E-commerce is more than selling things online. It provides many efficiency breakthrough over traditional sales. 10 times of sales figure with the same salesforce, and the scale is not limited to the number of storefront.
This is the playfield of pure knowledge.
In some extreme cases, a team of 3 build up a million dollar shop, or work off site all year round, and practise the 4-hour work week team.
In the clients we touched base with, most of them do not put “automation” as part of their strategy. But the investment in automation return very high, and can snowball the effects. And it does not take huge effort to start with:
Automate generation of Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is the foundation of effective online marketing strategies, and is still the most effective one to convince them to buy.
Not to mention, old customers consumers are known to open emails. Tell them the latest product news, provide helpful information and sell your products. Automatically convert social wall posts to emails, automate sales emails, new products, blog updates, hot selling products etc.
Look for other Automated Marketing Techniques
Birthday or anniversary upcoming? Send them messages and remind them. Or automated messages when people sign up for your email newsletter or buy a product?
Automate, Automate, Automate, provide a well packaged reason/excuse to enjoy your product again.
Put personalization strategy into Action
Greet them with their names in email, showcase how the product is made, take lively images how staffs handle products. These human touches and inner insights can add extra emotional feeling to your brand, help knocking their purchasing mind.
Social media automation
Schedule full month’s worth of social posts so you don’t need to worry about it. Of course not all socials can be automated, you still need to moderate comments, but at least you do not need to switch to editor role every few days.
And making a plan instead of adhoc can help building a strategy: connected, coherent content can snowball the awareness effect.
Remind them their wishlist
Wishlist is a common but easy to forget function. Add to wishlist means they are only one step from purchase. Customer do not checkout in the end? Why not remind them, raise their awareness, even hint them during discount?
Lure their feedback
There is no doubt in the power hidden in real user’s testimonial/feedback. But the difficulty comes from asking them to write the testimonial.
Other than using real money or benefits, a free, automated, received after 3 days of purchase email titled “what do you feel about the S100 camera?” can lure their shares. Who don’t want to show off their purchase, right?
Chatbots
In 2017, chatbots cannot replace customer service head-to-toe. But they sure help reduce CS workload. Even better, chatbots are more approach-able to customer due to its self-help nature, and human CS can intervent more easily and thus, better user experince!
Win in strategy level
Automation, systematic may seems overkill before scale, but saved time can be used to focus on the ever-changing market, grow your business, and embrace the influx of e-commerce wave.
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