The automation of e-commerce businesses has become much easier and more efficient in recent years. More and more online retailers are choosing to automate their activities and workflows and for a good reason. Automation can positively affect multiple areas of your business, including marketing, sales, customer service, order fulfillment, inventory management, accounting, and much more. Let’s see how this works in more detail.
Why Automation is Key for Ecommerce
There are many substantial benefits that different automation software can bring to your online shop. Here are some of the most important effects of a well-executed automation strategy:
-Speeding up all kinds of processes and streamlining workflows in the company.
-Saving time: your marketing, sales, IT, customer service, and operations department will be rescued from performing a number of tiresome, repetitive tasks on a daily basis, which will give them time to focus on strategic and creative aspects of their work.
-By saving time, it cuts your expenses, so it saves you money, too.
-Increasing conversions by improving customer experience and optimizing the sales process.
-Minimizing the potential for all sorts of human errors.
-Collecting, storing, and interpreting loads of customer data and putting them into action. These data can be vital for gaining a slight but crucial edge over your competitors.
All in all, automation can improve the way your company works on many levels. In this article, we’ll deal with some specific areas of your business you should look to automate. We’ll explain how to make the best use of automation tools in these areas and take a brief look at some of the concrete tools you can utilize for this purpose.
Email Marketing Automation
To this day, email marketing remains the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy. Different automatic emails can generate a lot of revenue if they’re being sent to the right people at the right time.
For instance, the cost of automatic welcome emails is next to nothing, yet these can significantly affect your bottom line. On average, welcome emails bring five times more sales than regular bulk emails.
Of course, welcome emails aren’t really enough. You’ll have to be more specific and carefully set triggers that will prompt the software to send different follow-up emails. Take cart abandonment, for example – as much as 70% of all online carts end up abandoned for various reasons. And it turns out that a brief reminder about the abandoned cart can be that little nudge in the right direction that a shopper needed. If you automatically send them emails as soon as they give up on purchasing a product, these will generate 36 times more sales than ordinary bulk mails – especially if you offer discounts or other incentives.
In general, emails can open up a whole world of upselling and cross-selling opportunities with consumers that have already shown interest in some products. Sending follow-up messages with related products can boost your sales substantially. Here it’s important to send the right offers to the right people, which basically comes down to accurate customer data and smart segmentation. You need to set the parameters and triggers right, and the automation software will do the rest.
A great tool to consider for this purpose is Klaviyo. It offers fast integrations with a huge number of e-commerce platforms, which will save you tons of time, as everything can be controlled from a single dashboard. Klaviyo also provides great segmentation and personalization features, including dynamic data blocks that will ensure that different sections of an email are shown to different carefully targeted groups. More than 30 thousand users who choose Klaviyo may be a good indication that it’s a very useful tool to automate your email marketing efforts.
Inventory Management Automation
Not having the right amount of control over your inventory can hurt your business in many ways. In an era where UX and CX are only getting more important, making a customer wait for an additional week or two because you don’t have the product in stock is anything short of a disaster. To put it in numbers, 24% of all shoppers reported having canceled their order because of slow delivery, while 38% of them said they’d never buy from a retailer again after a negative delivery experience.
Updating info about your inventory manually may be possible for some very small businesses. But in e-commerce, every business can become an overnight success, and every business needs to be scalable. Manual updates are not a scalable solution.
That’s why some sort of inventory management automation software is becoming a must for most companies. The right automation tools will ensure you continuously have a detailed real-time overview of your stock. This approach is much more efficient than periodical updating, as selling online is an unpredictable endeavor, and you don’t want to leave anything to chance. The software can monitor your inventory and automatically order products you need more of, unpublish out-of-stock products and even pause advertising for these products until you replenish your supply.
A great inventory management tool you can use is InFlow. It can help you organize your products with the help of lists, categories, photos, and serial numbers. It helps you stay on top of your costs, it helps you track your stock, and it can also take a lot of the stress out of reordering items. You can easily monitor everything from a handy dashboard.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the tool’s features. Best of all, InFlow integrates with plenty of the most popular e-commerce platforms (Shopify and Amazon included), as well as Zapier and QuickBooks, so you’ll have no trouble making the absolute most of it.
Workflow Automation
A lot of the work we do is done haphazardly and without that element of forethought that can make it productive, effective, and efficient. As humans, we’re certainly not always capable of giving 100% (and neither should we be). But sometimes, all it takes is a tool to help us make the most of the time and resources we have at our disposal.
With a clever workflow automation tool, you can build a smart workplace that will enable your team to communicate better and stay on top of all of their tasks. A smart workplace will ensure team members can tell at a glance who is doing what at any given time, what the priorities are, and when there is time to relax a bit.
It will also offer plenty of flexibility: you can still choose to tackle tasks in any order, but you do have a reliable and up-to-date set of data to base your decisions on.
