In the digital age, are you looking for new trends to boost your presence in the market?
Marketing strategies are important for business growth. It provides eCommerce brands an edge over its competitors.
In 2020, the overarching focus of the organizations will be to advance their marketing strategies to complement the broader financial goals of the organization and manage the market process and campaigns automatically.
For this, the most demanding tool in the eCommerce market is Marketing Automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can be defined as a procedure to automate marketing activities. It automates the repetitive marketing campaign tasks undertaken daily and provide a more personalized experience for the customers. It refines your marketing process by targeting customers across multiple channels.
In a recent survey, it was observed that more than 51% of companies are already using Marketing Automation and over 58% of organizations are planning to adopt it for better customer experience.
The Marketing Automation platform allows organizations to plan, coordinate, implement, and automate a time-bound workflow of marketing.
What does Marketing Automation do?
The Marketing automation tool allows you to execute an SMS marketing strategy without having to manually press the “send” button on each campaign or message you share with the audience. Marketing automation schedules posts and campaigns ahead of time and keeps the CRM data up to date.
It helps a business grow by saving time and resources, streamlining their segmentation, lead generation, customer marketing lifecycle, customer retention, marketing ROI measurement, uplifting business, and reducing staffing cost.
Marketing automation will be the game-changer for the eCommerce industry this year and below shared top trends will influence it.
Marketing Automation Trends 2020
Marketing Automation to grow more in 2020 and beyond
Marketing automation in 2020 is a successful investment as around 80% of the users of marketing automation observed an increase in their number of leads, and 77% observed an increase in the number of conversions.
Customer engagement in 2020 will add more value in conversion rate, and Marketing Automation will act as a key catalyst in making it all happen.
As per the stats, Marketing Automation in 2020 will have tremendous growth, and the prime reason for this would be more marketers are drifting towards the new automated marketing process and have realized the importance and potential of Marketing Automation, which is increasing their business revenue.
Below are the other eye-opening facts related to Marketing automation growth in 2020:
- According to Email Monday, demanding and spending on marketing automation tools will grow speedily, reaching $25.1 billion annually by 2023.
- The record also updated that 75% of marketing professionals are already using at least one type of Marketing Automation tool in their strategy. Other businesses can also implement the same marketing strategy.
- It is known as an important tool for improving bottom-line growth, with over 70% of Indian businesses using it primarily for improving their lead conversion rate.
For all organizations in 2020, whether a modest start-up or a multinational company to be on the top rank, they need to look for a budget-friendly Marketing Automation tool for an effective marketing strategy.
Machine Learning + AI-Assisted Platforms an intelligent step in the automation world
The existence of AI in phone apps is easy to see. From chatbots to speech recognition, the benefits and use of AI-assisted platforms are increasing and will continue to increase in the coming year.
Marketers in the contemporary age where competition for customer retention has increased are looking for AI-assisted platforms to automate and optimize their marketing to meet customer desire for personalized experiences.
If machine learning utilizes data to provide insights, then marketing automation AI-assisted platforms will take that data and help create supreme segmentation actions and suggestions. Machine learning along with AI-assisted platforms is where smart database marketing becomes a reality.
A recent study observed that intelligent and high-performing marketers are more than 2 times as likely to use AI-assisted platforms in their SMS campaigns.
Marketers implementing the automation principle in 2020 will heighten their business. A well-trained series of machine learning algorithms will better identify common areas of interest amongst customers than a human analyst will.
Once a consumer clicks an ad, the behavioral data will be consumed by Machine Learning systems and used in future campaigns and touch-points as the user progresses in their life-cycle. Likewise, AI-assisted platforms will extend and technologies like Deep Learning will be utilized to automate the study of consumer behavior, online shopping activity, understanding language, and speech patterns to create hyper-personalized consumer personas.
Lately, big brands like Amazon have already created their AI-assisted platform to deliver product recommendations, product delivery optimization, and much more. Amazon has made a deliberate effort to integrate machine learning and AI principles into the company’s working culture.
Personalized Content is shaping the market performance
Contemporary consumers desire and expect more personalized and content-driven experience from the brands they interact with frequently. Marketing automation has become the remedy that most businesses are leveraging to accomplish personalized campaign tasks and increase customer retention.
