Growing your e-commerce business can be done in many ways. You can find new niche products, hire influencers to become brand ambassadors, or launch a new ad campaign.

How to Find Improvements

If you haven’t used any of these strategies yet, then you still have truckloads of work ahead of you. But before pursuing these frontiers, you should take a step back and look for opportunities to improve what you already have.

Implementing automation, for example, is a great way to boost the efficiency of specific facets of your e-commerce business. It will help you boost traffic to your website, streamline your sales funnel, accelerate your lead nurturing process -- all while doing less work.

In this post, we’ll tackle the top five ways to leverage automation for e-commerce businesses.

1. Automate Abandoned Cart Emails

Every online business needs an email marketing strategy for lead generation and nurturing. By regularly sending relevant information through newsletters, you can maintain brand awareness, build recurring traffic to your site, and spread promotions that can spike sales.

Email marketing platforms.

With modern email marketing platforms, you can easily build automated workflows that schedule messages based on user activity or important dates. A common example would be an abandoned cart email, which is triggered whenever a user abandons their cart or the checkout page in your online store.

Let them know what is in their carts.

An abandoned cart email usually contains the items left in the user’s cart, along with a link to a checkout page where the purchase can be finalized. This will enable you to squeeze more sales from users who may have left for various reasons, such as lost internet connection, lack of available funds, and so on.

You can also depend on integrated features in e-commerce platforms to make abandoned cart recovery a breeze. BigCommerce, for example, has the “Abandoned Cart Saver” engine that works on a 100 percent  automated basis. Their data reveals that, when done correctly, it recovers around 15 percent of lost sales for sellers on average.

2. Automate Reviews

If there’s one thing that can convince your audience to buy from you, it’s the review or testimonial of a previous customer.

Customer feedback.

Another way to utilize email remarketing is to automate the collection of customer feedback. Again, you can fall back to a platform like MailChimp for this strategy, which can help you send or schedule automated messages after customers make a purchase.

If you use this, they really will come.

Over time, customer reviews will amass naturally without your firsthand involvement. You normally find them in social media networks, review sites like Yelp, or in the comments section of your own blog.

3. Automate Inventory Management

Inventory management is one of the most tedious aspects of running an e-commerce business. But by integrating your e-commerce platform with an accounting software like Quickbooks, you can easily automate important tasks, such as keeping track of purchase orders, updating the number of products in stock, or calculating the real-time valuation of your inventory.

4. Automate Invoicing

Requesting for payments can be frustrating, especially if you have to manually create and send every single invoice to your customers. The good news is, many payment and accounting platforms today allow you to create recurring invoices within minutes. Apart from Quickbooks, Due, and PayPal are other payment gateway you can use to create automated invoices.

Automated invoicing is also integrated in popular e-commerce plaforms such as BigCommerce. You simply need to integrate the right plugins, which would enable you to automate invoices as well as receipts after orders. To learn more about these e-commerce platforms and their features, you can refer to the infographic below:

Image Source: Lodlois

5. Automate Your Customer Support

Today, the term “AI” or Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a buzzword -- and it doesn’t have to be about voice-activated digital assistants or virtual coaches that can monitor your vital signs.

With a simple tool like It’s Alive, you can easily develop your own Facebook chatbot without writing a single line of code. It can help you build conversations that are directed by what the user types or clicks from the available choices.

A simple approach is to send users a link to your FAQ page whenever they type keywords like “how” or “help.” Sure, automated interactions may not always lead to a sale. But at the very least, you’re able to provide assistance to every user without having a live agent on standby.

At this point, you should now have a deeper understanding on how to use automation for e-commerce businesses. But don’t rest just yet; you still have a long way to go before you can call your e-commerce endeavor a success. To keep the ball rolling, check out this post for more ways to boost sales in your online store.

What automation tips or tools will you recommend to other readers? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below!