Marketing Automation

by Timur Khudaiberdiev

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the process of technologizing some of your workflows for efficiency and personalization. Almost all of the time it is applicable for repetitive activities that have similar patterns, which opens up the most interesting part, to observe the behavior and find similarities in it.

This is one of the main factors to make your marketing automation personal, remember, most of the juice comes from personalization in the first place.

Once you think you are ready to try this approach, don’t be afraid and just start, if the automation won’t work out for you for the first time, you will have an established approach that you can improve and make use of in another go.

Basically, it helps you to manage your campaigns and processes automatically. One of the main marketing automation we all know is CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It can be for basic needs and very complex, depending on the organization’s needs and capability. There is a lot of good software to automate customer relationships, but some can create their own CRMs from scratch.

Another great example and well-known example is email marketing. There is always a delusion that email marketing automation can be a savior for a company’s growth stagnations. 

Don’t get me wrong, email marketing automation is a very efficient and essential approach if it is done properly. There is an easy way of obtaining a user base and playing with it with your email marketing software, but just remember that it is not very efficient in the long run.

A small piece of advice is to focus on contextual experience based on each individual’s needs, remember personalization? Great. Create or use existing landing pages that answer visitors’ intentions. Obtaining a user base this way to send them emails, will more likely lead to something prosperous. But don’t forget to optimize your Shopify store speed right after manipulations with your pages.

Don’t stop right after you capture a lead, create an experience so they will stay with you longer, always loop back to the person with automated emails to know how they are doing.

Advantages of using an all-in-one marketing platform and how to use it effectively

All-in-one concept can be interpreted in various ways depending on where you use it. Let’s have a look at this from the e-commerce perspective, where you will find only a few app developers who focus on the all-in-one.

I must say this is quite a “hard mode” growth when you are trying to market your all-in-one platform or app to the audience. Since some users know how to utilize a few tools from your suite of apps only. Which shows one of the questions you’ve to solve in your path.

A good all-in-one platform should offer you tools like:

  • Wishlist
  • Photo reviews
  • Loyalty program
  • Social login
  • Instagram feed.

There is a niche among Shopify merchants who prefer all-in-one solutions, one of the reasons for that is pricing. Usually, pricing for a few apps in one is cheaper compared to if you are going to buy all of the needed features separately.

Another great news for a Shopify merchant relying on all-in-one is that integrations with essential apps will be very smooth and easy to use since a few functionalities are coming from the same app.

Basically, you can create a reward for sharing a wishlist and leaving a review in a few clicks without 3rd party integrations and coding. This is what makes all-in-one beautiful, a few apps working together in the same ecosystem, you don’t have to think too much and look for apps you need, most of the functionality is provided at hand.

But please note that not all-in-one Shopify apps do that, some might position themselves as an all-in-one, but in reality, you have to install different apps and bridge them via typical 3rd party integration.

Examples From Industry

One of the most loyal Growave customers for a few years now is Lily Charmed, a family-owned designer jewelry business based in the UK. We don’t intend to show you the biggest brands, but the smaller ones, who actually make a change in the e-commerce ecosystem overall.

Lily Charmed has strong ethical standards and uses recycled silver, with each worker getting a profit share. This is when they needed a new solution for customer-generated reviews back in 2018, when they were migrating to Shopify. Previously, they were using a well-known review app that was rather expensive and complicated. Therefore, it has been quite a journey to find the exact app they needed.

While searching for an app on Shopify App Store, Lily Charmed came across Growave. One of the main factors for choosing the app was to have a lot of positive reviews, which Growave had. Once giving it a try, they started implementing reviews and were surprised at how it was simple to add the functionality to the store. After a while, Lily Charmed started implementing Growave’s Shopify POS integration.

When it comes to reviews, every Shopify merchant knows that it is hard to get verified and legit product reviews with photos, Growave helped exactly with this problem by collecting 600+ positive reviews. Lily Charmed was among the first ones to try Growave’s Google Shopping integration when it was available back in 2020 which in place helped to improve the ROI and web presence with verified reviews in the Google Shopping feed.

