An eCommerce store has so many operations going on. People are adding products to the cart, wishlisting different items, making the payment, abandoning a cart, requesting for a return, and much more — all at once.
Now imagine how cumbersome it would be to reach out to the target audience manually. The huge volume of these tasks calls for the implementation of marketing automation. Let’s first understand Marketing Automation and how available tools can help businesses scale with a streamlined approach.
“Automation is not about taking marketers’ jobs away from them. It’s just about re-angling what marketers do”. – That’s what Cathal Melinn had to say on the DMI Trends Podcast.
Marketing automation makes use of software to replace manual and repetitive tasks. It not only saves time but also enhances customer experience with hyper-personalized targeting.
For example: Whenever a new user signs up on your eCommerce website, greet them with a series of automated welcome email campaigns. It will build brand awareness and build confidence in the reader’s mind to make the first purchase.
This is just an example of marketing automation. It is not limited to emails or siloed channels but scales up to all the diverse channels.
In addition, eCommerce marketing automation helps in the identification of new revenue streams, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities for your eCommerce store. Whether it is optimizing conversions, acquiring customers, or retaining them, marketing automation helps in achieving all your business goals without any manual intervention. Automation tools help you set triggered campaigns and send personalized communications according to the action taken by the user.
There are several tools available in the market that help with eCommerce marketing automation.
For ease of understanding, we have divided these tools according to the size of business they would be suitable for.
If you are an enterprise-level eCommerce business, you will have to manage countless operations. By using the correct tool, you will be able to grow your enterprise further and strengthen customer relationships.
Let’s take a look at the tools that are best for enterprises. These tools are equipped with advanced features that allow to employ an omnichannel marketing strategy. As a result, marketers can automate multiple marketing initiatives and optimize them according to the analytics.
1. Adobe: The suite of tools — Adobe Marketo Engage, Target, and Campaign
Adobe Marketo Engage combines automation, lead development, content, and ABM. It uses customer-triggered events to facilitate conversations across different channels. You can use Adobe Target for A/B and multivariate testing to enhance your eCommerce UX, whereas Adobe Campaign makes it possible to view the entire customer journey on a single screen. All combined together can help you create dynamic, personalized, and omnichannel Marketing campaigns.
Designed to cater to the vast array of enterprise-level operations and customer data, Adobe is a versatile tool that enables businesses to segment, target, optimize, and automate marketing campaigns to boost customer experience (CX) and ROI.
2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the most exhaustive features for your eCommerce business. Journey Builder, Audience Builder, Personalization Builder, Content Builder, Analytics Builder, and Marketing Cloud Connect are the most important features of SFMC. Salesforce Einstein lets you create predictive journeys and personalized, cross-channel experiences driven by AI.
With top-notch tools powered by AI and Machine Learning (ML), Salesforce becomes a hub for automating marketing that drives engagement and conversions.
3. Emarsys
Emarsys simplifies the intricate operations of building, launching, and scaling personalized cross-channel campaigns to yield unmatched results. No wonder it is trusted by leading brands like Shein, Puma, and Sephora, to name a few. Its omnichannel customer engagement platform helps enhance personalization across every touchpoint.
4. Netcore
All your website visitors won’t convert into buyers. Using the right tool like Netcore can help with this. It helps deliver personalized omnichannel experiences and build human connections with your customers. An important feature of Netcore is that they allow sending AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) emails, which makes modern app functionality available within emails. Users can take action from the AMP email itself.
5. Oracle Eloqua
Oracle Eloqua equips enterprises with campaign management, data management, lead generation, and sales enablement tools. It will help create sophisticated nurture experiences for adaptive journeys at scale. You can execute ABM strategies to engage, convert, and expand target accounts. An extensible open framework helps connect data from any system making business operations smoother with an exchange of huge chunks of data seamlessly.
6. Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 connects sales and marketing, thereby increasing visibility into customer needs. It also helps streamline processes and coach sellers. Dynamics 365 Commerce creates a unified, seamless buying experience to personalize customer engagement. As a result, it will lead customers closer to conversions. This tool has a range of intelligent business applications that are a lot more than CRM and ERP.
Managing expansion is a burning problem with medium-sized eCommerce businesses. They have to cope with the competition and secure their finances, all at once. Using the right marketing automation tool can help combat all these challenges and empower you to grow into an enterprise or large-sized business.
Moengage and Mailchimp would work pretty well for medium-sized businesses too. In addition, there are some other tools too, discussed below.
1. Klaviyo
Klaviyo enables omnichannel automation with email, SMS, push notifications, forms, and social targeting. You can send behavioral emails and SMS that are customized for every buyer according to their preferences. It also lets you segment the customers based on their browsing habits, order value, and previous purchases.
2. MoEngage
Moengage is a suitable platform for growing startups and mid-market eCommerce brands. It will allow you to send tailor-made communications according to customer behavior and interactions. You can build omnichannel customer journeys with the help of a user-friendly visual editor. Their proprietary technology will also let you ensure an optimum push notification delivery rate.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot’s eCommerce-focused marketing tool can be used to create optimized product pages, high-converting landing pages for ads, and tailor-made emails. It will personalize your marketing communications like emails, webpages for cart recovery programs, upsell campaigns, etc. Furthermore, you can connect your online store to HubSpot for several powerful integrations that simplify the operations even more.
4. DotDigital
DotDigital brings together customer data from every touchpoint of your eCommerce business. It creates a single source for all your data needs. Accordingly, you can create campaigns that draw the user’s attention and deliver a hyper-personalized marketing experience. Their analytic tools are also on point and layer data from different sources into intuitive dashboards.
