Jorge Zuñiga Blanco discusses the importance of automation for eCommerce marketing

Automated marketing is about saving e-merchants time and effort while optimizing the overall marketing strategy. By automating boring and time-consuming tasks, the company’s employees can focus on rewarding creative projects, while ensuring that these monotonous jobs are done correctly. Jorge Zuñiga Blanco, a successful entrepreneur and marketing expert from Costa Rica, provides insight into the importance of marketing automation for better business operations.

When done right, the shift to automated marketing virtually ensures that eCommerce businesses will increase their return on investment, revenue and overall growth, while boosting staff job satisfaction. The benefits of marketing automation can be divided into two main categories: the benefits to your eCommerce store and the benefits that will be passed on to your consumers.

Regardless of their size, industry or location, every eCommerce business should strive to improve efficiency and effectiveness whenever possible. Using a marketing automation tool is a key way to achieve this. E-business has been shown to experience a 14.5% increase in sales productivity, while decreasing overall marketing costs by 12.2% when they make the switch to automation.

Explains Zuñiga, “This increase in sales productivity is due to the increased availability of data, which translates into an overall improvement in online marketing efforts, allowing eCommerce companies to find their ideal audience wherever they are and target them with relevant messages in the most effective way.”

eCommerce companies will benefit from a decrease in marketing costs thanks to the optimization of the use of employees’ working hours. Without repetitive, mundane, time-taking tasks, your marketing and sales teams will now be able to focus on more creative and enjoyable tasks. And as an added bonus, by using your skills for tasks that really need them, your employees will experience greater job satisfaction, which, in turn, will lead to higher levels of staff retention.

For example, companies could easily automate a task such as lead assignment and tracking. With marketing automation software, employees don’t have to spend their time tracking each of the leads and can instead use their interpersonal skills to cultivate bigger and more promising leads in a real way. This brings to eCommerce businesses not only a greater number of leads but also higher quality leads.

Launching an automated marketing campaign takes time, maybe a couple of hours an afternoon. However, it doesn’t even compare to the time and money your eCommerce business will save in the long run. Once an automated marketing campaign is fully up and running, your business could be sending thousands of personalized marketing messages every day, on autopilot, while you sleep.

Automated marketing also makes it easy for you to organize the marketing efforts of your eCommerce businesses in the distant future, preparing and scheduling campaigns well in advance. We all know that the eCommerce industry is notoriously fast – for e-merchants, saving any amount of time can be hugely beneficial.

“By adopting marketing automation,” says Zuñiga, “the amount of time you save will be drastic, allowing you to direct your energy and efforts towards important tasks that really need your attention.”

One of the main benefits for e-merchants when it comes to automating their marketing efforts is the increased availability of data. Data is automatically accumulated on every aspect of your campaign. By analyzing this data, companies can learn what works and what doesn’t and use this information to guide their overall marketing strategy.

Knowing exactly what works within your company and what doesn’t work is hugely beneficial for e-traders as it means that all of your employees are responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Through the analysis of this readily available data, decision-makers in the company can ensure that efforts are focused on the areas of the company that need the most improvement, while successful departments continue to do what they are doing.

One of the most effective ways for e-merchants to use this data is to personalize their marketing efforts. With marketing automation, you can segment your audience and send relevant, personalized messages to individuals (rather than overall spam to a huge group). This in itself is a big step towards winning and retaining customers.

Studies have found that 50% of the tracks that companies generate are qualified but not ready to make a purchase right away. Therefore, they need to be nurtured. Using the manual approach, properly nurturing each of these potential customers is nearly impossible, especially if you have a large contact base. With the help of marketing automation tools, you can send Facebook tracking messages, abandoned cart emails, and sales alert text messages automatically, helping you convert all these customers insecure without any extra effort.

With marketing automation, you can ensure that your customers only receive highly personalized messages that are of genuine interest to them. And this “highly personalized” messaging goes far beyond addressing the customer by name. Customers expect brands to not only know their name, but also their background, their age, their shopping history and even their likes and dislikes.

Another key point you need to know about your customers is where they spend time online. Asserts Zuñiga, “With this information, you can reach your customers in the channel they prefer to interact and avoid sending them spam, sending messages to inboxes that they rarely review. Understanding your customer’s favored method of contact ensures that content is opened and read promptly.”

Content may not only be relevant at the time it is sent, especially if it is something urgent like a flash sales campaign. It needs to be opened quickly so that it remains relevant at the time of reading it. Communicating with your customers through their preferred media is the most practical means of accomplishing this. With a lack of content relevance resulting in an 83% lower engagement rate, ensuring that the message to the right person, over the right channel, with the right content, is paramount for any eCommerce marketer.

About Jorge Zuñiga Blanco

Jorge Zuñiga Blanco is a leading eCommerce expert who has provided his services to growing organizations throughout the world.  He has a diverse background of industries to his credit, giving him the ability to relate and contribute to business owners in a variety of markets.  He has more than 20 years in the eCommerce industry and, for the past nine, has dedicated his expertise and knowledge to helping executives and managers develop their business.

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