks you need to do. Many teams spend hours crafting emails, social media campaigns, and responding to customer queries.
That’s where ecommerce marketing automation comes in, giving you tools that allow you to put the most repetitive marketing tasks on autopilot.
Not sure where to get started? Here are some of the best ways to use marketing automation to your advantage, and the top tools you can invest in for your Shopify store.
What is Ecommerce Marketing Automation?
Ecommerce marketing automation is the art of using software solutions to enhance your marketing efforts, by automating certain tasks. Companies use intelligent tools to automate everything from lead segmentation, to email marketing, and data entry.
The biggest benefit of investing in ecommerce marketing automation software, is that it saves you crucial time. Instead of manually creating and publishing countless social media posts, or qualifying leads, you get to focus on more strategic tasks to grow your business.
Overall, the right automation strategy will:
- Boost efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks like publishing social media posts and sending emails, you can free up more time for your team to focus on other work.
- Reduce errors: Intuitive AI-powered automation tools reduce the risk of human error, particularly when it comes to tasks like data entry and prioritization.
- Improve customer relationships: With an automation strategy, you can consistently engage and connect with your audience, earning trust and increasing sales.
- Scale your marketing strategy: Using automation, it’s easier to scale your marketing strategy across various channels and platforms, increasing your reach.
- Optimize your sales: With the insights you gather from your marketing campaigns, you can discover new ways to increase conversion rates, and customer lifetime value.
Ecommerce Marketing Automation Strategies and Tools to Use
These days, there are plenty of ecommerce marketing automation strategies you can experiment with as you grow your Shopify store. That’s particularly true now that AI-powered tools are becoming more prominent in the digital landscape.
Here, we’ll look at just some of the top strategies you should consider implementing, and the tools, apps and integrations you can use with Shopify to bring your campaigns to life.
- Automated Customer Segmentation and Personalization
According to McKinsey, 71% of customers now expect every business to deliver a personalized experience. Unfortunately, personalizing every interaction can be difficult when your Shopify store serves thousands of unique customers every week.
The good news is that automated solutions can help. For instance, Shopify Audiences gives you an all-in-one solution that helps you create audience segments with the power of AI, ensuring you can create highly personalized marketing campaigns for each of your customer groups.
With Shopify Flow, Shopify Plus customers can then create unique customer journeys and experiences for each buyer group. You can even design loyalty programs that automatically track purchase histories and reward your most loyal customers.
Outside of Shopify’s built-in tools, you can find plenty of external apps for Shopify that help you segment your customers and create more personalized campaigns. Rebuy is an AI-powered tool that automatically delivers personalized product recommendations to customers on your behalf.
Alternatively, Shogun is a landing page builder which allows companies to serve dynamic, personalized content to customers on landing pages, based on their previous interactions with the site.
- Ecommerce Marketing Automation: Emails and SMS
Probably one of the most obvious ways to invest in ecommerce marketing automation, is to leverage a tool that allows you to send personalized, engaging alerts, notifications and messages to your customers via email and SMS.
Email and SMS campaigns are two of the most effective ways to engage with both previous and potential customers. You can use tools like Omnisend, an all-in-one SMS and email ecommerce marketing automation software on Shopify to create comprehensive email sequences. These sequences can welcome new subscribers to your store, remind them to renew subscriptions, or even introduce them to new products and services.
You can even use email and SMS marketing automation tools to reduce your risk of potentially losing customers, with abandoned cart emails. These messages notify customers when they leave an item in their cart without completing a purchase, giving you another chance to earn a conversion.
Alongside Omnisend, Shopify integrates with dozens of different email and marketing automation tools, such as Klaviyo, which comes with a broad range of fantastic customizable templates, and Drip, which helps you organize customer data into a single dashboard.
You could even go one step further, and use a tool like ActiveCampaign to create comprehensive sales funnels, access lead scoring features, and organize large contact lists.
