Landing pages, email marketing, and upselling are just a few singular ways to sell to your customers. But what happens when you combine every eCommerce sales strategy into one comprehensive process? What if you could create a new sales process that could drive customer communication, regardless of customer action, on autopilot?
eCommerce is projected to become a $1.5 trillion industry! But, your choice of technology may be the key that allows SMB’s to play in the big leagues. The newest eCommerce sales process will be completely automatic, based on consumer’s behaviors and actions. Today’s marketing automation goes way beyond simple email marketing. By choosing the right marketing automation service, you’ll be able to capture your share of the market regardless of the size of your business.
Marketing Automation Workflows
The automation process is built as a workflow. As the entire system is designed based on consumer behavior, it’s created to do a preset action when a customer does (or doesn’t) do something.
That’s kind of abstract, so the following is GetResponse workflow is an example of what happens when a customer doesn’t open a certain email. If the customer opens the email but doesn’t make a purchase, they are sent a special discount email. Hopefully, that results in a sale! But if the customer doesn’t open the email, they are sent a refocused and retargeted discount email a day later.
Think of it as a personal account manager, following up on every potential sale, on every platform.
Top Players in Marketing Automation
GetResponse
GetResponse is easy to use and affordable, but it also has shopping cart integration and an abandoned cart feature. An estimated 70% of online consumers leave filled shopping carts and having a plan to recapture these customers is essential. Having these features as part of your marketing automation software is essential.
Great for: SMB’s who want advanced features at an affordable price.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a leader in email marketing and also offers marketing automation support for eCommerce, including best customer and product follow-up. They offer several pre-set workflow options as part of their extra paid features.
Great for: Organizations who want specific workflows, including non-profits, the music, and software industries.
Aweber
Aweber doesn’t have a strong marketing automation feature like GetResponse or MailChimp, it does offer some eCommerce integration services. This includes offering customers the chance to sign up for your mailing list if they’ve made a payment through PayPal or Shopify.
Great for: SMB’s who have dedicated CRM’s to handle their entire marketing processes.
InfusionSoft
InfustionSoft is another great marketing automation service. It’s not as user-friendly as some others, and a little pricier. However, you can build your own marketing campaign or use one of their many templates.
Great for: Businesses that have separate shopping cart abandonment strategies.
Hubspot
Hubspot is a leader in marketing automation and has an extremely easy workflow platform for SMB’s. The price tag may be out of reach for some smaller companies, but an excellent choice for any company that wants advanced automation features.
Great for: Bigger corporations interested in lead nurturing.
Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Service for Your SMB
However, there are a few important things to consider. Here are a few guidelines for choosing the right marketing automation for your business:
- Simplicity: Each marketing automation platform is different, so choose one that’s easiest for your business to use and manage.
- Best Value: Choose the platform that has the features you want at a price you can afford.
- eCommerce Integration: The platform you choose must be able to work seamlessly with your existing eCommerce software.
From the first moment, a potential customer stumbles across your business to the final click in the checkout process needs to be meticulously managed. It’s not good enough to have a great email marketing system and a poor checkout process.
That’s why marketing automation is the perfect complement to any strong eCommerce platform.
Liesha Petrovich is the creator of Microbusiness Essentials, a blog dedicated to helping the smallest businesses succeed. In her free time, she’s working on a Doctorate in Entrepreneurship. Grab a free copy of her new book Killing Rapunzel: Learning how to save yourself through determination, grit, and self-employment.
