Marketing automation: a beginner's guide to get started
We know that there are plenty of technologies out there to help us work smarter. In ecommerce, smarter strategies enable you to maximize your resources at hand, shorten the sales cycle, and build brand loyalty that propels your company to scale up over time.
But with thousands of options to choose from, how do you choose an automated marketing tool that’s right for supporting your business’ marketing efforts?
In this article, we discuss digital marketing automation features and understand how utilize automation marketing software for guiding your prospects throughout the commerce journey with ease.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation allows your team to eliminate time-consuming repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and improve the overall quality of business operations.
When a company is able to incorporate a powerful automation tool for marketing as part of its business strategy, it can even accomplish tasks that overcome human limitations, such as capturing leads with automatically triggered responses.
Research from McKinsey shows that 60% of occupations have at least 30% of their activities that are automatable.
This means that if you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to understand how to leverage marketing automation platforms and drive conversions fast.
Some common features of marketing automation software include:
Sending personalized messages based on customer’s previous shopping history
Lead generation through FAQ chatbots
Schedule social media posts, content, engagement emails
Automatically triggered emails, messages or notifications
Analytics to show a campaign’s performance through read rates, open rates, conversion rates, etc.
Data sync and integrations with other ecommerce tools
CRM for segmenting mailing lists or leads contacts
Think of these platforms as your virtual assistant that executes tasks based on your command. You can make the best use of these platforms only if you have defined your MQL and goals from the start.
We use WhatsApp to contact our students, but it should not be regarded as merely an announcement board or customer service chatroom. We treat our students as friends, and that’s how we make the students trust AfterSchool.
Ronald Tse
Founder, AfterSchool
Best practices for B2C marketing automation
No matter what industry, a data-driven marketing automation strategy is critical to generating more leads. In our current highly competitive commerce landscape, implementing e-commerce marketing automation in day-to-day operations guides customers swiftly throughout all touchpoints, from discovery to post-purchase stages.
Source: HubSpot B2C Sales Cycle
For a clearer picture, let’s follow along a typical customer journey on an e-commerce site and take a look at the benefits of marketing automation for enterprises.
Trigger welcome email
Let’s say a prospective customer was browsing your e-commerce website and subscribed to your newsletter.
Source: Monica Vinader Homepage
Once you have their email address in your CRM database, it’s important to engage them right away while you still have their attention. With a social CRM and marketing automation platform like SleekFlow, you can define the triggers as to when your email will be sent, i.e. after clicking ‘Join’ on the website’s homepage. This guarantees that every customer receives a personalized welcome greeting from your brand, encouraging them to start shopping immediately.
Auto-update customer tier in CRM based on shopping history
An easy way to build brand loyalty is to reward existing customers. You can use a marketing automation platform to segment customers based on:
Their previous shopping preference or product category
Their cumulative spending
Their frequency of checking out on your e-commerce website
Without keeping track of their status, the platform can label customers to VIP status and encourage customers who have already demonstrated interest to continue purchasing from your brand.
Explore how market segmentation can benefit your business in our latest blog.
Birthday, seasonal, or special offers for retargeting campaigns
When every Christmas or holiday season rolls around, you can set up a marketing campaign that automatically sends exclusive early offers to existing customers.
Another fantastic marketing automation practice includes triggering timely discounts to customers:
To congratulate your customer on one year since their first purchase
To wish them a happy birthday!
To suggest customers upgrade to the latest version of their purchased product
Abandoned cart reminder email or notification message
According to Shopify, e-commerce stores lose 18 billion USD in sales revenue every year due to abandoned carts.
Minimize those lost opportunities by sending a notification to your customer’s inboxes to remind them to complete checkout, right before they click the exit button for good. Or if the customer is a VIP, you can also send them a reminder email with a discount code to redeem at checkout.
It's hard to catch your customers at the right time when tasks pile up. Leverage advanced e-commerce marketing automation tools, such as a bulk email sender, customer relationship management systems, product recommendation engines, and personalized content generators, to strategically maximize your chances of closing a sale and enable your business to grow at scale.