5. Bloomreach
A tool that makes complicated personalization simple, Bloomreach, helps follow the marketing triad by showing the right product to the right person at the right time. It guides the buyers closer to conversion and aids in omnichannel marketing by running campaigns across emails, social media, and mobile apps.
6. CleverTap
Automated user segmentation, omnichannel marketing, analytics and insights — you name it and CleverTap has it. It is the World’s #1 Retention Cloud that helps supercharge your mid-sized business growth. If you are an app-first eCommerce business, CleverTap is a complete platform that caters to all your needs.
7. AppsFlyer
Wanna scale your app installs and enhance visibility? Try out AppsFlyer for your eCommerce business. It comes with a new standard of privacy-enhancing measurement and deep linking solutions that improve customer LTV (Life Time Value). It works as a tool that turns the insights into actions by providing a comprehensive dashboard.
Generally, small-sized eCommerce businesses will have fewer resources. They might be running on a shoestring budget with limited access to advanced tools. Such businesses will gain maximum advantage through marketing automation tools that cater to their present needs while allowing them to scale. Cost-effectiveness will be another factor to be considered.
Here are some of the most effective marketing automation tools for small-scale businesses.
1. Mailchimp
Whether you use WooCommerce, BigCommerce or any other platform for your small scale eCommerce business, it can be easily integrated with Mailchimp. It comes with a powerful Customer Journey builder that allows you to create automated purchase paths according to the user’s past interactions. It will help you in creating engaging emails, digital ads, pop-up forms, and social media posts.
2. Zoho
Zoho One is a unified platform that allows you to integrate 40+ applications. For every small-sized eCommerce business, scalability is of paramount importance. With Zoho, you can streamline data management and automate everyday tasks so that you can focus on business growth rather than transactional operations.
3. WebEngage
Growing any business runs on the simple principle: Be where your customers are. That’s exactly how WebEngage can help you. It allows you to connect with your users on their preferred channels. You can either pick one or create a multi-channel engagement strategy. Just focus on creating a compelling campaign and the tool will do the rest.
4. Drip
With Drip’s customer-first strategies, you can deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels and build real relationships. You just have to customize their workflow templates according to your brand tone and goals. Activate them and take your customer engagement to the next level while ensuring long-term loyalty.
5. Omnisend
Omnisend serves as a single, eCommerce-focused automation platform that imparts a coherent, personalized experience. You just have to drag & drop the channels — email, SMS, and web push notifications into a single workflow. To make automation a breeze for you, they have pre-built different messages, subject lines, and workflow settings for various campaigns.
6. Keap
Small-sized eCommerce businesses are often struggling with too many tasks and tight deadlines. Keap’s marketing automation features let you collect new leads with minimal effort and drive the next actions, thereby propelling sales. It facilitates personalized automation that saves your time. (precisely 10 hours a week)
7. Sendinblue
If you are looking for the smartest and most intuitive platform for your growing eCommerce business, your search ends at Sendinblue. It will help you with beginner and advanced automation workflows. You can even A/B test different versions and optimize your automation strategy. Sendinblue helps with email, SMS, live chat, and every other channel where your customers are.
Besides the marketing automation tools discussed above, three tools that can give a leg up to your eCommerce digital marketing business operations are:
1. SEMRush
eCommerce businesses looking forward to growing their online visibility should consider investing in SEMRush. It is equipped with different toolkits that serve different purposes like:
Try out their pro, guru, and enterprise plans based on your specific needs.
For example: The Pro plan allows you to carry out 5 projects with tracking of 500 keywords. It is perfect for newbies and small sized businesses.
If you want access to content marketing toolkit, historical data, multi-location and device tracking, Looker Studio integration in addition to SEO features, the Guru plan is the safest bet for you.
For enterprise-level eCommerce businesses, it would be advisable to invest in the Business plan. It includes advanced features like API access, free migration from third-party tools, and PLA analytics.
2. Ahrefs
Running a profitable eCommerce business is a lot about visibility. Your customers should be able to find you. That’s where Ahrefs comes into the picture. It helps you with keyword research, site audit, and rank tracker. Imagine having great products in your eCommerce store but failing to meet business goals just because you are nowhere in the search results. Ahrefs is THE tool that will help you pick the right keywords and write engaging SEO-driven content that gets noticed.
3. Unicommerce
What if all your marketing automation tools are in place but the warehouse and inventory management are in disarray? It will impact your order fulfillment rate and customer satisfaction. Unicommerce is a great tool that works as a warehouse management solution, inventory management solution, and order management system imparting a consistent customer experience with its Omnichannel solution.
Renowned brands like Vero Moda, Myntra, and Edamama have tried this tool and observed unmatched results.
That brings us to an end of the eCommerce marketing automation tools… But there’s still a lot to learn. If you are keen to get more insights about how to execute omnichannel marketing automation for your eCommerce store, we have a comprehensive growth guide at your disposal.
What it covers:
A marketer couldn’t be everywhere; That’s why they drew on marketing automation tools! Running a successful eCommerce business is a lot about investing in a comprehensive automation solution that allows you to set up targeted campaigns while your team focuses on other important tasks that drive more profitability. It ensures the productivity of your employees as your business scales newer heights.
If you are looking for a no-obligation consultation on selecting a marketing automation tool or need help setting up one, our eCommerce experts are here to help. Get in touch!
Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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