How can Marketing Automation help your eCommerce business

According to McKinsey, eCommerce grew from 2 to 5 times (depending on the country) faster than before the pandemic. The lockdown pushed people towards online purchases and the adaptation grew at superfast pace. Looking at the rate of growth, the eCommerce retailers too jacked up their stocks so much that there were reports that even the offices in the warehouses were being used for stocking goods.

Since late 2021 and early 2022, however, the trend has been changing. As the near normalcy has been returning slowly, the offline stores have been witnessing an increase in their sales and proportionally, the online sales have decreased from the previous highs.

Now, more than ever, the strategy for eCommerce has to move to drawing customers towards your store through Marketing rather than the customers getting drawn towards online purchases as they didn't have a choice. Due to Corona, a lot of new eCommerce stores have opened as a lot of small and medium businesses had no choice but to move to online. Those new entrants, along with the old players need new ways of maintaining or increasing their revenue rate through online eCommerce stores.

This is where Marketing Automation comes into picture. Now, most of the big players have already integrated their eCommerce stores with Marketing Automation (MA) tools like Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, SFMC etc, However, very few companies realize the full potential of these powerful tools and how these tools can be used in multiple ways to turbo charge their online business. Some of these concepts have overlaps with your CRM software and Digital Marketing Analytics tools. However, we can use MA tools as the single source of data to analyze, design and run campaigns based on all the data collected.

Let me elaborate a few obvious and not-so-obvious ways in which these MA tools can help.

1) Orders - Orders data will give you insights regarding the customers who have already bought from you. It is always easier and more cost-effective to grow revenue from existing customers as compared to acquiring new ones. Some of the ways that you can bring back your existing customers are

   a) giving them an offer on their next purchase

   b) offering discounts on related items (e.g. if someone bought diapers, you can offer special discounts on baby food)

   c) giving them referral bonuses

   d) if they are buying some items at regular intervals, you can send them a reminder that the current stock of that item might be running out

   e) send them a survey or request feedback and you can incentivize them on their response

2) Leads - this includes data of the prospects who have visited your site and registered but haven't bought anything yet. The idea here is to covert them into buyers and some of the ways in which the MA tools can help are

   a) run a campaign for a group of prospects/leads (a type of segmentation) who have visited a particular product category page or a product detail page. You can add some discounts/offers on that particular product/category in the campaign

   b) if the user abandoned any item(s) in cart, a mail can be triggered reminding/incentivizing the user to come back and complete the purchase

   c) send a welcome mail to the newly registered users and encourage them to subscribe for newsletters/offers

   d) newsletters should not be aimed only at selling (although this is our ultimate motive), rather the focus should be on engaging the customers/leads by giving them useful information. For example, if you are selling automobile parts, the newsletter can cover what are the latest trends in automobile industry.

   e) segmentation can be done on various factors like geography, age, gender, interests etc. based on the relevance to the product(s) being sold on the online store. The campaigns can then be designed specific to the segment instead of sending generic campaigns.

3) A/B Testing - this is a powerful technique that you can use in conjunction with your MA tool. Here are a few suggestions

   a) from the Analytics tool that you use for your website (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics...), find out the pages/products that are not performing well - either bounce wise, traffic wise or conversion wise. Then you can do A/B testing on those pages and the MA tool will give you which version is performing better

   b) you can try and improve your Average Order Value (AOV) by running A/B testing on different customer segments by varying the price 

4) Personalization - Your MA tool can advise your eCommerce store about the past behavior of the user and you can customize/personalize the online shopping experience accordingly, resulting in a more engaging user experience and better conversions. For example, if you have a generic store like Amazon, and a returning user has browsed fiction books' pages before, you can show him/her the hero banner of some promotion regarding books or if he/she moves to the product listing section, the site can show Fiction Books category on top of the page etc.

5) Lead Scoring - although lead scoring plays a part in many of the steps described above, it is important to call this out separately as this can be a huge differentiator in terms of your Marketing Automation strategy. Lead scoring is used to classify the users into how likely they are to make the next purchase from the store. The campaigns and the messaging can be designed based on the various score levels of the customers. Along with the score levels, the triggers or actions of the users can also be used as an input to these campaigns to make them more targeted and effective.

To summarize, new market conditions demand new ideas and strategies. A good Marketing Automation tool is a necessity and not a luxury for your online store. Just having a good MA tool is also not enough and it should be working in perfect harmony with the online store to maximize returns.