E-commerce marketing automation tools are the answer to optimizing efficiency, customer engagement and retention, and buyer support for online businesses.
However, the overwhelming options available and the various tasks they perform can be difficult to navigate if you’re unfamiliar with these platforms.
This guide will examine e-commerce automated marketing and how it works, its top advantages, and the top strategies and software solutions for 2024.
Scroll down for a detailed review of the pros and cons of these platforms, what channels they support, how they work, and how much they cost.
Let’s take a quick look at the top 8 e-commerce marketing tools to automate your online business and then read further for an in-depth guide to everything you need to know about e-commerce promotional automation.
Omisend is one of the best e-commerce marketing tools for automating customer engagement.
Businesses can easily create content from pre-built templates and use the drag-and-drop editor to combine SMS, email, and push notifications into a single workflow.
The A/B testing feature makes it simple to compare different elements. You can also rely on automated reports and an intuitive sales dashboard to stay ahead of your performance.
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Our P2P Score: 4.7
Website: omnisend.com
ActiveCampaign is about automating email marketing and CRM to help businesses boost customer experience.
This software supports loads of third-party integrations, and you can send automated follow-up emails to keep customers interested in your brand and add tags to segment your most engaged subscribers.
Like many of the top e-commerce marketing tools we’ll review on this list, ActiveCampaign also provides A/B testing.
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Our P2P Score: 4.9
Website: activecampaign.com
Klaviyo combines a sophisticated suite of automation features for email and SMS marketing.
This tool will create automated workflows, customer-centric campaigns, and targeted web forms to capture qualified leads.
It’s also much easier to get started with a wide variety of pre-built templates that you can quickly filter by type to find what you need.
Another impressive aspect of Klaviyo is how many segmentation conditions are available to hone in on your target buyers.
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Our P2P Score: 4.6
Website: klaviyo.com
ShipStation focuses on automating your shipping and delivery process – a crucial aspect of e-commerce businesses.
This platform can help you design and create custom shipping labels, use shipping discounts, and import orders from over 100 selling channels and marketplaces.
Handling order fulfillment and inventory management can take loads of time, but using ShipStation to automate this process means increased efficiency, and you can eliminate the risk of incorrect or incomplete orders.
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Our P2P Score: 4.6
Website: shipstation.com
HubSpot is a dynamic e-commerce marketing tool that offers an extensive range of automation features for businesses of all sizes.
This tool can help you create personalized landing pages and web forms using any of the hundreds of ready-made templates available.
HubSpot also implements automated email campaigns, helping you curate the perfect content for your audience while providing you with advanced analytics, among other features in this customer engagement platform.
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Our P2P Score: 4.7
Website: hubspot.com
Sendible is an e-commerce automation platform primarily focusing on social media content.
Online stores can use this tool to optimize their social presence through AI content suggestions, automated content scheduling, and in-depth reporting and analytics to implement the best social media strategy.
While this tool doesn’t offer a wide variety of functions like other e-commerce marketing tools, it’s ideal for small to mid-level businesses looking to extend their reach.
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Our P2P Score: 4.3
Website: sendible.com
Omnichannel marketing has never been easier than Drip! This e-commerce marketing software will help your brand create custom workflows with minimal manual effort.
Over 20 easy-to-use workflow templates can skyrocket your brand engagement on social media, email, and your website.
There are loads of e-commerce integrations to leverage; you can create custom triggers personalized to each customer and craft remarketing campaigns for Instagram and Facebook.
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Our P2P Score: 4.4
Website: drip.com
MailChimp is an automated email marketing platform that allows users to create personalized email campaigns, customer journeys, and retargeting campaigns with just a few clicks.
This platform supports many integrations to import buyer data from your most-used software and ensures MailChimp can deliver audience-centric strategies.
Businesses can also rely on multivariate and A/B testing, priority support, and a dedicated account manager to make onboarding quick and seamless.
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Our P2P Score: 4.9
Website: mailchimp.com
It’s time to look at some of the advantages of e-commerce automated marketing strategies.
One direct benefit of using e-commerce marketing tools and automation tactics is saving time and resources. Automation aims to reduce as much manual work as possible.
You can focus your team and resources on more essential aspects of your store.
