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E-commerce sites - especially smaller ones - face two major challenges. They need to grow their site while maintaining a balanced operating account.
In this context, it remains essential to optimise time and resources, especially when staff is limited. Process automation is a solution that allows you to save time without recruiting, especially when it is based on artificial intelligence. Many tasks can be automated for your e-commerce site. Netwave presents 5 of them today!
1) Automate customer acquisition and retention
Automation for new customer acquisition
Generating traffic is essential for a company that wants to acquire new customers. But more than that: the real challenge is to convert visitors into customers. To do this, several automation techniques are particularly effective:
- Retargeting: also known as retargeting, this consists of targeting a visitor who has not purchased on your e-commerce site by exposing them (during their browsing on other websites) to advertisements promoting your products.
- Real-time bidding or RTB: real-time bidding consists of buying advertising space on the web in real-time for an audience targeted according to your criteria. Demand-side platforms or DSPs allow you to select the most favourable impressions available.
- Predictive marketing: this technique allows you to analyse visitors' personal data and send targeted messages. Predictive marketing software with varying degrees of automation will be useful to lighten your workload in this area.
Automate the management of your customer interactions
In today's highly competitive business environment, customer relations must be maintained with the utmost care! An intelligent automation solution will allow you to segment your customers according to specific criteria. In this respect, the essence of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools is to improve the commercial relationship between a company and its customers. Thus, by adopting such a tool, you control your customer relationship and respond more relevantly to your customers' expectations and individual needs—an excellent way to create, develop and maintain a privileged relationship with each contact.
Intelligent automation solution for customer retention
Customer retention is just as necessary as acquiring new customers, if not more so. A company is more likely to sell a product or service to an existing customer than to a prospect. To encourage customer loyalty, several actions can be automated, including
- Setting up a rewards programme. This process, which is time-consuming and tedious when done manually, can be automated via rewards platforms. Once the automation tool identifies a customer who meets specific criteria, it automatically sends them a discount code, access to specific offers or services, a selection of gifts, etc. This practice promotes customer satisfaction and loyalty and subtly encourages customers to buy from your e-commerce site again.
- Sending newsletters. What better way to build customer loyalty than regularly presenting your new products? Sending newsletters is particularly effective. It allows you to keep your customers informed of your news and to let them discover your latest products and services. There are many software programs for creating and sending newsletters to make it easier for you.
Automate emailing
If you manually segment your database using a CRM tool to track your customers, automation could save you a lot of time. Indeed, it is possible to synchronise your customers and prospects in a mailing list automatically. This is even more interesting when you consider that sending emails manually is a time-consuming and tedious task. Many email or marketing automation platforms on the market today with varying degrees of functionality. Most of them allow you to launch targeted email campaigns. You can thus be sure that your lists are well-segmented and that your customers receive relevant content according to their situation and interests:
- Convert prospects into customers. With specific automation tools, it becomes possible to detect cart abandonment automatically. Automatic follow-up emails are then sent to prospects. They can be accompanied by personalised messages based on items in the shopping cart and browsing history. In addition, they can be sent at specific times to have a direct impact without forced sales.
- Get feedback on the customer experience offered on your e-commerce site. It is possible to trigger automated emails to collect feedback from your customers on their past shopping experiences. You will then find out your offer's strengths and weaknesses.
- Send thank you emails to customers who have visited your site without a shopping cart. It is an excellent way to stand out from the competition and thank your prospects for their interest in your e-commerce site.
2) Automate logistics management
Logistics management is crucial in e-commerce as order processing and shipping are essential to your business.
E-commerce: automate inventory and stock management
If you run out of stock, you will not be able to meet your customers' demands and may generate dissatisfaction. On the other hand, too much stock will take up space in your warehouse and tie up a significant amount of cash flow. Automated inventory and stock management can help avoid such situations of shortage or abundance. It can also be used to facilitate and secure the ordering process. By receiving automatic notifications of out-of-stock situations, you can replenish your inventory at the right time. You won't have to constantly juggle your website, spreadsheets, and emails! Several tools can be used, from the most generalised like ERP or S&OP software to the most specialised like inventory management software.
Reduce the margin of error by automating the creation of shipping labels
Typos, errors, or omissions on shipping labels can devastate your brand image. In addition, they can lead to significant losses in future sales. It is possible to set up an automatic labelling system to avoid these pitfalls. It combines a printer and a label dispenser and can automatically apply the label to the package.
3) Automate communication on your social networks
Social networks are the backbone of a company's ability to thrive in the marketplace and attract consumers. Indeed, social network marketing is highly effective and produces quick results. However, to benefit from it, you need to share content to grow your audience and gain awareness continuously. Therefore, you must ensure that you engage your community through effective campaigns. To do this, it is necessary to post regular publications with engaging and relevant content. It can be interesting to automate the publication of content on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, depending on your target. For this purpose, you should know that some marketing automation tools allow you to schedule your posts on your company page or the profiles of your employees up to a month or more before they are published. This will save you time and visibility.
Some specialised tools can then automate content curation. This practice consists of selecting, editing, and sharing the most relevant content on the web on a specific topic. The automation tools then allow you to discover the most relevant posts based on keywords, which will make your task much more manageable!
Moreover, communication on social networks requires monitoring your brand. Also, e-reputation management tools allow you to automate the detection of mentions made to your brand on social media. This will enable you to react quickly and enrich your customer interactions.
4) Automate your website’s sales process
Without automation, the tasks of analysis, selection, and integration of products to be promoted on the site are particularly time-consuming. Especially since the manual management of a site's sales process requires many human and financial resources. Not to mention that this process often seems irrelevant. Indeed, manual management does not allow for a high degree of personalisation of the product suggestions put forward. All visitors see the same suggestions, regardless of their preferences. The automation of the sales process of a site allows you to gain relevance. Your products will have a greater chance of being purchased because the number of products put forward will be multiplied. In addition, the automatic use of visitors' browsing data helps provide them with a tailor-made service adapted to their needs. Thus, the products presented to visitors correspond to what they have come for. By adopting this customer-centric approach, the customer experience is personalised, which increases customer satisfaction and, therefore, the conversion rate.
In addition, based on experience, some automation solutions' artificial intelligence (AI) can identify a situation to reproduce what has worked best in the past. The response provided by automation is adapted to each customer at each moment. It allows you to personalise your display areas by offering each person the product, advertisement, or content most likely to be clicked on.
To conclude...
As you can see, automation is a cost-effective solution that saves time while enhancing the customer experience. At Netwave, our mission is to use artificial intelligence to provide personalised suggestions to visitors to your e-commerce site. By considering your visitors' context, behaviour, and psychology, Netwave's inductive AI allows you to maximise your chances of conversion while saving time through automation. Its approach is based on understanding the needs of your customers or prospects and aims to provide them with a fully tailored service! So, are you ready to get started? Get in touch with us!
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