8 Effective Automation Workflows for eCommerce Businesses
If you’re running an eCommerce business, you are probably on a constant search for new ways to engage with your customers, recommend appropriate products, and take advantage of opportunities to serve your audience. If you’re like me, you’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to streamline and make this work a little bit simpler. You likely already know many of the benefits of marketing automation, but for eCommerce businesses it’s essential. You can be pretty sure that your competition is taking advantage of automation to reach customers - so if you’re not, you’re leaving opportunities, and money, on the table.
Strategic Workflows for Growth
Next step - workflows! Below are eight effective automation workflows that you can use right now in your eCommerce business. They cover everything from product launches and abandoned carts to upselling, loyalty, and product recommendations.
Product Launches
Product launches generate excitement, buzz, and sales in advance of a product’s release. When you launch a new product, it can be tempting to get the product out there before starting to advertise it. But if done well, product launches can generate significant interest, excitement, and sales for your new product before it’s even released. These workflows typically start with three different inputs: a product interest form, a segment tag, and a product launch landing page.
The interest form can appear throughout your website, on external sites where users can register their interest (like BetaList, Kickstarter, or Facebook lead ads), or at physical events. The segment tag is for members of your existing audience that would be interested in the new product. Finally, the landing page is your chance to explain the new product’s benefits and features, show some early product photography, and generate excitement. All three of these inputs lead to the same email sequence, which is designed to get your audience interested in the product, answer questions, and inform your audience about the upcoming launch.
Upselling and Revenue Optimization
Upselling increases revenue by 10-30%, and is more affordable than acquiring new customers. It is a sales technique where you offer your customers the chance to purchase upgrades (better features, better specifications, more volume) or to get the more expensive version of what they’re buying so you can maximize the value of their purchase. The key to upselling is that you offer products that add value and improve your customer’s life. Upselling a customer is far easier and more affordable than acquiring a new customer, and is one of the simplest ways of adding revenue to your bottom line. With automation, you can reach out after a customer’s purchase to offer additional products, higher tier products, or related products.
Visualizing the Roadmap
To help organize these efforts, you can use a Light Ecommerce Product Launch Roadmap Template to make the road ahead easy to visualize. This helpful Light Product Roadmap Template from Venngage provides several features to streamline the design process:
- 100% customizable templates
- AI-powered editing features
- Millions of photos, icons, charts and graphics
- Effortlessly share, download, embed and publish
- Easily generate QR codes for your designs
| Design style | vintage |
| Colors | light |
| Size | Letter (8.5 x 11 in) |
| File type | PNG, PDF, PowerPoint |
By using these tools, you can base your upsell offers on how large the customer’s purchase was, what category the purchase was from, or whether the item is something that requires or “goes with” other items. Smart automation sequences mean that you won’t do any additional work to get that extra revenue.