With marketing automation technology, you can reach each customer across your database at the time, and with the content they need. It automates activities like sharing product preference messages or offering a personalized incentive after a certain number of completed online purchases.
Planning and executing hyper-personalized campaigns at a large scale for a massive consumer base was a major challenge in the past years as consumers were demanding brands to know their preferences. Now, Marketing Automation platforms act as a remedy and integrate seamlessly with online brands and collect consumer data at several points and help brands personalize large-scale campaigns smoothly.
Personalized Automated content in 2020 will be the prime element in a brand’s customer retention marketing efforts as it can help them uplift their loyal customer’s list.
With new drift in personalization, you can understand your customer’s online shopping habits, preferences, past purchase data and you will have a great chance to enter the world of a productive future market with hyper-personalization and predictive recommendations.
Chatbots will be in the limelight
The company dynamics have changed over the last few years and so have the features to level-up with modern industry intelligence.
68% of the audience prefers to engage in live chat and 63% prefer getting back to a website with live chat to repeat their purchase.
For this reason, most product-based startups prefer an affordable website for themselves to dedicatedly communicate with consumers and sell their products. In such cases, Chatbots are the most effective medium for interaction with the audience and complementary for other channels. It is a computer program that can have a real-time conversation with consumers by giving an insight into the business’s purpose, collecting their information, and keeping a track of which products they’re most likely interested in.
With artificial intelligence playing a crucial role in today’s age, AI-driven chatbots have elevated market performance as they allow brands to automate their communications with users and stand out in the industry.
Below are the few important reasons why chatbots are must-have for all the companies in 2020:
- Over 54% of customers preferred engaging with a brand via a chatbot and not an app. The massive customer engagement is easier with chatbots as it is a smart technology to hold up a meaningful conversation with multiple users.
- Initiating a whole new avenue for brand-customer engagement, WhatsApp will soon permit eCommerce brands to integrate chatbots with their API. With 1.3 billion active WhatsApp users, this will be a great chance for big to small organizations to drive growth.
- Other Messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger also had huge success after integrating Chatbots for brands. According to a study, over 60% of users who received a chatbot ping on Messenger engaged with the message.
In the coming years, Chatbots will be playing a significant role in customer engagement and customer retention. Chatbots will outsmart other technologies and will be proficient in behavioral recommendations along with deep integration with third-party software.
5. Automated Social Media Marketing
Automated social media processes including engagement, management, and marketing curtail the time spent on maintaining and growing a brand. As a result of automation, resources and time could be utilized in other areas of marketing and meeting the company goals.
2018 observed a 20% increase in the social media budget of brands, which will increase even further in 2020.
According to a survey, 135 minutes in 2017 to 143 minutes in the 2019 audience have increased social media engagement. Thereby, brands have a grand opportunity to increase brand awareness and functionality. With intelligent social media automation tools, brands can interact with the right audiences by messaging at the right time and maintain a high contextual relevance.
The other advantages of social media automation in 2020 are shared below:
- Company spending less time manually updating brand pages and maximizing reach
- More active on social media beyond regular business hours
- Real-time analyzation of customer data
- Pre-scheduling Facebook posts campaigns
- Get notifications of social conversations
The generation Z population is growing, and becoming active users of online shopping platforms. With time, they will compete with millennials’ on expense and spending potential. For this, brands need to plan a powerful social media strategy to acquire more Gen Z users as they spend maximum time online.
Another dominating strategy is social video content. Social video advertising increased 130%, which will encourage various brands to look towards video as an effective social engagement tool.
Another new effective marketing strategy in 2020 will be the “Stories” feature that brands can use to drive more leads to their brands.
Lifecycle Marketing Using Predictive CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Competition in 2020 is growing in the eCommerce market, and the cost isn’t the only determining factor in a customer’s decisions. It is important to estimate the value of a customer over the course of his interaction with your brand.
Implementing Predictive Customer lifetime value (CLV) is essential as it is a customer-centric metric that reflects the discounted value of future profits generated by a customer. The term “profits” here signifies estimated costs and revenue, as both have a vital role in estimating true CLV; however, the focus of many CLV models is on the revenue side and updating how much you should spend on customer acquisition.
