4 Inspiring Examples of Marketing Automation in eCommerce
September 13, 2018 - 11 minutes readThese case studies showcase the undeniable power of marketing automation
“Marketing Automation has played a key role in shaping the success of modern-day marketers. We are on a mission to improve marketing automation, one workflow at a time.” – Sourabh Mathur
The dawning of the autonomous age is upon us. We’re on the cusp of having self-driving cars become an everyday consumer reality, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) changing the way we interact with the world around us, and software that can help busy business owners increase their productivity while expanding their commercial reach and minimizing their workload.
For time-stretched eCommerce business owners, digital marketers, and team leaders with an overwhelming list of duties to perform on a daily basis, the ability to automate particular tasks or proficiencies can mean the difference between doing moderately well and being a roaring commercial success.
Presently, 67% of marketing leaders use a marketing automation platform. Moreover, 88% of marketers use more than one marketing automation tool on a regular basis.
The potential of marketing automation is great for those who embrace it – and here, we’re going to explore four examples of marketing automation to inspire your own efforts.
But before we do, let’s look at the definition of marketing automation.
Marketing automation explained
At its core, marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the primary aim of automating various marketing activities.
A host of marketing departments need to automate repetitive tasks such as engaging in social media, sending emails, conducting customer service interactions, and performing other website-based duties. Marketing automation technology makes these pursuits easier and more fluent.
To put this technology into perspective, here are the main benefits of utilizing marketing automation as part of your business’s digital strategy:
- Marketing automation tools can increase productivity by conducting time-consuming repetitive everyday promotional tasks.
- This autonomous technology can help increase the scale and reach of your campaigns by eliminating the need to send out marketing communications manually.
- The reporting capabilities of many of these developments and platforms can help you spot inefficiencies, capitalize on strengths, and make your team more accountable for their actions.
- Automated, personalized product recommendations can serve to help you increase your average order size, thereby increasing your bottom line. By automating laborious everyday tasks, you will have more time to create, strategize, and focus on the areas that will ultimately help you grow, evolve, and scale your business.
Now that we’re up to speed with the concept of marketing automation in addition to its core benefits, let’s explore our hand-picked examples of brands by using the technology to their advantage.
Topshop – the welcome email
Despite the rise of mobile applications and the prevalence of social media, email marketing communication is still incredibly effective when it comes to connecting with prospects and promoting your brand.
As a matter of fact, on average, 320% more revenue is attributed to welcome emails on a per email basis than any other form of promotional email. And, studies suggest that consumers who buy products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers.
Armed with this knowledge, fashion brand Topshop set out to supercharge its online sales with a fresh welcome email initiative that offered its newest subscribers a 10% discount as well as access to exclusive members-only content.
Not only was this email visually pleasing, digestible, inspiring, and succinct with a clear call to action, but, through the use of marketing automation technology, the brand was also able to reach out to every new subscriber with this communication without manually sending out any welcome email. The result? A significant boost in sales in addition to increased brand awareness – the magic combination.
Nau – re-engagement
45% of recipients who receive re-engagement emails actively read them. That said, if you do have subscribers on your list that have gone quiet, so to speak, branching out to them with a well-crafted incentive could provide you with a healthy return on investment.
To reconnect with its inactive subscribers and encourage them to engage with the brand once again, Nau Apparel used marketing automation to identify the quiet subscribers in its list and branch out to them with a wonderfully crafted ‘we miss you’ re-engagement email, offering an email-exclusive ‘save 20% on your next order’ discount, in addition to a similar communication that is triggered as a result of a cart shopping abandonment.
By having the power to trigger emails to be sent based on a subscribers’ actions or lack of it, including not opening an email, not making a purchase in two months, or not clicking an email’s CTA link, it is possible to inspire repeat custom, encourage brand loyalty, and offer value on a significant scale – like Nau has done with its savvy automated re-engagement campaign.
Shuperb – the how-to guide
Besides offering discounts, deals, and consumer incentives powered by marketing automation, it’s possible to showcase your value proposition, connect with your audience on a personal level, and drive loyalty by offering sharable content based on value.
This useful, practical, and perfectly presented piece of content served to deepen the post-purchase relationship with the brand’s customer, bestowing a relevant level of knowledge and cultivating a positive brand sentiment in the process.
By automatically triggering marketing emails to share the content with post-purchase customers and scheduling the asset at optimum times across its most engaged social media channels, the brand not only helped to increase its customer retention but also expand its brand reach exponentially.
Jupiter Asset Management – intelligence and personalization
Beyond email and social media, marketing automation is a powerful tool that can serve to enhance many aspects of a business’s commercial activities, big or small, making it more productive, more streamlined, and more intelligent in the process.
An excellent example of such innovation comes from UK-based investment business, Jupiter Assets. As part of the company’s overall digital transformation strategy, CEO Stewart Conway, leveraged the power of marketing automation to reposition its sales and marketing teams as relationship managers.
To do so, Conway took on the task of creating what he refers to as automated ‘exoskeletons’ or digital management templates that could assist sales and marketing teams in doing more on a daily basis. Jupiter is essentially using its marketing automation platform and initiatives as the ‘brain’ or ‘nerve center’ of its digital relationship management and customer experience activities while using the data collected through its various tools to enhance its promotional and content creation.
Speaking to the CMO on the subject, Conway explains:
“Where we’re just about to get to is literally that dream when a sales guy speaks to someone and has a good conversation, the website knows, understands, and responds, and the email teams can follow up. It’s creating that real customer view that links everything together.
Overall, we’re trying to get marketing teams to be more responsive to our data, work with sales guys to get a sense of leads getting in, then determine if we need to get more people in the top of the funnel, or how we nurture them.”
Despite this strategy being in its infancy, the business has already seen an incredibly positive shift in its internal company culture in addition to its brand engagement and productivity levels – a testament to the untapped potency of marketing automation.
Businesses like Jupiter assets are pushing the envelope of marketing automation, showing that with a little ingenuity and forward-thinking, a development like this can drive genuine innovation while making permanent, positive shifts to internal company culture.
While marketing automation is no substitute for creativity, forward thinking, and hard work, as you will by now be abundantly aware, this technology and mindset can help you grow your business, help you communicate with more prospects, and conduct your promotional activities in a more efficient, effective, and intelligent way than ever before.
By working in an open, communicative, collaborative, and creative environment while ensuring that everyone within your company understands your new processes, platforms, and technological integrations, you can use marketing automation to not only increase overall productivity but ultimately gain more life-long customer and brand advocates – which to an eCommerce business, is priceless.
If you would like to make your business more efficient, more organized and more data-savvy, and taking your brand to new and exciting commercial heights, take a look at the services, software, and solutions that we have to offer.
