We will remember 2020 as the year of the eCommerce boom in Italy: a total turnover of about 58.6 billion euros (NetComm) with more than 29 million consumers choosing to buy their products online. In the era of the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers’ buying behaviors and habits have changed, and more and more realities, including pure retail, have chosen to combine online sales with the more traditional off-line sales channels, with the aim not only of addressing the contingent situation, but also of totally rethinking their sales strategy and the relationship with their consumers also thanks to marketing automation for eCommerce.
So here are some practical tips to bring your online shop to success, let’s see together what Marketing Automation does for an E-commerce
8 tips ways to do Ecommerce Marketing Automation effectively
Profiling and segmentation for eCommerce: your ecommerce automation strategy starts here
We have repeatedly had occasion in our articles to address the topic related to the audience profiling and segmentation, reiterating how essential this is to bring winning marketing strategies to life, focusing on personalizing the customer experience.
Biographical information, data on historicized and real-time browsing behavior, qualitative data on interests, tastes, needs, but not only that: in eCommerce, the advice is to never neglect information about users’ buying behavior.
Analysis of the user life cycle (Customer LifeTime Value) and RFM matrix, thus become key profiling criteria for knowing one’s customer base and choosing the best strategy for increasing its value over time.
User who has just subscribed to your newsletter, customer who buys frequently, customer who buys often with good spending power or customer who has not bought for a long time? By adopting a profiling and segmentation method based on lifecycle and RFM matrix, you will know in detail how your audience is composed, you will be able to identify the most interesting clusters on which to invest in order to deploy effective marketing strategies aimed at customer loyalty, which are essential to substantially and continuously increase your sales.
On-site personalization: the potential of automation marketing for eCommerce
Profiling and segmenting your audience in the best possible way to offer each user “tailored” browsing and purchasing experiences: this is where the secret of an effective marketing automation strategy applied to the eCommerce world lies. But what activity to deploy right away?
- Dynamic product recommendation : i.e., products dynamically recommended based on different algorithms and displayed in different sections of the shop, from the home page to the product page, to the shopping cart page in an up-selling and cross-selling perspective.
- Behavioural messages: i.e. behavioural messagessuch as box messages, warning messages, pop-ups, to be customized in order to stimulate the user to perform certain actions that can, for example, range from subscribing to the newsletter to discovering special promotions rather than retrieving the abandoned shopping cart.
- Content personalization: this includes all customization activities related to textual content, images, banners that can cover significant parts of the shop or even the customization of micro portions of text on specific pages.
- Dynamic smart forms: i.e., profiling forms to be customized based on the user’s browsing path in order to collect information and data useful for further personalization activities (e.g., interests, likes, birthday..).
Off-site personalization: personalized customer experience even outside the shop
Engaging and ringing the user even when he or she is not browsing within the shop: again, an eCommerce marketing automation strategy can make a significant contribution through the implementation of effective activities.
- Trigger Welcome Series: allows you to walk a user who has just signed up for your newsletter, or registered on the shop, through the shop’s top categories or best-selling products and finalize their first purchase. You can schedule multiple email sends to start building the relationship with the new potential customer.
- Abandoned Cart Trigger: By setting this trigger you can solicit users who have not completed a purchase with personalized communications and timed offers.
- Trigger Birthday Offer: you can surprise your users on their birthday day or week by sending exclusive offers and promotions.
- Personalized Follow up Triggers: invites customers who have purchased to discover new and related products to the one they recently purchased, can be a must for an effective cross-selling strategy.
Beyond trigger activities, off-site marketing automation strategies also include all email marketing campaigns aimed at launching promotions, engaging users through special offers or customized loyalty programs.
Obviously, careful analysis and profiling of one’s customer base in this case will provide valuable clues as to the best strategies to deploy.
Personalized advertising campaigns and push notifications: for an all-around eCommerce automation marleting strategy
The browsing and purchasing experience of users increasingly unravels involving multiple touchpoints. If the activities listed above can be considered somewhat of a base from which to deploy an effective marketing automation strategy for eCommerce, we cannot, however, fail to make a brief mention of other activities that primarily concern the optimization of ADS campaigns and the implementation of web push notifications
Relevant clusters of users identified through profiling activities of one’s customer base can be used as target audiences for one’s ADS campaigns, especially with a view to remarketing. In this way, the contribution of using Customer Data Platforms, such as Blendee, is absolutely fundamental for optimizing the very performance of campaigns in terms of CTR and ROI.
Enabling web push notifications, on the other hand, can be a trump card not only for ringing users who are not browsing the site with personalized messages, but especially anonymous users who have chosen not to release contact information.
Marketing Automation for eCommerce: design your strategy, Blendee takes care of the rest!
“The first rule of any technology used in business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify its efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify its inefficiency.”-Bill Gates says. If marketing automation can bring a relevant driving force to your eCommerce, it is critical that there is a winning strategy behind it.
The recommended activities represent, as anticipated, a base from which to discover the real potential of a strategy based, yes, on automation but first and foremost on an effective profiling and segmentation strategy for your audience. It is starting from a definition of one’s buyer personas, from the profiling of the customer base that it is appropriate to proceed by identifying the best performing activities and channels to reach and engage your users.
