Acquiring new customers and gaining new orders is the top priority for ecommerce businesses.
If you have a small business, however, as you start to scale, systems and business processes will often become more complex and inefficient. It is easy to become overwhelmed with hundreds of small and repetitive tasks, from managing customer support and fulfilling orders on time to product and inventory management.
By automating your ecommerce processes, your online store can convert most or all of the manual, repetitive tasks into self-fulfilling, automated tasks.
The best part? With ecommerce automation, you can free up your team's time for customer interactions, creativity and big-picture thinking that will prove more valuable when it comes to scaling your business.
How Does Ecommerce Automation Work?
Most ecommerce automation happens through the automated workflow steps:
1. Trigger.
2. Condition.
3. Action.
For example, imagine owning a men’s clothing store and having an upcoming sales program. You want to offer discount rates based on customer spending on the store:
Platinum customers: Spend over $5000 and gain a 70% discount.
Gold customers: Spend over $3000 and gain a 50% discount.
Silver customers: Spend over $1000 and gain a 30% discount.
Here’s how the logic of the automated workflow works with a platinum customer:
1. Trigger: When an order is placed by the customer.
2. Condition: If the customer’s lifetime spending exceeds $5,000.
3. Action: Then segment the customer into the Platinum group.
With an automated workflow, you can say goodbye to pressing additional buttons regarding that process. Instead, you’ll watch it get done flawlessly all by itself.
What Should You Automate?
Identifying what to automate is the first step to ecommerce automation. When establishing your plan, consider the following:
Takes three or more people to do.
If three or more people are currently working on a single process, it is more likely that the process isn't running as efficiently as it could.
The risk of human error is portent, and communication is often lax.
Involves multiple platforms.
It is not uncommon for organizations to manually move data and information across multiple platforms, especially if the platforms lack integration capabilities.
This process is ripe for error and mistranslation, and the loss of data involved can be crippling.
Triggered by particular actions.
Processes that occur or are completed in reaction to a previous action taken are obvious choices for automation.
As shown above, through the use of a trigger, the processes can be completed quickly and on time — without any manual effort.
Benefits of Automation in Ecommerce
Ecommerce automation can increase the quality of the customer experience while simultaneously allowing businesses to prioritize more important tasks which require strategizing and social skills.
Here are a few ways your business could benefit from ecommerce automation:
Saves time.
Ecommerce automation is critical to getting more done in less time. It allows ecommerce store owners to put time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot, such as:
Auto-publish/unpublish website and social media content.
Auto-hide/unhide products and catalogs.
Auto-change product merchandising.
Auto-segment and engage with customers.
Auto-notify team members.
Increase sales and marketing effectiveness.
Automation can help ecommerce sales and marketing teams immensely through several different methods, including:
Providing personalized customer experience with real-time customer segmentation and engagement.
Assuring timely response with instant automated emails/messages sequences following customer activities.
Enabling proactive and dynamic email marketing automation campaigns with scheduled marketing campaigns on time-trigger.
The best part? It works.
According to recent statistics, adopting automation in sales and marketing can increase lead quantity by 80% and improve efficiency and marketing ROI by 45%.
Reduces errors.
Poor data management and consistent errors can harm your business immensely, causing customers to leave and damaging your bottom line.
Accurate data and information management are critical to your success as an ecommerce business. With so much data ever-present on your site, an automated workflow can save your time and prevent human error from causing significant issues.
With data backed by hard numbers and computer programming, you and your customers can rest assured that you’re receiving the correct information.
Improves customer experience.
Customers value expedience and responsiveness in a website, with 90% stating that an immediate response is important when they have a customer service question.
By automating customer service processes and workflows — from chat programs to self-service options — you can help to ensure high customer satisfaction and retention.
Examples of Ecommerce Automation
Automating your ecommerce processes can help eliminate tedious and repetitive tasks and simplify processes that could bog you down. Some examples of ecommerce automation include:
Workflows.
Workflow automation tools are built specifically to manage your business's administrative and operational responsibilities. They can help to streamline routine, day-to-day tasks while allowing you to coordinate multiple systems at once.
Notification emails.
Email notifications concerning things such as abandoned carts, order tracking, fulfillment and customer loyalty promotions can do wonders by keeping your customers up-to-date on the status of their orders or the state of your business.
By automating this process — through a simple messaging program or a complex workflow — you can save yourself time and effort while consolidating and assuring customers that their needs, wants and desires are the top priority.
Fraud filtering.
Fraud is a significant issue for ecommerce organizations, with losses estimated at $20 billion worldwide in 2021.
With automatic fraud detection and filtering, much of the human error centering fraud is removed from the equation. Automated fraud workflows can track and verify each order value through tools such as physical and IP address certifications.
For businesses that deal with high-risk orders, fraud filtering is even more critical considering the potential legal ramifications.
Marketing automation integrations.
For ecommerce companies, marketing is critical to growing and maintaining the success of your online business. Manual marketing processes are time-intensive, whether it’s managing email marketing or decoding digital platforms.
By integrating automated processes into your marketing systems, you can save a significant amount of time and manpower, opening your doors to new opportunities and ideas.
Who Benefits from Ecommerce Integration?
Ecommerce automation integration can ease the life of many people at your organization, including the following:
Operations manager.
Business automation can help operations managers by improving the day-to-day efficiencies of processes such as inventory and order management, shipping and fulfillment as well as sales.
This can be accomplished through automated workflows that help streamline manual tasks ranging from automatic tagging of products, inventory filters and grouping.
If your inventory stock starts to get low, an automated notification system can alert you while simultaneously ordering new supplies and updating waiting customers.
Customer service.
By integrating customer service systems with automated workflows, businesses and retailers can leverage specific customer data and characteristics they already have to help their customers.
With this knowledge, the automation processes can uncover the best times to reach out to customers, what kind of events or promotions are relevant to specific demographics and build tailored scripts for follow-ups.
Marketing.
Understanding customer activity and product information is critical to crafting successful marketing strategies. With manual systems, this process will inevitably become more cumbersome and lead to lower efficiency.
On the other hand, marketing automation can help companies segment customers based on specific criteria to tailor product and promotional options.
By improving customer data gathering, you will have more information at your fingertips to better market your new products and create high-converting marketing campaigns.
Design.
How your website appears to customers is critical to the success and credibility of your ecommerce brand, from design and graphics to navigational capabilities.
For those that use automation, design maintenance and upgrades will be considerably streamlined. Instead of manually reworking design specifications or running consistent reports, an automated system can take care of those — all without a lot of work.
Web development.
When developing and maintaining a website, customization is critical to long-term success.
Automation can help cure many historically labor-intensive issues for developers, from theme and template changes to stock updates to available and customizable shopping and payment options.
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The Final Word
Ecommerce organizations should apply automation as much as possible for one straightforward yet important reason — the more you automate, the fewer manual processes needed and the more your business can thrive.
Businesses have begun to catch on, with improving or adding marketing automation becoming a significant focus for the majority of ecommerce companies.
Automation saves businesses time and resources while making workflow processes faster and more efficient. It helps increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales activities. Most importantly, ecommerce automation software can bring you the freedom to focus on the things that matter most to your business.