Why Every E-commerce Business Needs Marketing Automation?

Equipping your e-commerce inbound marketing with a marketing automation system is typically mandatory. With marketing automation, you can do everything from handling repetitive marketing actions to filtering leads to increasing repeat sales.

An average of 49% of companies and marketing agencies have adopted a marketing automation system and have been seeing positive ROI (80% of businesses using automation have seen an increase in leads generation) resulted by a corresponding strong marketing automation strategy.

However, as a small/mid-sized business (SMBs), you might have not yet convinced of devoting your budget into this modern marketing tool and might think it only shines when it is in an enterprise environment.

In fact, the SMBs constitute the largest growing segment in marketing automation adoption, according to Marketo. And it has found that 68% of the “top-performing” small businesses have adopted marketing automation.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation, according to Marketo, is a software platform that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows. It gives you the capability of managing repetitive marketing tasks more efficiently. It allows you to grow into a more powerful marketing team.

In this way, you can automatically handle various marketing workflows such as email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, cross-channel marketing campaigns, website personalization/optimization, and lead nurturing/generation.

In other words, your marketing team will have an easier time scheduling newsletters, segmenting recipients, automating social media postings and tracking inbound marketing performance.

Why is it important for e-commerce B2C businesses?

 1. Enhance email retargeting campaigns

According to eMarketer, B2C businesses that utilize automation in email campaigns such as retargeting (cart abandonment) campaigns have seen conversion rates as high as 50%. And what is the average cart abandonment rate these days? Nearly 68%. This is the money you leave on the table and imagine if you could win back half of those bounced visitors’ hearts.

Unlike emailing using an email service provider, with automation marketing, you are sending reminder emails that are timely and hyper-targeted. It provides a resource-saving way to set real time reminders. It usually is set as a series of automated messages – if the first reminder doesn’t convert, the second message including incentives will be activated later. 

 2. Analyze and segment customers

Another benefit of utilizing marketing automation is to identify the demographics and psychographics of your e-commerce website’s visitors and customers.

A decent amount of customers will time browsing your store and researching your products before they decide to buy something, marketing automation software can collect that information. And once the visitors have converted, you will have more information in your pool.

Marketing automation not only helps segment your visitors/customers, it also makes targeting these segments easier. More importantly, by segregating conversions according to factors like purchase value, repeat sales, you’ll discover where your best conversions come from and who your highest value customers are and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

 3. Personalization

Modern consumers are evolving, one aspect of this continuous evolvement is that they want more personalized messages. With marketing automation, personalization is no longer hardly a strategy, in fact, it is easier than ever to deploy personalized campaigns. 

And when marketing automation is done properly, it gives you the ability to target specific segments, at a certain time. As mentioned, email marketing features the most common use in which automation and personalization intersect.