As web-based commerce becomes increasingly tough, it’s becoming essential to master web tools such as marketing automation. Having a well-optimized website is no longer enough to beat the competition in the digital world; you need to develop a marketing strategy that increases the number of prospects and traffic to your site. The automation of various tasks contributes to the conversion of prospects on the Internet. So, what does marketing automation really consist of?
The benefits of marketing automation
For a company that has established itself on the web to do business, creating a marketing automation strategy is almost a necessity to subsist on it, especially so that tasks are all automated.
How marketing automation works
For a commercial enterprise, in order to make a sale on the web, it’s essential to design a website optimized with SEO tools, enabling content that complies with search engine criteria. To popularize the company’s website, it may also be necessary to use purchasing leverage, which can be very costly. As a result, the company’s conversion rates will gradually plummet as acquisition costs rise. This is a mistake that can happen when starting a business on the web, as the company focuses only on those customers who commit to a sale and neglects the 99% who have ignored or abandoned their shopping baskets.
This is where marketing automation comes in, to automatically contact customers who have left their shopping baskets or simply forgotten about them. This is how marketing automation works.
Building a profitable e-commerce website with marketing automation
Implementing an automation strategy targeting customer relations(customer relationship automation) can boost a company’s revenue. To do this, it’s vital to identify your customers’ needs by defining important relationship points based on the interactions they’ve made on the website. To increase your customer portfolio, you need to develop a marketing automation strategy that will keep them coming back to your company’s website, regardless of the type of channel you use:
- Email,
- Chatbot,
- SMS,
- Print,
- Popin,
- etc.
In this way, the company can benefit from :
- Significantly improve customer satisfaction by enabling them to access the company’s website services from anywhere;
- Optimize productivity by focusing company resources on high-value actions;
- A strong capacity to target prospects via analyses made when they visit the website;
- More reliable management of resources and of the possible scenarios that will be applied for each prospect;
- Increased accuracy and updating of databases collected via website interactions, making it easier to launch new processes.
The benefits of developing a Marketing Automation strategy
The use of a marketing automation strategy can differ depending on the type of company. For B2B companies, the aim of marketing automation is to increase and satisfy prospects. For B2C companies, marketing automation is applied primarily to make it easier to interact with future customers and existing prospects. Via email campaigns, B2C companies send e-mails to their customers in three categories:
- Mail triggered by a prospect’s recent action, as in the case of collection via a chatbot, basket receipt emails, recommendations based on the prospect’s recent visit, and so on. These are all sales activities designed to maximize conversion;
- Lifecycle mail to ask customers after each sale if they are satisfied with their purchase, or if they are ready to travel, etc. These follow-up activities (part of emailing campaigns) further optimize the customer experience;
- Other emails such as new product launches, the arrival of promotions, SMS messages in the event of flash sales, and so on. These emailing campaigns enable the company to ensure that prospects remain loyal and are encouraged to reapply on the company’s website.
Convert existing demand from prospects
It should be noted that marketing automation does not create demand from prospects. The aim of marketing automation is to encourage the expression of demand via offers, so that customers are not lured away by the competition. This means that the money a company has invested to increase its visibility on the web (SEO, SEA, Webinars, Content Marketing, etc.) only pays off if the firm knows :
- Automate the retention of a large number of prospects to build up a broad customer portfolio;
- Attract future customers regardless of the device they use;
- Identify the needs and products of interest to each prospect;
- Contextual content to be sent to each e-commerce website customer;
- When to send emails to prospects.
In this way, you ensure that your prospects return to your website, while at the same time guaranteeing steady, rising profits over a long period. Once again, this demonstrates the effectiveness of a marketing automation strategy.
Build lasting trust with prospects
By automating the marketing strategy, the company can better respond to customers’ needs, and thus ensure their trust during the purchasing process on the website. This trust, however, is only established if the company succeeds in :
- To answer customers’ questions clearly and precisely;
- To personalize the needs sought by prospects in order to facilitate the choice of contextual content to be sent;
- Use marketing automation to create omnichannel content to support customers as they visit the website.
In this way, customers will be able to decide how and when they visit the company’s website, at any time. This gives you a major advantage over the competition, who only communicate with prospects during business hours or by telephone.
Respond immediately to prospects’ needs
Automating your marketing strategy allows you to better identify the weak signals emitted by your customers. These signals are usually the implicit desires of your prospects, needs they don’t yet know they have. With marketing automation, the company can easily detect its weak signals, enabling it to better identify and retain customers.
Develop scenarios to increase the number of customers
To keep track of visitor (future customer) interaction on your e-commerce site, it’s a good idea to design scenarios using marketing automation. This will enable you to track the behavior of your prospects and, at the same time, develop an appropriate scenario for each customer, whether they are passing through or generating sales. In this way, the number of customer contacts will increase, leading to future purchases and increased profits for the company.
The application ofa marketing automation strategy can help to increase the number of your customer contacts, while ensuring their loyalty and return to your e-commerce site via an email campaign and the automation of various tasks.