A good example of such a tool is Asana. While there are certainly more trending workflow management tools out there, Asana has been around for quite some time and it has perfected its solution. Asana allows you to design your own processes and create boards that help you stay on top of tasks. You can manage projects and teams with it, and there is a calendar you can use integrated with the tool. Plus, it works for any team: marketing, sales, IT, and so on.
Smart Calendar Tool
Smart calendars can be used for much more than just reminding us of birthdays and dentist appointments. A truly advanced calendar app can help you organize your team, arrange meetings, increase your productivity, and eliminate noise in communication.
This kind of scheduling tool is useful for any business, not just online-based ones. When designed well, they can save you a lot of time and instantly provide you with info relevant for your meeting or appointment. These can include a social media profile of a person you’re meeting or the weather forecast for the day and place you’ve set.
It’s best to show the benefits of such a tool as an example. Take Woven, for instance. Apart from standard functionalities you would expect from any calendar app, it offers conveniences such as smart templates for different meeting types, group polls, and availability sharing that speeds up the process of arranging a meeting immensely. Instead of losing time on endless group chats, everyone involved can simply mark their free and busy hours with just a few taps. This sort of tool can relieve you of a lot of frustration and time-wasting.
Live Chat Tool
The introduction of modern technology into the field of customer service has resulted in consumers asking more from brands in this respect. Instant responses and constant availability are big priorities for shoppers. As much as 90% of consumers have labeled an immediate response to their customer support issue as “important” or “very important.”
Users also expect you to be available via all possible channels. If they have a question about a product on your website that they’d like to buy, they may not be in the mood to search for your brand on social media in order to DM you. Additional few clicks or taps can make all the difference in the world here. That’s why you should think about a live chat automation feature on your website.
Now, very few chatbots today can engage in a truly complex conversation and solve complicated issues, as they still have trouble with properly processing natural language. Still, they can be very useful for answering basic questions and routing the right customer service rep into the conversation once things get too tricky for them. This tactic reduces costs, employs a “worker” that will be available around the clock, increases the average order value, and can boost your conversions by up to 20%.
Drift is the world’s leading conversational marketing platform with some very useful advanced live chat features. For instance, you have multiple inboxes at your disposal to manage different types of conversations, and you can save replies to common questions. A great thing about Drift is that you can see who’s browsing your website even before they choose to engage in a conversation and you can easily import all leads from Drift into your marketing automation platform. Finally, detailed chat analytics will help you learn whether you’re doing things right and make improvements accordingly.
Repricing Automation Software
If you’re selling on Amazon, then you understand the importance of continually updating your prices. Readjusting your prices based on the prices your rivals offer makes you more competitive and gives you a better chance of obtaining a Buy Box, which can substantially increase your sales.
In short, only the top sellers can win a share of the BuyBox, and the Amazon algorithm decides who the top sellers are based on several factors. Among other things, top sellers are supposed to provide reliable and fast shipping, quick responses to customers, stable inventory levels, and low order defect rate. Finally, one of the most important factors is the price.
That’s why you need to be up-to-date with price trends among your competitors and update your prices on a regular basis. It can get very difficult, if not impossible, to constantly check on your competitors’ prices and manually modify yours whenever needed. If you fail to adapt to prices offered by other sellers, you can get pushed out of the BuyBox almost instantly.
Here, repricing automation software can solve your problems. Aura can be a great tool of choice in this case. It will follow other designated retailers, register any changes in price, and react based on the values that you set previously. For instance, you can aim to be the FBA seller with the lowest price or simply target the current BuyBox price. Aura offers many different strategies and strategy templates and lets you easily define your competitors. It updates your prices just a minute or two after a relevant change happens and thus helps you maximize your time in the BuyBox.
Order Fulfillment Automation
Simply put, order fulfillment is the process that starts when the customer clicks the “order” button and finishes when the ordered product is at their door. It incorporates many different activities, like order processing, sending the confirmation email, printing labels, packing, shipping, and even managing returns. To fulfill the order successfully, businesses also have to handle some issues prior to the actual order, such as receiving inventory shipments or storing and managing the inventory.
Obviously, this whole process has a lot of moving parts, many parties are involved, and managing everything manually can be a nightmare. Automating these procedures can save a lot of time and money, and serve as a safeguard against human error.
It’s vital that all these processes are integrated and that they can all be controlled by a single tool. If you use one app to process the order, a second one to find a carrier, a third one to print labels, and a fourth one to handle returns, it can still get very confusing. That’s why you will want a good tool that enables you to monitor your inventory and optimize your stock.
Automating Personal Life
Finally, let’s try to conclude this article on a different note. Automation tools can help your business a whole lot, but it’s important to remember that they’re not almighty and that, at the end of the day, you’re the one controlling them. That’s why you should try a bit of automation in your daily life and introduce stable, healthy habits.
Different software can indeed help substantially boost your productivity, but it all starts with you.
Productivity comes from the stability of your body and mind, and your big-picture business decisions can’t be automated. The technology is there to help and you’re there to lead. It’s important to remember that and not overestimate the power of automation. Especially in the times when we need to think about our mental and physical health more than ever.