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Case Study: How Lazada automated its loyalty program in Thailand to grow customer engagement and spending
Source: Meta for Business
Lazada is one of Southeast Asia's most popular e-commerce platforms with product categories spanning from fashion, lifestyle, and electronics, to groceries. However, facing tough competition in Southeast Asia, Lazada Thailand has to stay on top by constantly finding new ways to engage with its users.
By partnering with GoSky AI, a digital agency that specializes in automated marketing, and supported by Meta’s Messenger platform, Lazada Thailand designed a social e-commerce loyalty program to drive sales.
Here’s a list of marketing automation features used and their benefits:
Trigger-based or behavior-driven emails for onboarding: Customers sign up to the Messenger-powered loyalty program via the email linked to their Lazada account
Personalized lead nurturing and qualifying: Without having to download any additional apps, customers can interact with the brand or other customers on Messenger, such as sharing their purchases and interest in specific products, posting about their reviews, watching live streams hosted by Lazada, etc.
Integrations with Lazada’s CRM and other APIs: With each action, members acquire points that can be redeemed as coupons upon their next purchase.
Re-engagement: Over time, Lazada can gather sufficient insights and analytics to launch effective retargeting marketing campaigns.
As a result:
96% of loyalty members remain active on Messenger on a weekly basis.
2.6X sales increase attributed to Messenger-powered loyalty program
3.3X Livestream views come from Messenger
Want to learn more about this powerful CRM and marketing automation campaign? Read about the full case study on Meta’s website.
Case Study: How TKD Lingerie achieved 40X return on ad spend (ROAS) with WhatsApp marketing automation software
TKD Lingerie, a women-led lingerie brand in the Middle East, ran a 7-day attribution WhatsApp Broadcast Campaign to promote their 3-for-2 lingerie promotion to 4500 contacts.
As a boutique brand, managing personalized communications of such a large customer database is challenging for a small operations team. That’s why TKD Lingerie chose SleekFlow to automate communications flow during this week-long campaign.
Here are some of the SleekFlow features used to enhance its team’s capacity and drive sales:
WhatsApp Broadcast: Deliver personalized communication at any time, anywhere
Social CRM: Label customers based on functional and stylistic preferences for segmented retargeting campaigns
Trigger-based messages: Snooze messages and define the parameters for automated messages to guarantee responses
Automate internal workflow: set up workflows to auto-assign or route the conversation to the right sales representative for follow-up action
As a result, TKD Lingerie achieved 40X ROAS and a 74% message open rate for one 7-day campaign.
Want to explore the benefits of e-commerce marketing automation? Here’s our use case.
How to nurture leads through CRM and marketing automation with SleekFlow
As an enterprise looking for marketing automation software, a key consideration is that the software can be easily integrated with existing CRMs, Customer Feedback tools, and e-commerce marketing tools This also means that onboarding is straightforward, easy to use, and ideally can be used across all teams including sales, customer relationship management, and marketing.
Keeping all your customer conversations in one place, SleekFlow is a powerful automation software for marketing campaigns and is the preferred choice for over 5000 businesses globally.
What are some of SleekFlow’s most effective social media marketing automation tools for e-commerce businesses? Here are some video tutorials for you to follow along!
Automate marketing messages on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Viber, or whatever social messaging channel your customer prefers
Within a few clicks, you can launch large-scale marketing campaigns and easily manage customer conversations in our all-in-one omnichannel inbox. To gain a holistic overview of your marketing campaign strategy and ROI, you can integrate your customer database and sync the database with your existing CRM, including HubSpot or Salesforce.
Create CRM and marketing automation rules to manage contact database
It’s no secret that marketing is all about catching your customers at the right time. Use SleekFlow’s CRM and marketing automation feature to define the scenarios and trigger messages that convert leads. Build your own chatbot to guarantee high-quality customer service and convert leads within a shorter period of time.
Auto-reply on Facebook Messenger and Instagram
Another handy automated marketing feature is the auto-reply function for Facebook Messenger and Instagram. You can run campaigns on these platforms and set keyword-triggered messages to interact with customers who have left comments on your posts.
While boosting your organic engagement on these platforms, your business profile becomes increasingly favored by the algorithms to attract even more relevant audiences.
Want to outcompete your peers with SleekFlow's help?
Book your personalized demo with SleekFlow today and unlock the potential of seamless communication
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