- Automate Everyday Customer Interactions
It’s easy to assume chatbots are just customer service tools, but they play an important role in your marketing campaigns too. Intelligent chatbots are excellent at not only answering customer questions about products and services, but also guiding them towards the right products.
Adding a chatbot to your Shopify website is a great way to improve customer satisfaction scores, which makes you more likely to earn repeat customers. Plus, AI-powered chatbots can increase average order values and customer lifetime values too.
For instance, a tool like Tidio can resolve customer queries, and help them find the best product for their needs, based on their goals or previous purchasing histories.
Apps like Chatra can proactively reach out to customers when they arrive on your website, and let them know about any limited-time promotions you’re running, boosting your chances of a conversion. You can even use chatbots to follow up with customers and ask them for reviews and recommendations you can use in future marketing campaigns.
- Ecommerce Marketing Automation: Re-engagement
We’ve already mentioned a couple of ways ecommerce marketing automation tools can help to engage your audience. Automated email and SMS campaigns are great for keeping your brand top-of-mind with your customers, and chatbots are great for proactively connecting with potential buyers.
However, sometimes you need help drawing customers back to your website. That’s where reengagement tools come in. These tools specialize in connecting you with your customers after they abandon your website, or forget to make a purchase for a while.
You can use the WhatsApp re-engagement tool for Shopify, for instance, to notify customers about their orders, and bring them back to abandoned carts.
Alternatively, you might use push notification tools to alert your customers via their web browser or smartphone whenever you have a new product on sale. Firepush is a popular tool for text-based marketing and push notifications.
Tools that allow you to automate loyalty campaigns, such as Shopify Flow, are also excellent for keeping your customers engaged. You can remind them that they have points to spend, or rewards to claim on your website, which helps to reduce churn rates.
- Automate Social Media Marketing
Studies show that by 2030, sales through social media platforms will reach a value of $8.5 trillion. If you’re not taking full advantage of social media for your Shopify website yet, now is the time to start. The good news is that automating social media campaigns can be easier than you think.
Shopify integrates seamlessly with a range of social platforms, from Instagram, to Facebook, and allows you to publish content straight to the channels your customers already use. You can share product pages directly on social platforms, add your product portfolios to social media shops, and even manage sales and order fulfillment processes in one unified space.
Another way to combine your ecommerce marketing automation strategy with social media is to add a social feed to your website. With a social feed, you can showcase social proof in the form of customer testimonials and user-generated content from channels like Instagram, on your product pages and home pages. This is a great way to boost your chances of conversions.
SocialEmbed, a free tool for Shopify makes it easy to add a feed to virtually any page on your online store. Alternatively, you can use the Instagram and Facebook app from Meta.
- Automate Upsells and Cross-Sells
Finally, one excellent way to leverage ecommerce marketing automation to increase your sales on Shopify stores, is with a tool that automatically delivers upsell and cross-sell offers to your customers. These convenient apps make it easy to increase the average order value of each buyer, by introducing them to frequently bought together products, bundles, and offers.
There are even tools that can deliver personalized recommendations, thanks to integrated AI, which boost your chances of higher sales. Plus, you can leverage upsells and cross-sells throughout the customer journey. For instance, the ReConvert upsell app allows companies to send recommended upsell offers to customers in the checkout, and post-purchase,
Not only do automated cross-selling and upselling tools have a significant impact on your profits, but they can improve the customer experience too. Offering customers great deals on recommended product bundles and collections will make them more likely to shop with your company again.
Grow with Ecommerce Marketing Automation
Ecommerce marketing automation strategies are more than just an excellent way to save time when you’re promoting your store. The right campaigns and tools can significantly increase your company’s revenue, and help you build stronger connections with your customers.
If you need help building the ideal ecommerce marketing automation strategy, or integrating the right tools with your Shopify store, contact Storetasker today. We’ll match you with an expert that specializes in Shopify marketing success.