Ultimate Guide to E-commerce Marketing Automation

Table of Contents:

What is Marketing Automation?


Are you looking for an autopilot mode for your marketing process? Marketing automation uses software that automates repetitive marketing tasks. Businesses can automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, marketing on social media, and even ad campaigns to save time and cost and provide a more personalized experience for customers.

By putting data to work and streamlining our workflows, marketing automation software not only help in generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey but it also increases sales and ROI.

Photo Credits: Truelist

Did you know?

  • 51% of companies are now using marketing automation
  • 80% of companies saw an increase in leads through marketing automation
  • 77% of marketers using marketing automation tools reported an increase in conversions
  • 12.2% of Marketing overhead was reduced by Marketing Automation

With over 20 years of experience, PROS digital marketing experts delivers fully functional end-to-end ecommerce marketing solutions. PROS digital marketing agency uses leading e-commerce marketing automation software like Sendlane, Omnisend, Klaviyo to drive sales, leads, and targeted traffic to your website.

Need for Marketing Automation

Companies may use Marketing Automation software differently. The way one uses software and where they are in adoption varies from company to company. Hence, different companies may receive different levels of ROI from Marketing Automation. The following are the main benefits of Marketing Automation:

Know your customers better

Collecting accurate and important data in real-time across the web plays a key role in e-commerce marketing. Marketing automation adds value by providing the right content to the customers at the right time across web, mobile, or any other platforms. The data by Marketing Automation is both analytical and behavioral which provides a unique experience for each customer.

Identifying trends

Marketing automation optimizes the experiences of the customers. It keeps the track of all your campaign marketing across your different e-commerce channels that enables the software to detect e-commerce trends over time. It identified the buying behavior of the customers and the pattern to create customer segments.

Understand the ‘why’ factor

Marketing Automation helps answer the ‘why’ factor of marketing. Which is to understand why customers buy, why they retail or why they convert. All these answers are important. The ‘why’ factor enables your e-commerce marketing strategies in areas that get the most returns.

Run hyper-targeted campaigns

Marketing Automation helps in scheduling projects that target your loyal customers. One does not need complicated hand-off procedures for e-commerce marketing. As everything is automatically saved. Marketing Automation helps in highly-targeted ad online campaigns, which add relevant propositions and build lasting relations with customers. Once you know the need for Marketing Automation, it is now essential to know the steps of the process.
Photo Credits: Marketo

The ROI of Marketing Automation


Marketing Automation is the systemized actions of campaign marketing that create consistency and help you in scaling your e-commerce business returns. Following are the two main steps to identify your Marketing Automation ROI:

Identify your goals

The process of planning starts by setting up an objective. It is important to know the ultimate business goal. Cascading the goals from the CEO, and other departments of the organization. Later communicating the requirements to market on the e-commerce platform is a business value.

Measure and track metrics

Once you know the goals of your business and its departments. It is essential to know metrics within your company. Following is the checklist for the same:

  • Time spent on sales
  • The number of visitors to your e-commerce website.
  • A number of products are sold annually.
  • How do measure annual revenue?
  • Measure campaign ROI.
  • Annual revenue report.
  • Sales-ready lead.
  • A number of leads per month.
  • The number of quantities is sold to the same customers.
  • Basis of key metrics; weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
  • Number of units sold annually
  • Key Performance Indicators to track your revenues.

It is also important to calculate ROI to measure the performance of your company. Remember to include the following important ROI goals:

  • Total e-commerce marketing and sales investment
  • Gross margin good percentage
  • The total amount of revenue from each transaction
  • Total number of sales generated

Calculate Your ROI

A complete ROI calculation will not be available for every program. Some programmes will have lighter objectives, such as the number of people who attend an event, but the closer you can get to calculating profits and return on investment, the better.

Even the most basic ROI objectives should include:

  • The total number of additional sales generated
  • The revenue generated by each transaction
  • The percentage of gross margin
  • Total marketing and sales investment

Marketing Automation has helped various e-commerce platforms in generating a good amount of revenue. The continued section will provide you with the many benefits of the software to the e-commerce platforms.

E-commerce Marketing Automation

It means using e-commerce marketing automation software to manage and control repetitive tasks. This frees up human resources to concentrate on software management or other tasks. The software will carry out set tasks and track progress seamlessly, so you’ll always know what’s going on, from cart abandonment to subscriber emails and more. Following are the key benefits of E-commerce Marketing Automation

Increases Revenue

Marketing automation helps e-commerce businesses in generating more leads thus driving more revenue. By leveraging marketing automation, e-commerce merchants can reduce their manual intervention and focus on marketing lead conversions.

Improves Customer Engagement

Marketing Automation ensures the success of e-commerce marketing campaigns. The vision of the software is to engage the customers and increase the base of customers. The process helps in building e-commerce brand awareness and personalized follow-up to build long-lasting relations with customers.

