Marketing campaign automation is one of the most successful digital marketing practices in recent years. Why? Not only for its multiple benefits. Not only because it helps you integrate your Sales team with your Marketing team or because it enables you to boost your customer relationships. Most importantly, because it is your business’s customer engagement strategy. It is the dialogue between you and your audience; it is an integrated strategy to make something out of every single person who gets in touch with your brand through every possible channel!
With the right marketing campaign automation software and proper execution, you can create lead profiles and then target them with the right messages (triggered or not) to cover their interests at any given time across any channel. It is a highly efficient way to automate marketing workflows within your website to nurture leads, increase revenue, and even take on administrative tasks such as customer profile updates based on your purchase funnel and more.
What if… You can sell more without expanding your team
Remember when you first learned about logics in middle school Algebra class? ‘If George eats X amount of French fries every week of a month and gets no exercise then he will gain Y pounds each week.’ Now, apply it to your eCommerce business. If customer A abandons the shopping cart right before checking out and your automated email campaign is triggered then there’s an increased probability he will return to complete the transaction. You will have another chance to win back an abandoned visitor.
According to research, 96% of visitors to your website is not yet ready to buy. However, these people have clearly shown interest in what you have to offer and are good candidates to continue marketing with the goal to convert them to buy later on.
Marketing campaign automation allows you to sequence campaigns in a way that they can be triggered automatically, either with a time delay or based on a specific action criteria (e.g., a visitor abandons after searching). Once set, the automation flow provides you the flexibility to respond quickly to an event without having to physically monitor all the website activities, as well as allow your marketing team to focus on the bigger pictures or enjoy some time off at the beach! At ContactPigeon, we like to call email automation the ‘silent salesforce’.
Capture every conversion opportunity
Aside from abandoned carts, email automation marketing may ‘rescue’ all sorts of lost conversions in small or large scales. Think visitor to customer conversion, think customer to loyal customer conversion, think loyal customer to evangelist conversion but also, think how your brand can make THE difference on an individual scale. Noticed a customer purchasing specific products every 6 months? Just as the next 6 month period approaches remind her with an automated email to repurchase the product again, and notice the conversion happens. Not only does these type of reminders provide recurring sales opportunity, they are excellent in delivering great customer experience to boot.
Omnichannel reach with marketing campaign automation
Marketing campaign automation in eCommerce is all about results. To get results, your business needs to have a presence in multiple channels in order to broaden the reach to your various audiences who consume information in different ways. An omnichannel strategy is about leveraging the channels your audience resorts.
Marketing automation excels in the capability for monitoring visitor behaviors and personalizing content to be delivered via their preferred channels automatically. For example, for a customer who engages with your product/service online, but ends up purchasing offline, you can still send recommendations relevant to her offline purchase in the next email campaign. With the necessary CRM integration and automation flow, you can enrich customer insights across the various channels. The result? A deeper level of engagement with your customers on your customer’s terms.
Deliver consistent brand experience
Another bonus in an omnichannel marketing automation is the consistent brand messaging and shopping experience for your customers.
One key driver for such consistency is the ability to personalize recommendations based on customers preferences, either based on past purchases, browsed items or channels of engagement. For instance, for a male customer who has never looked into women section, sending him a newsletter featuring the latest women footwear is not only a wasted touch point but also negatively detracts from his brand experience.
The second contributing driver to consistency is the fact that designing marketing campaign automation requires a more holistic view of the consumer experience journey. As you define messages to be triggered automatically, you are more likely to design messages that are consistent across the entire shopping experience for the specific customer profile, as opposed to the one-off email newsletters that are created for mass distribution.
In the over-competitive eCommerce sector, the ability to deliver a truly unique and consistent shopping experience is essential in differentiating your shop from the crowd.
A few key things on marketing automation platform
By now, you should be successfully convinced that marketing campaign automation is a critical component to your eCommerce marketing.
There are a few things to note when it comes to building out your marketing automation capability, it is important to select a platform that will enable you to deliver campaigns across all key channels that your customers are engaging on. Whether that is via email marketing, on site messaging, SMS, or even offline channels. Another key consideration is the ability to integrate easily with all your customer data in order to draw proper insights on your audience.
ContactPigeon is a unified marketing automation solution that offers the key marketing extensions you need to build a solid contact list, retarget your visitors and ‘hit’ accordingly at the optimal points in a customer’s shopping experience. It allows you to capture insights into visitor’s online journey, in order to convert those insights into automatable actions and campaigns to be delivered via multiple channels (e.g., email, SMS, on site pop-up, etc.).
With ContactPigeon, pairing your marketing automation actions with your marketing campaigns can yield conversion rates and increase sales with minimal efforts.