Rather than handling customer support, event-triggered emails, content creation, and personalization yourself, e-commerce marketing tools and strategies can accomplish this for you.
Customer engagement significantly impacts sales, and e-commerce marketing automation can help you take this to the next level.
Businesses that have perfected their customer engagement campaigns are 41% more likely to report higher conversion rates than in previous years.
With e-commerce marketing tools and automation strategies, you deliver a more personalized shopping experience and stay ahead of consistent communication to optimize engagement.
Video: Borderless Commerce
Retaining buyers is a constant obstacle for online stores, and e-commerce marketing automation is a solution.
E-commerce marketing tools leverage in-depth analytics on your target customer base and how they interact with competing products and brands online. They then design bespoke campaigns to keep these consumers invested in your brand.
By simply increasing customer retention by 5%, companies can boost revenue by 25 to 95%.
To enhance customer engagement and retain more buyers, you must refine your customer support and how quickly you resolve queries and complaints.
Because marketing tools can automate most of your service team efforts, shoppers can rely on speedy, personalized responses that make them feel valued and heard by your brand.
Ultimately, improving customer support through automation sets the foundation for brand loyalty and ongoing e-commerce success.
Here are the top e-commerce marketing automation strategies to skyrocket your online store and how to leverage e-commerce marketing tools to get the best results from these tactics.
Chatbots have become a crucial strategy for marketing automation because of how efficiently this software makes customer communication.
Companies don’t have to invest manual resources in answering customer queries. Instead, they can configure canned responses to push leads through the sales pipeline.
In fact, Juniper research confirms that in 2024, chatbots can save businesses up to 2.5 billion hours of work – yes, you read that right!
Next, using chatbots ensures customers receive speedy communication. Delayed support response times have caused 52% of consumers to stop purchasing from a company.
Fortunately, chatbots can mitigate this risk and deliver automated responses to customer queries in record time.
To successfully use chatbots, businesses must invest in high-quality software tailored to all their communication channels.
In addition, stores should monitor chatbot performance to identify changes in customer support, make changes accordingly, and focus on helping customers reach resolutions as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
Another critical e-commerce automated marketing strategy is remarketing. This strategy can help e-commerce platforms attract direct customers who have interacted with their products but have not purchased them back to their offerings.
What’s more, sellers don’t have to do this themselves. Instead, they can rely on e-commerce automation tools, namely remarketing software, to create retargeting ads on other websites that the sellers’ web visitors often visit.
In other words, if a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn’t complete their purchases, remarketing software will create personalized ads for that product on the next websites the customer visits.
As shopping cart abandonment rates fall between 50 and 98%, and first-time web visitors only have a conversion rate of 2.4%, remarketing is a powerful automated strategy to get customers to the final sales stage.
Not to mention, retargeted web users are eight times cheaper to reach per click!
Successful email marketing takes a lot of time, and so much can go wrong! A quick and easy way to get around email marketing and optimize your performance is by investing in an e-commerce marketing platform to configure triggered emails.
Email marketing software can automatically send personalized emails triggered by specific events, such as new email sign-ups, disengaged subscribers, or festive periods during holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
Triggered emails will ensure customers have a personalized experience with your e-commerce store and remain engaged.
These campaigns generate 31% of all email orders and perform better than typical email campaigns in various metrics. For instance, triggered emails have 83.4% better open rates, a 2,270% increase in conversion rates, and 341.1% more click rates.
Here are a few tips to create triggered email campaigns that achieve the results you want for your e-commerce business:
Setting up automated alerts and reminders will help keep web visitors interested in your products and store and guide them to conversion.
We know how painstakingly high cart abandonment rates are, and using automated reminders to retain customers is a fantastic way to minimize losing sales.
E-commerce automated marketing software can send personalized reminders to web users before they exit your website.
These tools can also remind customers to check out if they spend too much time on your website without interacting with any items. In addition, you can also rely on this software to send automated discounts and sales alerts.
Unlike sending typical discount emails to persuade targeted buyers, automated marketing tools will send personalized discounts to specific customer segments.
Web visitors will receive alerts about deals tailored to them based on interests and behavioral data, and guess what – you don’t have to worry about manually handling this!