Offers Better Customer Insights

Marketing Automation provides e-commerce merchants with valuable customer insights. The solutions provide real-time tracking and insights to the company. All of which are valuable for the success of marketing campaigns. It helps merchants to analyze customer behavior and engagement. Marketing Automation provides personalized messages to the customers.

Saves Time & Cost

Marketing Automation helps in providing the ultimate success of increasing ROI. By automating different critical e-commerce marketing functions, merchants save their time, effort, and costs. This further improves the performance of the e-commerce business. Thereby higher revenue, boosting sales and increasing the return on investment.

Best E-commerce Marketing Automation Platforms

Omnisend

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform for ecommerce businesses looking to grow. Omnisend lets you combine multiple channels into a single automation workflow for seamless communication via email, SMS, web push notifications, and more. To get ongoing sales power across the entire customer lifecycle, segment your audiences based on campaign activity, shopping behaviour, and more.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses acquire, retain, and grow their customers by automating SMS and email marketing. You can not only send automated emails and SMS, create beautiful campaigns but also increase sales, drive traffic to your website and enhance your website performance using Klaviyo.

Sendlane

Sendlane is a cloud-based email marketing solution for content creators, digital marketers, and e-commerce companies. Key features include email automation, performance tracking, real-time reporting and analytics as well as email retargeting.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a marketing, sales, and service platform that assists businesses in attracting visitors, converting leads, and closing and maintaining customers. With HubSpot onboarding, businesses can better manage marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

Launch a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy

Here are the right steps you can take to ensure a smooth launch of your marketing automation platform:

Set Clear Goals

Marketing automation takes time and money to implement in any organization. Having clearly defined goals and alignment is essential for a successful implementation and launch. Understand why you’re using a marketing automation system. Is it to reduce the sales cycle, increase alignment, or increase revenue? All of this and more can be made easier with marketing automation.

Train All of your Teams

More than just sales and marketing are impacted by marketing automation. Customer service, billing, and even IT are all affected. Training teams on the value of marketing automation and how to use it is a great way to get buy-in from all departments within your company.

Before you launch your software, provide thorough training on the platform and its capabilities. To ensure your launch is a success, use the training, implementation, and support guides from Omnisend, Klaviyo, Sendlane, HubSpot etc.

Create Visual Workflows

Create visual project workflows instead of writing out verbal workflows of how leads will progress through the journey. These detailed workflows aid in communicating the big picture to all teams, gaining buy-in, and speeding up feedback loops.

Setting up workflows ahead of time will allow you to segment leads even further and tailor your nurturing process to specific client interests and needs. Knowing how leads will be engaged and guided through the buyer journey will save you time and help you market more effectively.

Segment Database

Segmenting lists based on where the lead came from (website or landing page), information downloaded, customer pain points, or where they are in the buyer’s lifecycle are all common segmentation strategies.

Take inputs from various teams to identify data pain points and agree on the best segmentation strategy. Taking the time to get to know your customers, as well as cleaning up and segmenting data, will not only make your marketing automation launch go smoothly, but it will also increase your chances of converting leads into paying customers.

Lead Scoring

By tying both teams’ efforts to revenue, marketing automation aids in better alignment between sales and marketing teams. In most cases, the definition of a qualified lead is a point of contention between the sales and marketing teams.

Setting up a scoring leads model based on consumer behaviour prior to launch will allow your sales and marketing teams to quickly sort through all of the activity to find the “best match.”

Build High-quality Content

Create content for each segment customer and buyer persona for at least 2-3 months. Here are some options:

Email Templates: Create standard email templates for use as autoresponders, drip campaigns, and advanced nurturing. Hubspot templates and Salesforce Classic both have a large selection of email templates for prospecting, inbound referrals, and follow-up.
Landing Page: People notice the landing page first, and it immediately hooks them. With landing page builder, create beautiful and engaging that generate leads with the Hubspot Landing Page Creation tool.
Setup Forms: Create new or update existing forms using your software’s form builder or form mapping. Make sure these forms are linked to the landing pages on your website.

Integration

Before going live, make sure your marketing automation platform is integrated with all of your other marketing technologies, such as your CRM and content management system. Hubspot marketing automation software, for example, integrates seamlessly with the Hubspot CRM platform. Pardot also has APIs that connect to various CRM systems.

Testing

Remember to test the system several times before the official launch. You can quickly fix any bugs, refine and reset criteria, anticipate common user queries, and literally see if the process works by testing and rolling out the marketing platform in stages.

Conclusion


For e-commerce businesses, marketing automation can be a game-changer. It assists you in scoring, sorting, and nurturing leads throughout the sales cycle, increasing conversions by focusing on customers with the greatest purchasing power. But marketing automation is a challenging task that requires technical expertise.

PROS helps you attract attention in busy inboxes with their effective email marketing campaigns. We not only help you connect with your leads, we develop them, and convert them into paying customers. We don’t stop there…we do so much more! We help you to deliver the right content to your target audience at the right time to get high revenue and ROI in the shortest possible time by using leading marketing automation platforms like Klaviyo, Sendlane, Omnisend etc.

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