eCommerce brands invest loads of time, money, and effort into ensuring marketing campaigns reach their desired goals. Adding automation and various channels into the mix will help amplify marketing efforts and enable real-time engagement with behavior-based triggers – allowing eCommerce brands to interact with customers at the perfect time.

Source: Digital Third Coast

eCommerce marketing automation is when brands use software tools to automate certain marketing processes and use cases. Automation helps streamline complicated and time-consuming marketing processes, improves efficiency of campaigns, and enhances overall customer experience. 

Let’s deep dive into eight common use cases from the world of eCommerce and how brands can use automation or AI to enhance experiences.

Having a grasp on the best use cases for automation is just one step of the process. The planning and execution behind each use case will determine how successful your automation efforts will be. Take a look at some best practices to keep in mind while planning eCommerce marketing campaigns. 

Segmenting the flow of your marketing automation campaigns helps create a more personalized journey flow across different customer groups. By dividing your audience based on their past interactions with your brand, purchases, and browsing history you can send the relevant campaigns to the right customers. 

AI in combination with a customer data platform (CDP) can make segmentation more efficient and accurate. AI can streamline the segmentation process and accurately group audiences with ease. This way, brands can target groups quickly and more accurately and predict what customers want to see.  

Read more about how a CDP and AI can improve segmentation and enable predictive marketing capabilities:

Personalization is the king of customer engagement. The more you can personalize your campaigns to customer personas, the better your marketing efforts will perform. Behavior-based campaigns are more personalized than a broadcast blast, and marketing automation powered by AI lets you take that a step further with personalized recommendations, incentives, and promos. 

Similarly to how it works with segmentation, AI algorithms can pinpoint patterns and behaviors in massive amounts of customer data. This allows for more accurate segmentation and hyper-personalization of the content you send to your audiences. 

AI combined with a customer engagement solution can personalize content through:

Reach your customers on the channels they prefer by delivering consistent brand moments and messaging across all channels. Mix traditional channels like Email and SMS with digital channels and in-app messaging to boost visibility around your campaigns and offer customers better overall experiences.  

For example, if a high-value customer has abandoned a purchase, why just send an email? Send them an SMS or a WhatsApp message to prompt instant and effective action. 

Some popular channels for omnichannel marketing include:  

Speaking of omnichannel, make sure to use social media platforms to their full potential. If you follow these best practices, you will have detailed and accurate audience data segmented into relevant groups for your campaigns. You can personalize the campaigns and send them over any channel – including socials.  

For example, you can launch a targeted campaign on Instagram or Facebook, and include a click-to-chat on WhatsApp button on the ad, giving customers easy access to speak with your brand and find out more about the offer. Once they have reached out on WhatsApp, you can guide them through the customer journey with an interactive and personalized conversation.  

Automating marketing campaigns and incorporating AI can be a daunting task for brands. How do you know you’re making the right moves? Targeting the right groups? Did you properly train and implement your AI?

Our professional services team take the stress away from eCommerce brands when it comes to marketing automation. With CX consulting, customer integration, migration services, your brand can focus on customer experience strategies while we take care of the heavy lifting.

Customers know what they want from eCommerce brands – personalization and ease of service. Give them what they want while simplifying internal processes with marketing automation tools and techniques.