Another example of how to leverage alerts and reminders for automated e-commerce marketing is product updates and launches.
Do you have a new product a specific group of customers would love? Automated marketing will send these buyers emails to notify them of updates to products they are most likely to purchase and new items that will convince them to purchase.
To discover more of the best e-commerce marketing automation strategies, let’s dive into personalizing your website.
Online stores should use e-commerce marketing tools or website personalization tools to achieve a web design and layout that reflects their brand and has elements targeted to individual customer segments.
Personalizing your website is a highly tedious process. You must implement different content and interactive components to engage each ideal buyer on your site.
With software, you can automate this process, which points to how imperative it is to choose the perfect platform for your growth, goals, and budget.
But website personalization isn’t just critical for sellers. Over 70% of buyers expect personalization and get frustrated when e-commerce sites don’t employ this strategy.
A few examples of how to personalize your website for different customer segments through automation include:
As we just covered website personalization as a marketing automation strategy, it’s vital to explore segmenting your customers.
Segmenting your buyers forms the foundation of your automation marketing strategy because different buyers require different marketing approaches.
Your automated marketing tool will create campaigns and content based on your target audiences.
What’s more, this software (depending on the one you choose) can also develop automated segments for you, saving you time and effort!
To prove how important it is to segment your buyers, research confirms that 70% of marketers use customer segmentation, and 80% of businesses that use this strategy have increased sales.
The same data reveals that marketers typically target three to four customer segments, and the most common segmentation criteria are:
From all these aspects, behavioral segmentation is the most effective for e-commerce stores.
Last but certainly not least, another of the best-automated marketing strategies is A/B testing.
This method entails testing two different landing pages and their types of content, elements, and marketing approaches to determine which performs the best.
The top marketing automation tools offer A/B testing functions to help businesses invest in the right landing page design and content layout.
This is ideal for e-commerce stores to avoid choosing the wrong landing pages and losing sales. The bottom line is – online businesses never really know how different types of content will perform, and A/B testing provides them with this knowledge.
Here are a few tips to leverage A/B testing for landing pages:
E-commerce marketing automation entails automating tedious tasks and strategies for online sellers. Automation aims to help you leverage custom workflows, content planning and scheduling, retargeting, email marketing, and more with minimal manual effort.
There are many e-commerce marketing strategies, but the ultimate of these tactics include using chatbots for customer support, creating retargeting ad campaigns to re-engage buyers, and configuring triggered emails to stay ahead of customer engagement.
In addition, e-commerce sellers should also create automated alerts and reminders, personalize their websites for each user, segment shoppers, and use A/B testing
E-commerce marketing automation software streamlines personalized marketing efforts by enabling targeted email campaigns, tailored product recommendations, and timely communication based on customer behavior and preferences. It nurtures leads through the sales funnel, recovers abandoned carts, and fosters customer loyalty, ultimately driving higher sales and engagement. With detailed analytics, businesses can continuously optimize their strategies to deliver consistent, relevant experiences across multiple channels while saving time and resources.
There are seven core automation strategies for marketing in the e-commerce space. This includes leveraging chatbots, retargeting ads, triggered emails, automated alerts and reminders, personalizing your website, segmenting your customers and A/B testing landing pages. Check out this ultimate guide for more on these strategies and the top e-commerce automation tools in 2024.
Other issues may include over-automation leading to personalization, integration, technical issues, dependence on third-party providers, a lack of human oversight, and challenges adhering to regulations.
Proper measures, such as robust data security, maintaining a balance between automation and human oversight, and thorough testing, are crucial to mitigating these risks.
Twilio: The State of Customer Engagement Report
HubSpot: Here’s Why Customer Retention is So Important for ROI, Customer Loyalty, and Growth
Freshworks: Deconstructing Delight: Understanding the Complexity of Consumer Expectations
Statista: Online Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate in Selected Industries Worldwide
Business Insider: Returning Customers Are Far More Valuable to Online Retailers Than New Customers
ICOM: Remarketing – What’s It All About and Does it Really Work?
Mckinsey & Company: The Value of Getting Personalization Right—or Wrong—is Multiplying
NotifyVisitors: Segmentation Statistics That You Must Know in 2024