How E-Commerce Businesses Can Benefit From Marketing Automation
Small businesses and e-commerce companies are constantly looking for ways to reach new customers while spending as little cost and time as possible. Using popular market places like Grow Amazon Business and similar platforms, where you can set up a seller account and get your products in front of millions of potential customers, all for a cost that’s tailored to your selling plan, fulfillment method and item category, is certainly a great way to check these two boxes.
You can also utilize these platforms’ built-in promotional capabilities, like Amazon advertising in the UAE, and boost product listing visibility at controlled pay-per-click rates.
However, as any savvy business owner knows, you can’t rely solely on one channel for your entire customer acquisition strategy. More channels equals more exposure. More exposure equals more conversions. But if you’re already strapped for time and resources, how can you possibly juggle multiple channels and their respective marketing strategies effectively and consistently?
The answer is marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to systematizing repetitive promotional tasks to increase efficiency and streamline workflows to grow your revenues faster. By automating specific tasks, such as social media posting, email management, content scheduling and even ad initiatives, e-commerce businesses can design marketing campaigns that effectively engage with their target audience across several channels at once.
By doing more with less, small businesses can achieve significant progress in gaining a foothold in the marketplace and expanding their share.
4. Ways Marketing Automation Adds Value to E-commerce Companies
The following are four advantages that marketing automation offers e-commerce businesses:
1. Increased Productivity and Profit
For budding e-commerce companies, budget allocation for marketing initiatives and campaigns is a carefully thought-out process. As many small businesses face budget constraints, marketing automation can save them a lot of time and money in the long term. At the same time, it effectively increases profit margins and ROI.
Suppose you run a small e-commerce business selling aroma oils. Your current marketing strategy is focused on driving organic traffic to your online store through social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, seeing as you don’t yet have the funds to go the paid ads route.
To yield more organic results through these channels, you’d have to invest a considerable amount of time and energy in publishing content and managing your social media presence, one that if you were to spend on devising new recipes or thinking of ways to expand your product range, would add more value to your business.
Using marketing automation tools, you can schedule posts and pre-plan campaigns with precision and consistency in a fraction of the time. This optimized approach translates to greater productivity, a better direction of your time and efforts, and, ultimately, higher profits.
2. Better Lead Generation and Nurturing
A critical business development function for any company is effectively nurturing prospects along their respective buying journeys to turn them into sales. Marketing automation can successfully nurture leads, using the right targeted content at the right time to monetize them into sales.
Some automation features, such as behavioral tracking, allow businesses to better understand where prospects are along their buying journeys. This provides a competitive advantage to e-commerce companies as they can offer a unique, personalized experience that focuses on potential customers’ individual needs and interests.
By being able to steer prospects toward your business’ desired outcome, you could score a potential 20% increase in sales from nurtured leads.
3. Improved Customer Retention
No matter the business size, customer retention is a determinant in driving sales and revenue. According to the Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention by as little as 5% can result in a 25% to 95% profit increase. The value of keeping the right customers has a significant impact on the scalability and growth of a small business.
Marketing automation can be deployed to optimize customer retention. Its tools provide valuable insights into buyer intent, enabling you to strategically employ marketing tactics that keep customers engaged with your business.
From landing pages and email campaigns to call-to-action buttons, automation can be customized to send personalized marketing messages to specific audience segments across every stage of the buying cycle. This can be a high-impact way to improve reach and maximize upsells and cross-sells.
4. Actionable Data Generation
Today’s consumers expect personalization and relevance in everything from the products they buy to the marketing messages they receive. And automation can help you deliver just that.
It can provide real-time, valuable information to give you a deeper understanding of customer behavior and allow you to tailor your campaigns accordingly to drive more sales. A data-driven campaign with measurable results can help an e-commerce company make smarter, more strategic decisions about its spending and gain a competitive edge.
Scaling Your Business With Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can streamline your promotional efforts, increase efficiency and transform how you engage with potential customers.
Consider incorporating it into your marketing strategy and see how it can help grow your e-commerce business quickly.