Using software tools to complete various online store tasks such as order fulfillment, marketing campaigns, and customer support is Ecommerce automation.
Automating your online business helps you on multiple fronts. The obvious benefit is that you get to save a lot of time. Another significant benefit you get is the effective utilization of the workforce.
You can redirect the workforce to tasks such as data entry and other productive sections of your business. Automation also helps you to keep your product information up to date. This is extremely helpful if you have a wide range of products.
Automation also helps you enhance the customer experience. The most obvious benefit is a chatbot. A chatbot is a program that interacts with your customers and addresses their queries.
Effective Automation Strategies for Your Ecommerce Website
1) Using Popups
Windows you use on your online store to advertise, offer discount codes, and capture emails are popups.
Popups float, slide in, and interact with customers. You can automate popups depending on your needs. Say you want to welcome first-time visitors with a 20% discount coupon.
You can tell, aka command, your popups to appear before visitors’ eyes at a particular time, such as 10 seconds after they landed on your site.
See how search engine journal is making use of pop-ups.
Image Credit :- Search Engine Journal
Say you want to target those about to exit the store without buying anything. You can program your popup to monitor the users’ mouse movement and scrolling behavior and crop up when they are ready to leave the site.
2) Fulfil Orders Automatically
Optimizing the supply chain is an Ecommerce site owner’s dream.
Manually fulfilling orders is time-consuming, especially if you have too many orders. Automating the order fulfillment process expedites product picking, packing, and shipping and eliminates human errors.
Mistakes such as double-picking and not recording the orders are common in the Ecommerce world.
You can sync most automatic order fulfillment apps with your online store. These apps automatically receive your order details from your store, process them, and notify the customers via email and mobile phone. Some apps even choose the best shipping route for efficient delivery.
Read: Maximizing ROI with Remarketing Campaigns
3) Using Email Campaigns
Email campaigns are one of the underrated marketing strategies. It is one of those few channels that give an impressive ROI.
See how Asana is sending email campaigns regularly.
Image Credit :- Asana
Effective email marketing is impossible without the help of automation tools. A bot can outperform a human being every single time when running an email marketing campaign.
An email campaign does not stop with sending a welcome email to a subscriber or a customer. It goes beyond and deep. As an online retailer, it starts with reminding customers about abandoned carts. Then comes the follow-up if someone purchases your product.
“Once your business starts scaling up, some customers will become loyal, and some will go inactive. You have to reward the loyal customers with rewards and make the inactive ones reengage”, says Simon from Ace Blogger Outreach.
For every strategy discussed above, you must send different emails at different times. It is humanly impossible to send 5,000 personalized emails to 5,000 people at different times within a short period.
4) Through Product Recommendations
Automation can help you increase the average order value by recommending the most appropriate customer products.
It is common for stores to have a ‘You May Like’ section beneath their product descriptions. These recommendations are not recommended by staff but by intelligent programs.
See how Amazon is making product recommendations.
Image Credit:- Amazon
These programs take various factors into account, including but not limited to a customer’s browsing behavior, purchase history, watch history, and recommendation of products.
In simple terms, these tools personalize each customer’s shopping experience. According to a study by Adobe, your customers are likely to spend 40% more time if you personalize their shopping experience.
Depending on your store’s feasibility, you can place the ‘Product Recommendations’ tab beneath each product description or on the cart page.
5) Inventory Management
This kind of goes hand in hand with order fulfillment. Many entities solely relying on manpower for inventory management suffer from overstocking and understocking.
Using the right automation tool will help you avoid these pitfalls. As an online store, let’s say you have 100 units of a product but sell 200 of them.
You realize the mess at the eleventh hour and hastily order another 100 units of the same product from your supplier. Your supplier charges you more for expedited shipping.
Meanwhile, calls start pouring in from customers who have not received their products. Many cancel their orders. Your reputation goes south.
According to this study, 38% of customers say they will stop buying from a seller if the delivery experience is awful.
6) Using Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the most commonly used automation tools. A chatbot is a tool that can interact with your customers and address their queries in real time. The best part is that it is always running and can talk to multiple customers simultaneously.
Image Source:- Chatbot
To put it in a nutshell, it has the potential to replace a live support team.
Chatbots are effective in reducing the burden of your customer support. From a business perspective, reserving your precious manpower to answer FAQs is unwise. According to this Tidio article, more than 50% of internet users in the US have used chatbots.
Chatbots can also be used to collect emails. Naming chatbots with quirky names and making them converse with visitors to collect emails is a strategy many online stores follow.
7) Affiliate Management
Keeping your affiliates happy is extremely important to scale up your business.
Having a dedicated portal for them is the first step. An affiliate management tool also helps you track and manage your brand ambassadors.
It may be easy for you to maintain a handful of affiliates. However, switching to an automation tool will be an intelligent decision if the network grows.
An affiliate automation tool will allow you to identify the best performers by assessing their performance. It also helps you make timely payments, which is crucial in maintaining the business-affiliate relationship.
