Increase eCommerce Conversions With Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is not exactly a new concept, seeing as it’s been around for quite some time. It has been helping businesses grow, expand, turn their prospects to customers and lead these customers further down the sales funnel.

Marketing automation is pretty much any kind of software that automates marketing processes. 

These processes are necessary and repeated, such as sending out e-mails that will be personalized and tailor-made for each customer or releasing social media ad campaigns in a timely manner.

Or even tracking down and automating sequences for an eCommerce website, seeing as the eCommerce business is one of Marketing Automation techniques’ biggest fan!

Let’s go ahead and see how marketing automation can make your life easier in 2019, if you’re into the eCommerce game:

Be clever with your signups

You already know that you need to get prospects to sign up for your email list. 

But how are they going to do that if you’ve got pop-up forms appearing as soon as they land on your website? 

No one likes pop-ups, and the prospect will most probably just close the window and get on with their day anyway. Instead, allow your visitors to browse through your website. 

Track how much time they spent on your product pages, what they clicked on, what they saw, and use an exit intent pop-up to capture their attention before they go instead of when they arrive.

It’s an easy, discreet way to do things and you can extract a great deal of useful data that way. 

And you don’t need me to tell you that data is incredibly important in this case, as it will help you determine your KPIs and reach your goals.

Personalization

Personalization yes, but not in the way you think. It’s 2019 after all, and an email that says “Hello John, here’s what we’ve picked for you” won’t really work.

We are talking about the highest level of personalization you can offer. Track your users’ activity and start segmenting. This will help you make good use of your data and will turn a one-time customer to a more frequent, even a loyal-one. 

Try and work with personalized welcome emails, replenishment emails, cart abandonment emails, anything that will make your user think that you care. 

For example, if an online shopper leaves your ecommerce site during the checkout process, abandoning his shopping cart behind, you could send him a personalized email with a limited time offer, some product description of the items he left behind, complete with a great call to action to get them to come back. It's a great way to increase conversions with email marketing and reduce the number of abandoned carts.

Or, let’s assume that the potential customer visits an eCommerce store that sells clothes and buys a pair of trousers online. A very common practice would be for the retailer to send an email that recommends buying something to make an outfit out of that pair of trousers. 

It could be a shirt today or a purse next week, it doesn’t really matter, as long as he gets sent recommendations.

Word of warning, though: The fact that I bought that pair of trousers doesn’t mean that I’ll love the outfit you recommend. So, when you’re coming up with that part of your marketing email strategy, study your data and don’t be afraid to get very creative. You could also do some a/b testing to see what works best!

Use Chatbots and AI

Why? I hear you ask. Well, the answer is quite simple here: Shopping in an online store with nobody to make real-life recommendations can be quite boring.

This can change drastically if you use chatbots or Artifical Intelligence (AI) that can “talk” to the prospect. 

A fun dialogue and one or two good recommendations can go a long way and it will definitely help you lead your prospects further down the funnel and turn them to customers with great lifetime value. It can improve your potential customer's shopping experience and therefore lead to a better average conversion rate. You will turn a couple of online shoppers into high-quality leads.

Again, get creative. Use questions to determine what your customers need and want, you could ask all kinds of things, and even plan interactive games that would help them reach a decision.

Gamify the whole experience, as gamification is a fairly new concept in any sector except elearning, and there is a huge space for improvement.

Buyer personas will be a must

Buyer personas have been around for so long, it seems pretty silly for us to mention them still. But we can’t point that out enough, seeing as buyer personas give data that will be definitive factors in planning your strategy. 

Create your personas, fill in the demographics, maybe you could even gather a few “selected lucky people” and offer incentives. 

That way, you’ll be able to fill in actual data, gamify the experience, as we’ve already mentioned would be a new way to engage potential customers, and the “beta tester” will be able to enjoy some exclusive benefits, which might turn them into loyal customers. 

Predictive lead scoring, anyone?

As opposed to traditional lead scoring, predictive lead scoring is an automated procedure that can and will take into account various data that have to do with your customers.

That data could be extracted from your buyer personas and your actual up-to-date customers. And, the great thing about them is that they can be used to check whether the leads are qualified or not.

The process is automated and all you need to do is brainstorm with your team, come up with a formula and set up the automation sequence. You don’t need to nail down the data that is most or least important, as the automation itself will do this for you. 

This will help any eCommerce store hold onto loyal customers, which is a more cost-effective technique, rather than creating new customers.

Pro tip: How about scoring some more leads through your social media channels? See how they did it!

Quality over quantity. Always.

In 2019, quality leads will rule again. It’s way more important to generate high-quality leads than it is to constantly generate new leads that might not end up in a sale. Seeing as new leads are only a top-of-the-funnel practice. Numbers don’t lie on that one:

(Source)

And what is the best way to nurture your leads? Email marketing, of course! Some notable Email Marketing Software is Moosend and MailChimp.

Optimize, optimize, optimize!

I am talking about your webpage, your emails and your landing page. 

You should definitely optimize for mobile, seeing as mobile platforms are all the rage today. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the desktop is dead, but it seems that the quicker something loads on mobile platforms, the better it is for any type of business.

Don’t believe us? Well, perhaps the numbers will be enough to convince you:

(Source)

Also, don’t forget that millennials make up a large part of the targeted market nowadays. 

And millennials are very familiar with technology, it seems outdated for them (us) to get out of the house and do… Well, anything! Shopping, paying bills, dating, if it can happen online, we’ll do it online!

It also helps that online shopping is getting easier by the day with enhanced user experience, unlimited product categories and online stores, multiple payment options such as credit card and paypal, lower shipping costs, and the ability to shop anywhere on mobile devices.

A site visitor can now not only read the product description, but get product videos, product reviews, and product images when shopping which reduces friction can raise the average conversion rate.

There are plenty more ways to increase eCommerce conversion rate in 2019, but I think the above cover the most important ones. 

Of course, an honorable mention should go to customer experience and list segmentation, two things that are traditional, but will greatly help your business in 2019 as well as in any other year.