One of the most significant advantages of eCommerce is its ability to incorporate the newest technologies. Since most (if not all) processes are digital, constant innovation occurs to make systems more efficient and convenient.
Automation technology allows business owners to optimize their daily operations and streamline their workflow. This innovation saves time and resources, allowing companies to focus on more critical revenue-building tasks.
If you’re a business owner looking to boost your bottom line, eCommerce automation certainly helps. By automating routine tasks and processes, you can reduce the time and effort required to operate your business, freeing up resources to drive growth and increase profits.
What is eCommerce Automation?
eCommerce automation is using technology to automate various manual processes in a business. This aims to free the workforce from doing repetitive but necessary tasks and improve operational efficiency. Different types of software are available for eCommerce businesses, each designed to automate specific tasks.
For example, some tools can automate email marketing campaigns, manage product listings, or handle customer service inquiries. By turning manual processes into automated workflows, businesses reduce the risk of errors and improve efficiency, leading to a better customer experience and more effective business operations.
How to Automate Your eCommerce Business: 7 Functions to Optimize
You can divide the functions best automated for eCommerce into three: customer-facing systems, internal systems, and marketing systems.
Customer-facing systems
Providing the best experience possible to your customers is a must for businesses to improve customer loyalty, retention, and brand imaging. Automation improves customer experience without much effort from you or your employees.
- Customer Support
On top of providing the best service, answering customer inquiries and concerns help your company be seen positively. In fact, 88% of people believe that their experience with a company is as important as its product or services.
This belief doesn’t mean that you must have staff ready to answer any question at all hours, though. Streamline the process through automation tools like chatbots by preparing answers to frequently asked questions. This way, customers that need personal help are filtered to your representatives.
- Transactional and welcome notifications
You can send order confirmation and tracking via email and SMS to let your customers know you care about their transactions. On a subscription model, you can also send welcome messages after a successful registration. These can personalize their experience with your company, which promotes customer loyalty and repeat business.
Automation can ensure these notifications are sent to the correct people immediately with no effort from your team. Rush provides transactional notification automation free of charge, which can give you the benefits without any additional costs!
- Invoice
If your business uses a buy now, pay later system or follows a subscription-based model, a necessary part of that is creating regular invoices. Creating an invoice is tedious and difficult to remember, but automation can help here too.
By automatically creating and sending invoices, a service offered by many accounting and online payment platforms, you can avoid all the hassle and even reduce the likelihood of mistakes caused by human error.
- Post-purchase and abandoned cart follow up
Customer feedback is a fantastic way of improving your services and also serves as marketing for your business. Using automated emails or messages, you can reach out to people and ask for their opinion. Display positive reviews to convert more people and learn from negative feedback.
Abandoned carts are a common problem for eCommerce businesses, but automation can also help. After a certain period, your software sends an automated message to the people who abandoned their cart to remind them of its contents and hopefully get them to complete their transaction.
Internal systems
The customer side of things is only one part of your operating needs. Your internal systems also benefit significantly from automation.
- Inventory management and cross-selling
Gone are the days when you need to check your sales record against your remaining inventory manually. Inventory-keeping software handles this repetitive task, even if you sell on different websites. This tool turns the once-daily job into something you only need to do occasionally to double-check.
Automation helps you in selling to different websites too. Instead of manually uploading your listing to each website you operate on, you can use automation to cross-post on all necessary websites. Automated software collates orders from your channels into one central location.
- Analysis and reports
Collecting your orders is only one of the things a sales automation tool can do. Fortunately platforms such as Rush come with an analytics module that can help users organize and analyze sales trends with ease. Generally, this makes it easier for brands to make personalized and relevant promotions for customer re-engagement.
The computerized system might even notice trends that you aren’t able to because of its high data capacity, allowing you to see where you need to focus on improving.
Marketing systems
Marketing is the way people find out about your products and services. With automation, you can reach more new people and keep in touch with your customers.
- Email and message marketing
Personal messages and emails to your customer base are crucial ways of promoting your products and services. Automated email marketing campaigns save time and resources while maintaining customer contact.
Automation handles tasks such as creating and scheduling email and message campaigns, segmenting contact lists, and tracking and reporting campaign performance. Rush’s engagement module helps even further by allowing you to segment your customer base by demographic and purchase behavior easily.
- Social media management
Social media is a crucial channel for eCommerce businesses to interact with customers less formally. A survey of shoppers placed social media as the number one communication channel for brands to connect with their consumers.
Automation tools help schedule posts and announcements across your various social accounts and track engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, to analyze and maximize the benefits of social media.
The Future of Business
Automation tools are already being used across all industries. Considering its benefits, automation will streamline your operations and improve the customer experience.
As you automate your processes, ensure you have a reliable eCommerce platform. The good news is Rush provides its merchants with an automated notification and tracking system, Analytics dashboard, the engagement module and so much more!
We’re the all-in-one eCommerce solution to help take your business to the next level. Check out our eCommerce packages and partner with us today!
