I often hear from retailers that they struggle to find the time for effective ecommerce marketing when most of their energy and resources are dedicated to operations and customer support. For these businesses, my first question is "have you invested in a marketing automation platform?"
Marketing automation is quickly becoming the industry standard across ecommerce, helping retailers save time, boost sales, increase efficiency, and enhance relationships with customers. It involves using cloud-based software (like HubSpot) to execute repetitive marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posting and lead generation. Marketing automation also allows users to easily plan, test and measure marketing tasks to improve effectiveness and grow revenue.
How marketing automation boosts ecommerce growth and marketing reach
1. Personalizes messaging
Marketing automation helps you to target both potential and existing customers in a personalized manner. You can use the data you have on your customers (like product preferences, past purchases and demographics) to create personalized messages as opposed to general advertisements. Personalized ads increase the probability of conversion by almost 10x!
2. Saves time
Ecommerce marketing automation saves time by reducing repetitive tasks and allowing you to execute at scale. Imagine the time you spend posting to Instagram or sending a thank you email to every customer when they make a purchase. With marketing automation you can configure workflows to carry out these tasks automatically so that you can focus other important tasks.
3. Reduces costs
Marketing automation platforms combine the features of many disparate marketing apps. Email, landing pages, website hosting, social media management and more can all be found in one solution.
4. Enhances brand consistency
Successful marketing strategies are consistent. The Mere-Exposure Effect (sometimes called The Familiarity Principal) has a profound effect in ecommerce marketing. This psychological phenomenon states that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are more familiar with them. Marketing automation platforms make it very easy for online businesses to consistently deliver messaging, offers, and more to customers... thereby increasing their familiarity with them.
5. Increases efficiency
Whether your marketing team is small or large, marketing automation helps you make the most out of the available resources by enabling you to scale activity. Creating workflows, cloning existing email templates and scheduling a number of social posts ahead of time are just a few examples of efficiency gains through ecommerce marketing automation.
6. Improves lead generation and nurturing
Lead generation and nurturing can be a time-consuming process to manage if done manually. Marketing automation can be configured to deliver offers to prospects and customers automatically based on their behaviors, demographics and more. Also, you get a clear picture of customer behavior by tracking (and scoring) their digital engagement with your web properties.
7. Provides a concrete measure of success
The success of any digital marketing campaign depends on its ability to monitor performance and determine what's working and what's not. Marketing automation helps you not only to attain efficiency but also to measure progress. You can identify areas in your marketing strategy that need improvement or test new campaigns and strategies.
8. Better ROI
Marketing automation increases customer lifetime value by increasing cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups. When you combine customer lifetime value and enhanced lead management, you get increased sales activity that results in better ROI.
How HubSpot makes marketing automation easy
HubSpot is a leading ecommerce marketing automation provider, delivering a powerful and highly scalable solution for organizations of all sizes. As a one-stop shop for all things ecommerce marketing automation, these are just some of the ways HubSpot makes marketing automation easy:
- Features & Functionality: HubSpot has a robust set of tools that make it one of the leading marketing automation platforms available. Among these include workflow creation and optimization, email marketing, social media, lead scoring, event-based segmentation, and reporting. Content creation tools, for example, ensure that you generate quality content with keywords, links, and SEO advice. HubSpot's reporting feature is a remarkable one because it helps online businesses track their progress and success with campaigns.
- Scalability: Beyond the features, HubSpot simplifies marketing automation through scalability. You can easily clone email, workflow, forms and more to eliminate unnecessary duplication of effort. HubSpot enables users to be extremely productive, even as the number of customers or orders increases.
- Price: Many online businesses shy away from marketing automation because of its costs. HubSpot ecommerce marketing automation is priced to fit the needs and size of the customer.
- Easy to navigate user interface: HubSpot has a friendly user interface, and hence you don't need sophisticated IT skills to use it. Also, training employees on using a new system can be daunting and divert attention from the company's operations. Unific offers expert onboarding services to ensure you can start getting value from your investment immediately.
And finally, a shameless plug...
As a HubSpot Connect Partner and top-tier Diamond Agency Partner, Unific knows how to best set up and configure HubSpot for merchants. Our HubSpot Ecommerce Onboarding Package will expedite your portal setup, learning curve and time-to-value.
We understand your business model and how to make your shopping cart and HubSpot work together to support it. Schedule a call with us today.
