When starting with digital sales, companies like these will probably think about automation and optimization of their channels. They will deal with problems regarding stock, warehousing and connecting to their online customers. They want to implement discount codes, improve their web shop processes and combine the offline and online customer journey. These are all scenarios of which you can imagine that they are very important topics for ecommerce companies. However, applying Marketing Automation in this sector delivers much broader results. In this sector, Marketing Automation takes your marketing efforts to the next level. When you start implementing Marketing Automation, don’t focus on just selling a few more individual products through conversion optimization (e.g. by better personalization). Other use cases are way more valuable to achieve.

Marketing Automation will help you sell the relationship between you and the customer. As MarTech specialists, we’re not doing shop optimization. The focus is not specifically on, for example, executing the sale or the transaction. These topics are more operational to the business, but with Marketing Automation the focus is more on promotion and personalization, which contributes to the customer experience and eventually leads to higher retention, revenue and customer loyalty. For example, implementing a Marketing Automation platform like Marketo Engage helps you with making your sales more effective, upscaling and downscaling and upselling and cross selling. These are exactly the topics on which we deliver the value.

Use Cases

While working with these retail companies, we came across some typical use cases. For one of our clients we used data for all marketing automation efforts. We placed a Munchkin tracking cookie on their web shop to attain this data, and used that to score on interest for specific product categories. This way, we were able to find out someone’s interest without a sale taking place. This means you can inform them about what you could deliver in their specific category of interest.

Another example is tracking quote views. It is important to get insights on how much time people are spending on your website, on what pages. These can be flagged as interesting moments, on which you can build loyalty programs. After all, companies want to sell their products, but also acquire data to improve their business.

In B2B or B2B2C commerce companies, onboarding is an important topic. You want to make sure that your new clients are onboarded in the most optimal way possible. You want to have a clear view on what exactly happens when a new customer is acquired, and that all the correct processes start running. Followed by that, you want to activate your customers. You can do this by jumping in at the right time, nurture them with the right content and keeping track of your customer’s buying behavior.

Up- & Cross-selling

An interest topic for digital sales is up selling and cross-selling, in which Marketing Automation can play an important role. For many ecommerce companies, clients are dividable into different categories. There’s people that are solely interested in a specific product, but there’s also people that are interested in multiple products within a specific category. Besides that, there’s also people who are open to multiple products in different categories and who might be interested in added services or more advanced options. With Marketing Automation and Technology, you can identify these different people and track what they are interested in, followed by nurturing them with the appropriate content that they are interested in.

Marketing and Sales alignment

For all companies, including E-commerce, it is very important that Marketing and Sales align their goals. Without alignment, a business will not be able to excel in their marketing and/or sales efforts. Marketing Automation can play a significant role here. Especially in the E-commerce sector, it is really important to pay attention to the buyer journey. In what phase of the buyer journey is your potential client? With the use of lead scoring, you can identify the right journey step. After that, it is important to communicate a sales ready lead to your sales department. Marketing Automation enables you to automatically send out an alert when someone reaches the right threshold, including all the needed information. This way, you’re transferring hot leads to sales immediately. This should be followed by a smooth and quick follow-up from sales. Research shows that companies that follow-up on their leads within an hour, have a 7 time higher chance to have a meaningful conversation than companies that do so an hour later. This is just a small section of Marketing and Sales alignment where Marketing Automation can play a role.

Marketing Automation goes beyond the operational processes in delivering value

Investing in Marketing Automation can lead to many benefits in the commerce business. It is important to look beyond the operational automation of processes, and look at the value that can be added in growing your business by improving customer experience and lifetime value, the use of data to increase sales, lead nurturing and many other topics in which MarTech can play a role.