Another great example of how Lily Charmed utilized Growave is the Wishlist feature they decided to try. We’ve helped to decrease the cart abandonment rate by 22% since they started using Growave and there was a 45% increase in Wishlist usage during the holiday season. It really shows that we can help merchants and their customers to return to the website and complete an order, not just abandon the cart and disappear. 

Growave helped to increase the repeat purchase rate by 30 to 40% in one year span by introducing a loyalty program to Lily Charmed users. We helped to obtain these numbers primarily by assisting to incentivize customers with discounts and nice perks, which in return helped to gain a loyal customer base.

This is not a single example of how Growave helps Shopify merchants with their needs every day there is a lot more to discover and find out a relevant customer story that is applicable to you.

Are you being trapped in a vicious cycle of investing and earning over and over again through your e-commerce business but still not getting your target results?

The competition in the digital and e-commerce world has grown tremendously and is expected to grow tougher over the upcoming years. Every day, there are hundreds of new creative ways for online business owners to acquire more customers and harvest higher revenue. Luckily, working in a thriving industry can definitely be a benefit.

One of the most effective and highly recommended business techniques is automating marketing processes. Digital marketer and SEO Wizz, Neil Patel, described it as “the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management, that would have otherwise been performed manually.”

Aside from that, it has been proven to be a good avenue to launch marketing efforts faster, generate leads and accelerate revenue. For instance, CentricsIT, an online one-stop-shop for numerous technology solutions once experienced a marketing decay, not until one of their newly-hired employees explored email marketing automation. The effort delivered a 59% boost in leads and generated $1.5M with the system implementation. This is just one of the numerous success stories about the said innovative strategy.

So if your answer to the above question is a burning “Yes”, maybe you haven’t reached out to marketing automation just yet.

Newbie or not, here are some things that e-commerce business owners need to know about marketing automation in the upcoming years:

Customer Journey

The marketing journey starts with:

It’s important to understand our prospects behavior thoroughly; from being just a prospect to converting them to a paying customer, and everything in between, would really be advantageous in crafting the necessary efforts when implementing marketing automation. This generally helps you comprehend the factors that may contribute to customer churn.

Lead Generation and Lead Scoring

The sure and safest option in translating your visitors into bonafide leads is to offer them personalized and relevant content that would lead them to trust your brand in the process. And once you’ve succeeded in that aspect, the best way to nurture their experience is to have an effective lead scoring model. Through the database, marketers may customize the client’s overall brand experience that’s specifically based on his/her customer journey stage and interest level, which may result in an improved sales quality.

Segmentation and Personalization

Marketing automation allows marketers to segment their audience based on certain criteria like demographics, buying behaviors, interests and amount of money he/she is willing to spend for a product/service.

By grouping them into defined categories, you can effectively craft a more targeted approach as well as personalized marketing strategies for your respective clients.

Workflows

After you’ve segmented your database, it’s time to create workflows that can help you develop leverage towards your subscribers and keep in touch with them.

Workflows are being used to automate repetitive actions and standardize marketing process. There are the so-called action-triggered workflows that basically influence the content of the email. For instance, a newly signed-up client may automatically receive a welcome email, and then several follow-up emails soon after. Event workflows are also quite popular especially during special occasions like Christmas and birthdays. Expect to receive automated emails before, during and after those special events.

Other sample workflows are free trial sign-ups, abandoned cart, product delivery, lead nurturing, and more. name a few.

Data Analytics

Not only does marketing automation help you to efficiently reach prospects but it also allows you to generate data for competitive analysis without working too hard. It tracks accurately all possible statistics about your implemented marketing strategies and campaigns.

With this feature, entrepreneurs, especially those who own small businesses, can easily act upon specific efforts that didn’t work and nurture those that triggered positive results.

Testing

With an improvement that’s backed up by research and statistics, there’s definitely no space for second thoughts.

In general, the goal of marketing automation is for businesses to succeed, that’s why it also helps you test your business strategies that gear towards providing a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Though resources for promotions are unlimited, there is still absolutely no quick fix. Investing in an automated marketing technique would allow you to focus mainly on the excellence of your content and relationship building efforts that guarantee an increase of ROI soon after.