Ecommerce Marketing Automation Software: Everything You Need to Know

The Mad Men days of marketing and advertising are gone. Billboards, direct mail pieces, and TV commercials don’t cut it anymore. But neither do “wide net” digital marketing and strategies. Mass-market banner ads or emails to entire databases are so 2014. Today’s consumers want personalized experiences that give them the information they want, when they need it. 

What does that strategy look like, you ask? A little bit of everything, from Amazon ads to SMS and everything in between. But marketing professionals would struggle to keep up with this level of personalization on their own. That’s where ecommerce marketing automation tools come in. 

What does an ecommerce marketing automation platform do for you? These tools allow marketers to program routine marketing efforts and repetitive tasks so that teams can spend time on more impactful efforts, like testing, data gathering, strategizing, or optimizing existing campaigns. 

Let’s look at some of the different types of ecommerce marketing automation tools and see how they work and can benefit your ecommerce store. 

Benefits of ecommerce marketing automation

Marketing automation tools and platforms present your business with a myriad of advantages and benefits. Let’s take a look at some of the most impactful ones. 

More conversion opportunities.

Setting up high-quality automations can help create more conversion opportunities for your business. From abandoned cart emails to “back in stock” notifications, these kinds of automations are simple to set up and can be hugely beneficial to your business’s bottom line and improve your conversion rate.

Increased marketing channel efficiency.

Imagine if someone on your team had to send out a personalized email every time a shopping cart was abandoned on your ecommerce site, or if someone had to send out a text message to each phone number in your database anytime you had a new deal or product. 

Automating individual functions of your team means more time for your team to optimize existing automated workflows and create new, thoughtful, more creative marketing campaigns. 

Expanded customer segmentation and personalization capabilities.

Your team wouldn’t send the same email to Gen Z customers that they would send to an audience of Baby Boomers, would they? While, yes, it’s important to cast a wide net when it comes to some of your marketing campaigns, other communications should be personalized to specific audiences — or even down to an individual level. 

Doing this kind of work manually would take massive amounts of time and effort from your team. Marketing automation tools can help drastically cut back on time, giving your teams the ability to improve lead scoring, come up with new audience segments to target, optimize messaging within existing campaigns. 

Improved customer journey.

Customer experience is key to making a sale. Not just within the sales or marketing funnel, but at every point of the process — even post-purchase. By automating campaigns or communications throughout a customer’s journey, brands can keep customers engaged and leads hot. 

• Top-of-funnel automation: Automation for top-of-funnel digital marketing can take many shapes. A key area for success in top-of-funnel campaigns is in digital ads. Different automation tools and services can help digital marketers segment audiences with extreme precision. Content and copywriters can tailor messages to these individual audiences and market to individual ideal customer profiles (ICPs) with extreme accuracy. 

• Bottom-of-funnel automation: These kinds of automations take place when the buyer clearly has intent to purchase. By improving bottom-of-funnel communication, brands can improve conversion rates, and even raise average order values by upselling or cross-selling products. One of the most useful bottom-of-funnel automations your marketing team can implement is abandoned cart emails. These emails can often be the final nudge your prospect needs to finally make a purchase. 

• Post-purchase automation: Once a customer has purchased a product, it would greatly benefit your business to send followup emails asking for reviews. This is also a great opportunity to send the customer products that might be related to their initial purchase — all of which can be automated. 

Better understand customer feedback and data.

Gathering, categorizing, and analyzing customer feedback is one of the most important ways marketers can use automation. Automation tools aggregate feedback from various sources, like surveys, social media, email, and reviews, and can even categorize that feedback based on tone or user intent. Teams can then make more data-driven decisions, which will ultimately lead to better campaigns and more conversions.

Ecommerce marketing automation strategies to consider

Which marketing automation strategies will work best for your business? This, of course, all depends on your specific need, but if your business isn’t using automation services for at least five of the following purposes, start looking at some tools to help make your day-to-day marketing tasks more efficient. You’d be surprised how quickly implementing just a few of these strategies can get your business on the right track. 

Abandoned cart email campaigns.

Email marketing automation is one of the most useful automation tools for your business, and abandoned cart emails are some of the most useful in the email marketer’s toolkit. 

The Baymard Institute found that the average cart abandonment rate for all online stores online was 70.19%. That means out of 1,000 carts that could become sales, 700 of them would be left at checkout. 

What is a business to do about this massive missed opportunity? Simple: send out an abandoned cart email drip. Abandoned cart email sequences are one of the most effective ways to use automation in retailers’ digital marketing or retargeting strategies — and that’s a fact. Klaviyo found that abandoned cart recovery email flows outperform all other email marketing flows in return-per-recipient (RPR) rate and open rates.

When it comes to best practices, brands should keep abandoned cart emails short, sweet, and to the point. Brands should also keep these email streams to a minimum, two to three emails per abandoned cart, as to not bombard the potential customer with communications. Brands can also analyze the data from these emails to see how they’re performing and to optimize specific messaging. 

Welcome email nurtures.

Creating a welcome email nurture is another great, effective way to entice customers to make a purchase. While they may not be at a stage where they have as much intent, like they would when it comes to abandoned cart emails, customers can still be persuaded to open their pocketbooks and make a purchase with a welcome series. 

The trick is to create a welcome email series that informs and incentivizes customers, while also informing you of what purchasing intent they may have in the first place. First, it’s important to think about how you’re going to get a customer’s email address. Will you offer them a coupon? Entry into a loyalty program? Or are you just asking them to sign up for a newsletter? What you’re offering your customers may mean the difference between gathering data and not. 

