Running an ecommerce store has never been easier if you use Shopify, but that’s just the first step because if you really want to grow your business and start making money you need to tweak and fine-tune various settings so that you can streamline sales and marketing processes.
Forrester predicts that online shopping retail sales in the U.S. only will hit $500 billion by 2020 from $373 billion in 2016. It’s evident that ecommerce business has great potential, so if you want to capitalize on this trend, it’s essential to dig deeper and implement various useful Shopify apps and solutions.
Automate your email marketing efforts
These optimistic projections about the meteoric rise of online shopping shouldn’t be taken for granted because there’s a big issue that has been tormenting many online retailers ever since this method of shopping became available – the dreaded shopping cart abandonment.
Baymard Institute has calculated that the global shopping cart abandonment rate amounts to 69.23%. Email marketing is one of the best methods for fighting this depressing statistic, as it gives you the opportunity to remind the prospects that have abandoned their shopping carts about the items they were interested in and that they almost bought.
Email marketing automation apps for Shopify can handle and launch all your shopping cart abandonment campaigns to increase conversion rates.
Bearing in mind that online retailers lost $4.6 trillion through shopping cart abandonment in 2016, by automating your email marketing efforts you can prevent leaving a lot of money lying on the table.
Automated email marketing can be used for other highly lucrative sales tactics.
Amazon generates 35% of its revenue through recommendations, which means that you should take a page from the online shopping pioneer, and use email marketing to recommend similar or complementary products to customers who purchase something from your ecommerce store.
Upselling and cross-selling require a highly personalized and persistent approach in order to work.
An automated email marketing app will allow you to schedule campaigns, segment your target audience, and personalize your messages.
Automate your customer service
Customer churn is a common issue for both online and brick-and-mortar stores, and according to research studies, 68% of customers leave a business relationship because they perceive the company in question as being indifferent towards them.
Luckily, we live in the age of AI and machine learning, which means that you can automate your customer service and have everything covered.
At the moment, using “https://thenextweb.com/news/chatbots-intelligent-assistants-impacting-marketing” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”chatbots is a big thing, and an increasing number of online stores have one hovering in the corner of their front page.
Chatbots can speed up the sales process by dealing with some of the most frequent questions and issues that customers have since it’s not always possible for a sales rep to be online and handle the situation.
Juniper Research forecasts that the use of chatbots will result in cost savings of more than $8 billion annually by 2020. Bearing in mind that in 2017 those cost savings amount to approximately $20 million, it’s clear how huge this trend will become, so make sure to implement one of the chatbot apps for Shopify.
Automate your social media management
It’s already common knowledge that content is a great tool for driving traffic to your ecommerce website, as well as for engaging and educating your target audience. This means that the content you generate has the function of warming your leads and subtly converting them into sales.
Social media channels have the purpose of expanding your reach and it’s very important to post information about a new blog post on your website or let your customers know that you have listed a new product. It would be very complicated and time-consuming to do all this manually, so applications for managing your content across social media channels can save you a lot of time and keep your accounts regularly updated.
There are a multitude of tools on the market to help with your social media automation, popular ones include, Buffer, Hootsuite, SproutSocial and MeetEdgar.
Automate your inventory management
Managing inventory is an extremely demanding task because you need to know whether you’re running out of stock so that you can order or produce more items of your product, and it takes a lot of time to do it properly.
By automating this process, you’ll be able to easily keep track of product availability and demand, change pricing, and be notified about all the relevant information regarding stocking your shelves in advance. Apart from that, selling across various sales channels can be an additional complication, because you need to manage each of the channels separately, so an app that can sync across all those channels will come in very handy.
When it comes to dropshipping, although you don’t have to buy any items and store them because the vendor will send them directly to your customers, you still need to manage and fulfill orders, and some apps allow you to do that without any hassle.
These two approaches to ecommerce business are completely different, and both of them require detailed analytics, meaning that regardless of whether you keep the products you sell in stock or not, you have to understand your metrics and use them to grow your business.
Find out how to Automate your Shopify Order Fulfillment process with the Shopify + Floship Integration here!
Automate your payment system
According to a survey, too long and too complicated checkout process is another important reason why customers abandon their shopping carts. A limited number of payment options can also significantly affect your ecommerce business, as customers want to select the one that they usually use or the one that they think is the safest.
Dealing with cards and money requires the highest possible level of security, which is why you need to automate the whole process and provide your customers with the possibility to decide on their preferred payment method.
Before you implement various payment options, you need to check out if they are accepted in the countries where your business operates.
Besides that, it’s important to establish what type of payment method your customers prefer. Since certain industries, such as diet or travel, are considered as high-risk businesses, some payment services won’t agree to work with you, and you’ll have to find a service that specializes in working with high-risk industries.
Conclusion: Shopify Store Automation and Your Online Growth
The Shopify ecommerce platform can help you with your online store and make it easier for you to get the ball rolling, but if you want to develop and grow your business, you’ll need to implement automation as much as possible.
Nate Vickery is a business consultant and an online author mostly focused on covering marketing and MarTech related trends and practices for startups and SMBs. He is the executive editor at Bizzmark Blog and a contributor at The Next Web.
More Shopify Tips
- Top Free Shopify Add-Ons for Your Online Business
- 5 Best Beauty Themes for Shopify Store Owners
- 5 Formidable Security Plugins Every Shopify Merchant Should Investigate
- A Crash Course on Shopify Order Fulfillment
Ready To Upgrade Your Logistic Solution?
Speak to Floship ecommerce logistic consultant about improving your global support chain today
