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In the digital world that we are in today, every eCommerce marketing strategy comes down to one thing –automation. Integrating marketing automation tools to your B2B eCommerce platform lets you automate most of your marketing for you.
A great marketing automation platform not only gives customers what they want but also offers them a great buying experience.
Here are 5 powerful marketing automation software that will definitely boost your eCommerce sales!
First things first. If you want your customers to have a great shopping experience on your online store, you’ve got to direct all your efforts towards ‘targeting the right customer, at the right time’ –and with content that evokes emotion. You can do it with personalization.
Personalization simply means getting more ‘personal’ with your customer. Your eCommerce store and all your marketing strategies must be in sync with the unique interests of your customer.
Doing so manually can take up several lifetimes –that’s when marketing automation tools come into play.
1. A highly personalized Email Marketing Automation Tool
Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the best ways to build customer relationships and create engagement. However, email marketing automation simply automates the process with a customer-centric email marketing strategy.
An email marketing automation tool is software that sends emails that are personalized and relevant to the reader. It runs pre-defined triggers set by you and automates the rest of the process with no manual intervention.
7 Useful Features of an Email Marketing Automation Tool
1. Audience Segmentation
A recent case study by HubSpot revealed, segmented emails generate 58% of company revenue.
You can now send strategically targeted emails to your customer groups without manual intervention to maximize CTRs.
The AI gathers information about how your customers have interacted with emails sent to them in the past, how they interact with your website, chatbots, and other resources to create audience groups based on the user data it collects.
It also gives you a better understanding of where in the customer journey cycle your customer really is, and what kind of message will have the highest impact on your reader.
2. Dynamic contact update
You can set triggers to dynamically update any new customer information found.
This can be any new sales, blog subscriptions, registrations for events or trade shows, social interests, user demographics, purchase history, and so on.
3. Personalized email template maker
With email automation, you can choose from a range of ready-to-use email templates or you can create your own template that matches your company or B2B client’s branding.
Personalized automated emails have a 75% higher open rate than traditional emails.
4. Creates strategic email workflows for different scenarios
You can create specific triggers and assign unique workflows for different audience segments.
You can have multiple email marketing campaigns like automated welcome emails for new subscribers, cart abandonment reminders, transaction emails, customer feedback/survey emails, seasonal offers, and a lot more.
5. Reduces time and effort with automation
Email automation is super time-saving as you don’t have to manually set up unique email campaigns for every customer in your database.
6. Hyper-personalization
If your customer matches the pre-defined triggers set up in a certain list of a segmented audience, they would then receive emails that are relevant to them with no manual intervention from you.
Every email sent to your customer is personalized to meet their interests. This doubles your chances of conversions.
7. Reduces human errors
Email automation also reduces the chances of human errors as your customer data is dynamically updated and emails are sent automatically, based on the triggers you set.
Quick Tip!
Before you choose a B2B Email Marketing Automation Tool, make sure that it meets your B2B eCommerce marketing strategy, your marketing budget, and has a 24/7 customer support service and product maintenance team as offers.
A smart and automated lead nurturing system like this can go a long way as it will drive revenue for your B2B eCommerce business for years to come.
2. Maximize Sales with AI-powered Product Recommendations
If you’re someone who wants to ramp up your B2B marketing game, then you already know that targeting (and re-targeting) customers with the products they like, is Rule #1 in the playbook.
3 Uses of AI-powered product recommendations in eCommerce
Two visitors on a B2B eCommerce website will see different product recommendations, sponsored ads, and so on, based on how they interacted with your website in the past.
1. Dynamic product recommendations
If you know what your customer likes, you can offer dynamic product recommendations to your customer at every turn of their buying journey.
Creating a lead nurturing system like this by showing product recommendations that are hyper-relevant to your B2B customers’ buying interests will definitely improve online sales.
2. Track the online behavior of visitors
Data from automation lets you identify and track customer buying trends.
- Did they spend time learning more about a specific product?
- Was that product shared with friends and family?
- Which products are added to the cart?
- Were they about to make a payment but changed their mind later?
- Did they look for related items?
- How much time did they spend on your eCommerce store?
- Did they bookmark your product page?
- Where are they located?
Information like this can help B2B marketers understand customer buying trends.
3. Improve your sales efforts
Your sales teams also can benefit from the user data on your eCommerce platform. AI-powered product recommendations help your B2B sales:
- Understand what kind of products your customers prefer buying
- Boost online eCommerce sales
- Identify slow-moving products, and more!
You could even pass on the valuable customer information gathered to your sales teams and boost sales by making the reach-out personal and relevant.
3. Earn Repeat Purchases with a ‘Search-Bar’
A personalized site search bar is optimized for maximum convenience when a search is made on the eCommerce platform.
A personalized search automation tool provides dynamic synonym suggestions that detect and map mistyped words to relevant keywords.
Here are some stats that Algolia gathered on site-search optimization on eCommerce platforms:
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- 43% of users on retail websites go directly to the search bar
- Up to 30% of e-commerce visitors use an internal site search
- Site searchers are 2-3x more likely to convert
- Conversion rates nearly doubled from people who used on-site search and found what they were looking for.
This is how important a search bar is to an online eCommerce store. Impress and retain your site visitors within the first 15 seconds (or they bounce). Using marketing automation tools can help you!
Imagine this:
You are a distributor who wants to place a bulk order for LED outdoor lights on a B2B eCommerce platform. You trust this eCommerce store as you have purchased from it in the past.
Now when you type ‘LED’ in the search bar, you see a list of recommendations like ‘LED lights’, ‘LED outdoor lights’, ‘LED street lights’, ‘LED lights for outdoor parking’, ‘LED lights for outdoor seating’, etc.