Next, think about where your customers are signing up. Depending on the page or section of your site a customer is when they hand over their email address, you may want to segment them into different nurture streams. Say you’re a clothing and apparel company and a customer has just signed up for a 15% off coupon while browsing your T-shirt page.

Instead of immediately sending them an ad for sunglasses, show them a few different t-shirts similar to the ones they were looking at. After a few well-timed emails, you may be able to cross-sell them on other products with “Customers also purchased…” type emails. 

Followup emails.

Followup emails cover a few different aspects of the purchasing funnel. These emails are also known as “abandoned browsing” or “abandoned product” emails. Brands can send these communications after a known customer has left a site without adding an item to their cart or abandoning a purchase. 

These emails can often be simple nudges like “Only X amount left in stock,” or more direct like “Did you forget something?” 

Followup emails can also refer to emails sent directly after a customer makes a purchase. Also called “confirmation emails,” these communications are great ways to keep in touch with customers, update them on order status, and potentially cross-sell on related products.

Customer loyalty programs. 

Setting up a loyalty program is a fantastic way for ecommerce brands to use automated marketing tools. The first step, as is with most times you ask a new customer to give you their personal information, is incentivizing them to provide you with details like their name, email address, and birthday (more on that one later). Loyalty programs are a great incentive, especially if you can entice a customer with some sort of immediate discount code right off the bat. 

Once a customer signs up for your loyalty program, you’ll be able to send them automated SMS messages and emails about all sorts of things, from new products to back-in-stock notifications and everything in between. 

Loyalty programs also allow brands with customer retention and re-engage existing customers once they’re hooked on a product. 

Birthday offers.

Using marketing automation tools, brands can easily automate sending specialized birthday offers to customers. This type of automation can essentially be put on autopilot. After your ecommerce business gets customers to sign up for a loyalty program or This is a great way to bring a little joy into a customer’s life, and also incentivize them to make a purchase they may have been holding off on — you know, as a little treat. 

Surveys, feedback requests, and reviews.

As we said before, the post-purchase experience is often as important as pre-purchase. Giving customers speedy shipping experiences, flexible return policies, and mesmerizing them with the unboxing experience can keep a customer coming back time and time again. 

After you put all that effort into dazzling your new (or old) customers, you should capitalize on that momentum and send them an automated followup email stream. This stream can serve a number of purposes. 

• Upsell or cross-sell new products: Since you already have been collecting data in real-time on what products your customers like, you might as well put it to good use. Take this opportunity to send a followup email telling your customers what kinds of products other customers have purchased, or show complimentary products.

• Ask for feedback: Customer engagement surveys can provide a wealth of information when performed correctly. Keep your questions to a minimum, but make sure you’re getting information that you can use to improve customer experience later on. Try asking questions about the checkout experience, product pages and descriptions, or site navigation, some of the biggest pain points when it comes to customer experience. 

• Request a review: 98% of customers read reviews before they make a purchase, making product reviews one of, if not the most important part of a product page. Send out requests for reviews a few days after a customer has received their package and has had time to use it. 

If you’re having a hard time getting customers to review your products, it may be time to rethink your strategy. Try incentivizing the review (whether positive or negative), or send out requests along with the product, either in a confirmation email or as a QR code in the package. 

Chatbots for customer support.

Another way to improve customer experience is by implementing automated chatbots onto your site. These chatbots can help improve experience in a variety of ways, like product search, product recommendation, or even checking on order status. 

While it’s important to have a human element to these chatbots (always have an option that transfers to a real person), it’s impossible to have a human monitoring chat on a high-traffic website. Instead, businesses can implement automated chatbots that can be programmed with specific responses and brand details. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new age for chatbots. As tools continue to learn from past conversations or experiences, they get better at responding to new inquiries. This means a better experience across the board, and less time that humans have to spend responding to order inquiries or other details. 

Automated SMS campaigns.

In a world where consumers are bombarded by advertising day-in and day-out, it’s important to make messaging as personalized as possible. There are many ways brands can do this. Automation makes it easier to segment audiences based on specific demographics or interests, but there are ways that messaging can get even more personalized. 

While email marketing campaigns give you a direct line into a customer’s inbox, SMS messaging gives you a direct line into a customer’s pocket. 

There are some best practices to keep in mind, however. While emails can be sent once or twice a week, try to keep SMS communications to once or twice a month. Save these touchpoints for communications that you’re fairly sure will convert. 

Back in stock notifications, price drops, and new product announcements based on a customers’ past purchase history are great uses of this highly personalized messaging. Think of SMS messages more as push notifications for your customers, little nudges that can help improve re-engagement rates and influence customer behavior.

Optimizing campaign messaging. 

Gathering and analyzing campaign data is all well and good, but the real benefits of campaign automation are the optimizations teams can make based on these insights. By freeing up time, effort, and brainpower, brands can use these valuable insights to optimize communications and messaging on everything from emails to product descriptions and everything in between.

The final word

Marketing automation software is an excellent tool that your business can use to streamline operations, improve customer engagement, and gather, analyze, and optimize campaign data. By utilizing these tools, workflows, and integrations, your business can automate a large part of its digital marketing efforts. When these tasks are streamlined, teams are free to spend time on tasks that will have a larger impact, like optimization, data analysis, or more labor-intensive go-to-markets that require more creative energy.

With the right tools and platforms, your ecommerce business is sure to see an impact from implementing an ecommerce marketing automation strategy.

FAQs about ecommerce marketing automation