The most obvious benefit of implementing marketing automation for your ecommerce site is time. By automating tasks you get more of it, to do the things you love, but more importantly and less obvious, to allow those tasks to be performed far more accurately than you ever could.

The most laborious task, reported by most CMOs we speak to, is the time and effort necessary for customer emails. Others including sales calls, invoicing, and social media posts. Essentially, everything you need for high calibre customer relationship management can be done with a marketing automation strategy.

Marketing automation software works in the background to make the automation happen, like your own personal assistant. The right marketing automation software can help any company get organised, increase sales, improve the customer experience and save a tremendous amount of time. They can be a real game-changer for small businesses. But more than that the latest machine learning, artificial intelligence solutions, can develop personal relationships with each consumer, and multiply the average order value and customer lifetime value as a consequence.

How does marketing automation work?

We all have that list of manual, repetitive tasks: reminders, follow-ups, reporting, drafting emails. These tasks aren’t difficult, but they distract and are an encumbrance you could well do without, from the more meaningful to-dos that can have a bigger impact on the bottom line.

With the latest marketing automation solutions PPL for example (predictive personalisation solutions), you can set those manual processes up once and forget about them. Your automated campaigns can continue to run in the background while you focus your attention on bigger projects.

How does marketing automation work? At a very high level, marketing automation send specific content to leads based on behaviour and data, with the goal of closing more sales. More significantly these days, it requires zero set-up whatsoever, nor does it require manual intervention at any point either. So automatic has become autonomous, and much more profitable. How much do your staff really cost?

Now you are equipped with a solution that not only watches every purchase your customer makes, but every nuance of their visit to your site is used to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what they are most likely to buy next and when. it then selects the highest ranking products for that customer (never the same for two different people) and ensures it is front of that customer at the perfect moment.

The advantage this provides is both the advantage over your competitors, or indeed any alternate provide of that product in question, as you get to offer it to them miles ahead of the curve, and exactly when they want it. but this is also a huge advantage over existing software and systems you are running, as it outperforms all other marketing solutions by 20-fold, according to the likes of Forrester, Bain and McKinsey.

How to use marketing automation for small business

Marketing automation isn’t limited to companies with huge budgets or a seemingly never-ending list of customers. It can make a powerful impact on companies of all sizes, especially small businesses who are already strapped for time and resources. With the right software like SwiftERM, small businesses can easily learn how to use marketing automation to best serve their needs.

So, what does marketing automation do?

1. Builds relationships: New customers rarely purchase from a site the first time they visit it, which is why marketing automation, like predictive personalisation emails, are important to building and fostering that relationship. By helping each consumer feel nourished and important to you, and your care about the products you offer them as an individual, through regular, thoughtful sends, the return on investment goes through the roof.
   
2. Helps you follow up on potential sales: PPS sends emails to customers who browse your website, abandon their cart, and help complete the potential transaction.
   
3. Tracks the customer journey: The more you know about your customer, the better. With PPS marketing automation software, customer journey is tracked perpetually calculating stats from every KPI, such as how long it takes a customer to make a transaction, what information they need to complete that purchase, and what marketing assets are leading to the highest conversion. Each on a unique and solus basis, and never used are part of a segmenting process.
   
4. Automates social media: With tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, you can automate the posting of all your posts once you’ve created the caption, copy, image, links, and hashtags. Automatic posting saves time, helps your brand maintain consistency, and also helps you take a more analytical and deliberate approach instead of the spur of the moment inspirations.
   
5. Automates reports: Automating your reports can save countless hours that you’re spending in preparing data visualisations and basic analysis. The tools you’ll need are quite accessible – Google Analytics, Tableau, and Power BI. You can easily automate report generation with custom visualisations, and practically no coding. You should have a data source that will be connected to these platforms for report generation. Google Analytics has both data collection and reporting functionalities, which can be accessed without any coding.
   
6. Simplifies communication with a chatbot: In the simplest terms, a chatbot is a programmed responder with pre-fed responses, links, and questions to have an interactive tool that can automatically help your customers when they visit your website for the first time. Even in the B2B space, chatbots can add a remarkable amount of value by bringing down your bounce rates, capturing customer data, and freeing up resources.

What Is email marketing automation?

Email marketing is the key asset in marketing automation. Emails are the vehicle to communicate with consumers and provide ever greater affinity between you and them ultimately so their loyalty to you becomes absolute.

Final Thoughts

Marketing automation can be a real game-changer for small businesses. It helps you nurture customers like never before, not only throughout the sales cycle, but inter very existence thereafter, boosting conversions by each and every customers. But more than that, it helps you run your business far more efficiently. It takes all of those pesky tasks off your plate and rockets you into the big leagues.

SwiftERM is a Microsoft Partner company.

For a free trial of marketing automation’s predictive personalisation software click here.

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