Most of the Best AI tools allow you to assess the campaign performance in real-time. An automation tool is also a sight for sore eyes for your affiliates since they can find link shortening and branding tools within the dashboard.
8) By Segmenting Your Customers
Segmenting customers is beneficial for targeting online stores. As a business owner, knowing your loyal and passive customers gives you an edge in optimizing campaigns.
You do not need a separate tool to segment your audience since most email automation tools can do it.
Segmentation helps you spend your resources prudently by identifying customers with great purchase intent. It enables you to personalize the emails.
Personalizing is crucial to boosting your business. You cannot send a generic message to different audiences and expect them to behave similarly.
Sometimes, you must do ‘Lead Nurturing’ to educate the indecisive customers. And if you draft your email without reasoning why they should make that purchase, they may skip that mail tool.
9) By Scheduling Social Media Posts
We are now in the age of social media. Your presence on leading social platforms is no longer an option but mandatory to attract an online audience.
See how Adobe is making use of Twitter space.
Image Source:- Adobe
With stories replacing text posts and short-form videos overpowering static images, being active on social media is tiring and bewildering sometimes.
Sticking to a posting schedule is challenging, even with an effective content strategy. Because the ideal time for posting differs from platform to platform, you need a scheduling tool to be active on social media.
Some tools are so smart that they can tell you the ideal posting time based on your target audience’s engagement. Some even have native features to make your posts go viral.
Read: Online Marketing Services for Small Businesses
10) Supplier Onboarding
Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) is equally important to Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Vendor onboarding is tricky if your e-commerce store is a marketplace for multiple brands.
The process involves a lot of work, from cherry-picking the suppliers to integrating their inventory.
The crucial part is screening your suppliers using checklists. Then comes the exchange of tax details, marketplace integration, and test runs to ensure a smooth order process.
When the vendors are larger, manning them using your regular workforce wastes labor.
11) For Managing Reviews
Acquiring authentic reviews is crucial for a business’s credibility. If you are a marketplace selling third-party products that have already garnered reviews, this may seem like no big deal for you.
But if yours is an emerging original brand, you need reviews to scale up your business.
It is human nature to register unhappiness before appreciation. Hence, asking your customers to leave a review is a must. You also need to modify your reviews and filter out defamatory reviews.
Yes. There is a difference between bad and defamatory reviews.
Automation will help you sequence your emails to acquire reviews from your customers. Users need not go through a tedious review process since these emails have built-in review widgets and sliders.
12) By Automating Invoices
An invoice management system is a time and resource saver. It allows you to give your customers round-the-clock access to invoices and receipts.
They do not need to contact you for invoices. When a customer orders, the system automatically sends an invoice.
Plugins and extensions are also available in the market to create invoices automatically. These plugins automatically track sales and help you monitor the cash flow.
The market also has free software programs to automate your invoicing process.
Ecommerce Automation FAQs
1) Why Should I Automate My Ecommerce Business?
Automating your e-commerce business helps you on various fronts. The apparent benefits are higher productivity and reduced operating costs.
You can also improve your availability if you use the right automation tools. Automation helps you achieve consistency in business while reducing human errors.
It also helps your employees by freeing them from mundane tasks such as data entry. As a result, they will channel their energy towards things that need human intervention at any cost.
2) Is There Any Downside in Automating My Ecommerce Business?
There is no downside to automating your e-commerce business. But it does cost you some money.
Automation is not your tea if you are concerned about worker displacement. Some worry about the security concerns of syncing multiple automation tools with your business.
Your concern is legitimate. We advise you not to subscribe to any shady automation tools. Look for reviews and contact the customer support team for an automation tool to learn more about them.
An important aspect of automating your business is the robotic nature of the process. A human can respond to situations both critically and creatively. But a machine, aka an automation tool, lacks that flexibility.
3) What if I Ignore Ecommerce Automation?
You will miss the boat. The very idea behind e-commerce is automation.
Take a product page, for example.
A customer does not need an executive to explain the product’s benefits. The persuasion part is semi-automated here through product descriptions and videos.
With automation, you can scale up your business faster and with minimal errors. All while reducing the overall expenditure.
4) Does Automating Support Affect the Customer Relationship?
No. It may make the customer-company relationship a bit plasticky. Well, not literally. However, a bot will still sound mechanical unless you use a technology like Google Duplex.
Let’s get the basics right. By meaning automation, we essentially deploy a machine in place of a human to interact with another human.
A human being, on any given day, can beat a machine when it comes to emotion. People feel connected to a business through some sort of emotion. A machine cannot provide that, but a human can. Hence, a chatbot can be used for mundane queries like FAQs, and humans can be used for actual conversations.
5) Is Automation Cost-effective?
Yes. Automation will help you cut down your business expenditure. It will cut down labor costs and improve customer experience due to fast shipping.
Your business profits depend on how much output you can bring with the limited time and resources.
Without automation, things will happen, but with hiccups and at a slow pace. Putting your business in automation is akin to being on steroids.
