4 Spot-Fixes to Transition Your E-Commerce Business to Automation
(Photo by Jesse Vermeulen on Unsplash)
This is a guest post by Josh Spilker, whose author bio will be at the end of the article.
Business owners constantly complain that there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.
In fact, half of most managers find that they spend nearly half of their time on administrative tasks like emailing and marketing services.
One of the greatest benefits an E-Commerce business can offer is the freedom to work from anywhere at any time.
This type of lifestyle is certainly ideal for many entrepreneurs, but running an online business, especially retail, can still take up lots of long hours.
Thankfully, retailers can easily automate much of those time-consuming tasks and free up time in your day that you can dedicate to more productive tasks.
Whether they be improving your business or your golf swing.
Here’s four systems that can help you turn your E-Commerce business into an effective, automated success.
1. Set Up Triggered Email Responses
When it comes to automation, setting up an email system is one of the easiest time-savers you can implement. You can use an email automation tool to set up a drip campaign which is are scheduled out ahead of time.
Automated email programs can send out things like promotional messages, like newsletter or sales announcements, or personalized action based responses, like an email reminder for cart abandonment.
Using an automation system makes it easy to create high-quality messages with measurable results.
Drip is an app that makes it very easy to set up a successful campaign for your E-Commerce site by personalizing emails for every customer.
Just including a customer’s name in the subject line can increase open rates by 40%, so adding in little personalization touches can really make a difference in the success of your email campaign.
Drip offers email templates that you can easily customize for your business and products, and it offers various action and time based triggers for automatic email send offs.
The program even includes customer segmentation and analytical tracking for every email, ensuring that your campaign experiences great success.
2. Ship Through Third-Party
Automating logistical features and warehousing not only clears up a lot of time but it can save you a lot of headaches, too.
By eliminating the need for inventory space, processing orders, and packaging and shipping staff, third-party warehousing and logistics can be a true lifesaver for E-Commerce businesses.
Thanks to new technology and the expansion of connected devices, third-party logistics companies have greatly improved their abilities and services for E-Commerce businesses.
Many offer package tracking, streamlined delivery processes, and low-cost shipping rates, making it an excellent addition to a successful online business.
If you are considering using a logistics company to handle warehousing and shipping, then you must be sure that you still have control when it comes to quality assurance for your product.
Damaged products or improper packaging can slice into your company’s profits, and it actually plays a huge part in your customer’s satisfaction with your business:
The top two complaints for E-Commerce packaging were that boxes were difficult to open or excessive packaging.
Be very careful when you pick out a third-party partner, as their actions can affect your business in a major way.
3. Provide Automated Customer Service
Customer service is a big deal, especially when it comes to online shopping. Since your customers are not able to speak to someone face-to-face, it is up to you as a business owner to provide a way for them to contact you should they need assistance.
Over half of customers agree that excellent service outweighs the cost of the product itself and it greatly influences their purchase loyalty.
One of the most common complaints from customers is that it takes too long to reach a customer service representative.
From the time that they spend being put on hold, transferred to another department, or waiting for an email response, your customer’s frustration grows, as does the chance that they find another company to do business with.
Offering an instant, automated customer service option to your website is a great way to provide excellent and immediate communication.
Using an AI (artificial intelligence) customer service program sounds like a futuristic dream for many small online businesses, but it’s actually quite feasible and practical.
Chatbots like Inbenta can result in up to 40% increases in conversions. The automated bot not only helps customers with any questions or concerns, but it actually can help suggest related products or services based on their phrasing.
4. Step Up with SMS Marketing
It’s no secret that people these days are spending a significant chunk of time staring at their phones.
As mobile phone ownership continues to grow across the US and developing markets, capitalizing on good old text messages with SMS marketing is a tactic all E-Commerce brands should not forget.
SMS marketing has seen a big surge in popularity over the past few years. This strategy boasts a higher response rate than many other forms of mobile advertising.
The recent State of SMS Report found that the average response rate for bulk SMS campaigns is 32%.
Other than high open rates, there are many benefits to using SMS marketing.
For one, it’s quick. Delivering your promotions, or any form of brand messaging, is done in a matter of seconds.
Secondly, it’s very flexible. You can either send your content to a small targeted group, or your entire contact list. In turn, making it overly simple to mold campaigns around your exact needs.
Additionally, unlike email, users can opt out with the click of a button – rather than having to go to a specific landing page and jump through a bunch of hoops.
Third, you don’t have to battle spam or work with email filters. There are no barriers or distractions in the way of getting your messaging in front of the recipient.
Text messaging isn’t going away any time soon. The future is bright for SMS marketing.
Tools like SMSBump make the entire process a breeze.
You can swiftly integrate it with your E-Commerce platforms and build highly customized, automated campaigns with detailed reports for all your efforts.
In Conclusion
With technology advancing quicker than ever before, turning on automatic business responses can mean more than just setting up auto-reply to your out of office emails. Automation is truly to key to saving time and making more money with an E-Commerce business. By turning your online business into a well-oiled automatic machine, you can experience more time to work on other productive projects or scale your business to a larger operation than before.
Author Bio
Josh Spilker is a writer and author living in Nashville, TN. He is the content manager and strategist for Workzone, a top project management software company. He also blogs regularly about the creative process at Create Make Write.