On the other hand, if your friend visits the same B2B eCommerce store and begins typing ‘LED’ in the search bar, the list of recommendations would not match yours.
What happened here is that your eCommerce automation offered personalized search results to the user based on its purchase history, location, demographics, and buying behavior. Like Google does.
This way you can keep your B2B buyers hooked (and continue browsing) your B2B eCommerce store until they find what they are looking for.
Quick tip!
A happy customer is more likely to come back to your online eCommerce store and make a repeat purchase. And an even happier customer might even place an excellent review on your website.
B2B businesses can expect a bigger order than the last time if their distributors or suppliers were satisfied with their last purchase.
Consider optimizing your search bar with eCommerce platforms that provide personalized search functionality like ewiz commerce. See how the marketing automation tools work.
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4. A Custom-built human-like AI chatbot
It is important that your chatbot doesn’t seem too robotic or vague. The conversation must be personalized for every customer for ‘intelligent’ or ‘sensible’ conversations.
Most B2B eCommerce Platforms use chatbots that are built ‘in-house’ to tailor industry-specific AI conversations combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML).
Types of Chatbots:
1. Open Domain
- Can converse about ‘anything’ as conversation can go in any direction
- Best for multi-tasking with several use cases
- System-generated responses
- Expect unpredictable outcomes
- Technology is still premature
- The bot can take years to perfect
Examples: Meena, Siri, Alexa, Wit, Watson
2. Closed Domain (Domain-specific) Chatbot
- Answers to a specific set of topics
- The conversation is limited to a pre-defined flow
- Best for solving a fixed range of problems
- You have to create a dataset of Q&A’s
- Predictable outcomes
- More achievable technology
- Shorter time-to-market
Examples: Customer support Chat or Messenger Apps
3. Hybrid chatbot
This chatbot includes human intervention when necessary. It filters out low-priority issues by handling them without human intervention.
Hybrid chatbots are commonly used by small to medium B2B eCommerce stores as it provides the benefits of automation by saving essential time and also offer a smart allotment of resources within your company. It can also build trust among customers who wish to hear a human voice when they feel vulnerable.
Imagine this:
A customer has a query regarding the refund requested on an order. This part of the conversation can be handled by a closed domain chatbot as there would be a pre-defined process for a refund process in your company.
However, if the customer still isn’t satisfied and requests to speak to a customer care executive, then you can redirect the conversation to the concerned employee who can take it ahead from there.
4. Live Chat or Human-to-human Chatbot
If you don’t want to invest big or risk it with a complicated AI chatbot, you can integrate a ‘live chat’ widget into your B2B eCommerce platform. This means you assign a dedicated employee to chat with your customer.
This will get the work done for starters at the least as there is no need for automation here. You just have to integrate a chatbot API, and you’re ready to go!
5. A CRM integrated with Marketing Automation Softwares
An advanced CRM provides data visualization and real-time analytics. You can also integrate other automation software into the CRM, making it a world of endless possibilities.
Your CRM can become an important tool for everyone in the team.
With a great CRM, you can have all your information in one place for everyone to see, learn and benefit from. This could be your strongest asset!
7 ways how CRM combined with marketing automation tools can help your B2B eCommerce Business
1. Analytics
Gone are the days when spreadsheets and supporting documents made for a good PowerPoint presentation. You can build custom dashboards and generate visual reports from your CRM database.
2. Lead Management
Your B2B marketing plan can be aligned with your sales pipeline using automated workflows and real-time data gathered.
Be it a form filled up on your website, or user data gathered by your chatbot, all this information can be fed directly to your CRM.
You don’t need to hire resources just for data entry. This process gets automated.
3. Email
You can create automated email drip campaigns using targeted automation. Identify areas of opportunity and growth from the results generated to better your email marketing efforts.
4. SEO
Your SEO team can directly gain insights from the CRM and also coordinate with the content team.
Having all the customer data, content, user analytics, and reports help your SEO team have useful information to create a great SEO plan.
5. Content Management
Gathering insights directly from the CRM makes for a great content strategy. It allows you to integrate a content management system, gather web analytics, and help strategize your content – all in one platform.
You can integrate a CMS platform like WordPress or HubSpot, and also use content distribution tools that can post content on social channels like YouTube, Linked In, Facebook, etc.
6. Finding gaps
Data from your CRM can help your management, support, and product development teams understand what your B2B eCommerce platform currently lacks. They can then build bridges to overcome them.
7. Cross-departmental collaboration
Teams will have real-time customer data and AI-powered automation at their disposal.
This can help different departments to come up with better strategies to detect potential leads, maximize customer experience, boost sales and also increase customer retention.
Quick Tip!
With third-party software like HubSpot CRM integrated into your B2B eCommerce Platform, you can gain insight into your customer journey to see which marketing assets are working the hardest and create hyper-targeted workflows to achieve them.
So, these are the 5 B2B Marketing Automation Softwares that can drive great success and revenue. However, it would be much more efficient if you could have one software that does it all for your B2B eCommerce Business.
Best marketing automation software for B2B eCommerce in 2021
ewiz commerce is an Al-powered B2B eCommerce Platform that can help you:
- Create your eCommerce website,
- Integrate different automation tools, and also
- Provide you with a team of experts to guide you with your day-to-day activities.
It’s called an eCommerce ‘platform’ because of the end-to-end control it provides.
To put it simply, ewiz commerce offers much more than developing an online eCommerce website but also helps you manage it, market it and maximize your revenue with AI-powered automation. See features.
