There is no telling if and for how long social distancing will continue. Its impact on customers’ preference for online engagements as opposed face-to-face interactions is still uncertain for many business owners today, especially for those already in the eCommerce business. This uncertainty has put a great amount of pressure on sites to optimize and keep up with the demands of online shopping that customers gravitate towards today. With many turning to automation as a solution to manage order fulfillment, marketing, and more for their brand, we explore what sites stand to benefit from automation, and some examples of what this could mean for brands.
eCommerce automation is defined as software solutions that convert business tasks (operations, marketing, customer service, etc.) into intelligently designed workflows that execute actions for your site when needed. It essentially puts actions that previously required manual labor on auto-pilot.
What this should accomplish is simplifying the way your company runs and generates revenue by freeing up your time to interact with customers and optimizing the cost of marketing, merchandising, and order fulfillment.
Nowadays, customer retention is one of the most significant workflows you can set up for your site. Actions that help you reward customer loyalty have proven to increase profit and user engagement beyond a one time purchase.
Automatically tagging customers who fit the “loyal customers” criteria will allow you to offer these high-value customers additional perks that will keep them coming back to your site without the logistics hassle of identifying them. These can include: free deliveries, gift cards, triggered discounts, personalized thank you messages, and review collection for your products.
By creating a customer retention workflow based on your current sales, you can potentially reduce your marketing spend and your ROI timeframe.
Managing your inventory is a significant way to cut down on fulfillment issues and boost your online marketing efforts for your site. By tagging your best-selling products, new releases, or out-of-stock products as such (clearly and automatically), you can deploy tactics through SMS and email to create buzz around your products and consistently drive traffic to your site.
One example is creating a tag to automatically identify low stock quantity products and remove them from your site based on a predefined number of units you consider “low” in your inventory. In doing so, you can also task your process to allow customers to sign-up and be notified when the item comes back in stock, in order to not lose a sale you may not have been aware of.
In an era of Influencer Marketing, building a network of brand ambassadors has become an important growth tactic for eCommerce sites. Automating a workflow that tags, tracks, and manages your brand affiliates is a powerful timesaver to consider.
By implementing an affiliate marketing workflow, you can allow for commission-based sales to occur automatically. This way, you not only secure online purchases and reward your network of affiliates, but you are also automatically receiving tagged information about a particular affiliate’s following. With this information you can also trigger highly targeted campaigns and optimize your ideal buyer personas.
When deciding where and how to invest in automation it is important to evaluate your business strategy and find the right solutions that will give you your money’s worth. As consumer behaviour continues to gravitate towards online shopping and tactics like influencer marketing provide you with strategic data about your online niche, we believe that having eCommerce automations implemented correctly makes a big difference in how social distancing can actually impact your brand.
At Resolve we are committed to building eCommerce sites with tailored software solutions within your budget that help you engage and retain customers. If you are curious about automation for your site, we encourage you to chat with us about innovative ways in which workflows can benefit your brand.
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