If you look at the macro picture of commerce, eCommerce exists to take the burden off of traditional retail and lets technology do the heavy lifting. Having a solid eCommerce site is a great start, but there are many ways to automate across marketing, customer service, product and operations that growth-focused eCommerce retailers should absolutely take advantage of.
Leveraging strategic automations saves your people time and money, all while removing the guess work from customer interactions, ensuring a consistent and quality end-user experience.
Taking advantage of the following automations takes some planning and setup, but saves boatloads of time in the long run, allowing your team to focus on what matters. And to save even more time, SaaS eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce allow for one-click setup of many automation platforms through their connected Apps, making setup relatively quick and painless.
Take a look at some of our favorite eCommerce automation strategies, along with the platforms we often use to bring automations to life.
Welcome New Visitors
Your store’s first interaction with a customer serves as a digital WalMart greeter – “Welcome! We’ve actually got a special offer for new customers like you!” Automate your first interaction with a well-timed popup, offering an incentive for joining your email list, like a coupon code for 10% off your first order. Tools like Privy make the design and trigger of these popups a breeze, and integrate with ESPs like MailChimp and dotmailer, right out of the box.
Market Your Store
If you’re truly looking to grow sales, there is no more important automation set than your marketing efforts. Marketing is time and resource intensive for your team, and using the right tools can allow your marketers to focus more heavily on brand and ROI, rather than simple execution. Whether its on Google, Facebook or Instagram, your products and brand need to be seen by the right customers to drive interest, traffic and sales. Automate and simplify your eCommerce marketing with Springbot to reach new customers and collect data to make actionable marketing insights, going forward.
Chat With Customers
Your retail associates are a critical part of driving customers towards the right products or answering their questions around fit, style and customer service. Leverage a chatbot or automated customer engagement platform like Intercom to take the initial burden off of your associates and let a robot answer questions until they get escalated. You can even take advantage of new automation features on Facebook Messenger, allowing you to triage, respond and segment customer inquiries automatically.
Search Smarter and Recommend Products
It used to take a seasoned retail associate to recommend complimentary products or complete a look for a customer. Not anymore. Leverage smart search tools and product recommendations from Klevu to up-sell customers and feed them products that are much more likely to convert and grow AOV.
File Your Taxes
There is no bigger administrative headache than filing your sales tax. Save your accounting team’s team and your money by utilizing an automated tax solution like TaxJar for reporting and filing.
Generate Ratings and Reviews
You’ve gotten the sale. Nice work! Now save your team’s time on following up with customers by utilizing smart automations from YotPo to ask customers for a rating and review. Automating this process helps create usable content on your site, encourages another touchpoint with your customer and helps validate your brand’s products for future shoppers.
Automate Returns
The return process without an automation in place is just a huge waste of time. Look up the customer’s order number, send them a shipping label, receive the package, process the refund and ship out a new product. There’s a better way. Employ a return automation system like Return Magic to automatically receive return requests through a branded portal, create a return shipping label, refund via gift card, cash or exchange, deliver email notifications and reduce your fulfillment team’s burden, across the entire return process.
Conclusion
We’ve laid out a ton of solutions to reduce the time, effort and energy spent on things that can be done automatically. Not sure where to start? Get in touch with us and let us audit your entire eCommerce footprint to find opportunities to save you money and grow your business.