Predicting CLV is a powerful base to retain valuable customers, increase revenue from less valuable customers, and improve the customer experience overall. It allows you to narrow down your focus:
- To retain a VIP customer: Send special offers or gift to the customer
- To acquire new customers: with look-alike modeling, you can slowly upsell them products by incentivizing with discounted coupons.
This segmentation with CLV will allow brands to provide a pleasant personalized experience to customers and have higher conversion and retention statistics.
Implementing Predictive CLV in 2020 marketing strategy is significant because:
- More brands will try to analyze their consumer’s online behavior, and understand how they are purchasing, functioning online, and their motives behind it.
- Predictive CLV is going to be the tipping point, as brands will reform their advertising expense according to the expected revenue from their customers.
- With advanced segmentation, brands will be able to easily identify all levels of consumers from high to low and design highly personalized marketing campaigns with a reasonable marketing cost.
- Latest Marketing Automation Softwares will help brands create highly accurate user profiles easily by analyzing consumer buying behavior and past purchase records and create an accurate CLV assessment.
Customer Retention is going to be Critical For Business Growth
Customer retention is an important element for any growing company because it not only estimates how fortunate they are at acquiring new customers but also how great they are at satisfying existing customers.
Unlike Customer acquisition, retention is easier and more cost-effective. Customers who will be retained will spend more and buy more often and refer to the brand’s services to family and friends. According to a business study, only a 5% increase in customer retention can boost company revenue by 25-95%.
Maybe 2020 will be the year to witness more emphasis on retention than acquisition and customer experience will get more advanced and become a cross-function channel for SMS marketing and campaigns. Also, intelligent marketers will focus more on understanding the journey of anonymous visitors who haven’t purchased on their site, and with efficient customer retention tools in 2020 tracking their customer journey from an unknown visitor to the known user will deliver true value in terms of business growth.
There are five important strategies for long-term customer engagement in 2020 and beyond:
- Emphasize the customer buying experience.
- Plan a post-sale follow-up for online purchases.
- Add an opt-in subscription or full-time membership feature.
- Execute flash sales related to items they regularly buy.
- Excel your service-delivery options.
Satisfied customers will act as brand supporters and will review it to fellow-mates. In today’s time, customers trust reviews and recommendations from their friends more than advertisements. This will be a good reason for brands to keep their existing customers happy and retain them.
According to Forrester, brands that offer outstanding customer experience will have 5 times higher revenue growth as compared to other brands as acquiring new customers remains 5X more costly than retaining existing ones, and the CLV of old customers compared to newly acquired customers is a lot higher so this is the prime reason why most brands will have to focus on retention in 2020 to increase their bottom line.
Mobile marketing approach
In a recent survey, it was observed that mobile users have risen to 4.68 billion last year. To top it off, mobile app revenue has also reached 461.7 billion dollars, up by 96.5 billion from 2018! As the digital audience drifts more towards mobile devices, brands must also learn how to turn up to the mobile network targeted audiences.
Mobile marketing in today’s age acts as a growth driving factor for brands as the user connects with the online world using mobile. Therefore, the main objective of brands will be to create an elaborative mobile engagement strategy, leveraging tools like push and web notifications, SMS, and in-app notifications effectively using Marketing Automation to run successful campaigns.
With industry competition at the peak, brands will focus on creating mobile-specific content and exclusive mobile engagement strategies to retain and acquire customers.
Below are prime opportunities for mobile marketers in 2020 :
- Google’s mobile-first index released in 2020 will emphasize brands to optimize their website for mobile. Thereby, mobile will become the go-to channel for marketers in 2020 for engagement and retention.
- More mobile-based ads and campaigns can be expected in the coming years as mobile ad expenses exceeded desktop in 2018 for the first time, and this will continue in the new year with spends expected to increase by 8.5 %.
- With Mobile Market automation, brands will collect and analyze the data of their mobile users and how they engage with their brand, and this customer behavioral and transactional data will be important for understanding the customer’s intent and buying behavior, which will lead the way for personalized campaigns in the coming years.
In the modern age, the use of mobile devices has grown across all demographics that means you can connect with your target audience via mobile marketing, regardless of what products or services you offer. In a survey, it was reviewed that over 90% of people will view a text message within 3 minutes of receiving it and this can be used in modern mobile marketing to grab the attention of more consumers for business growth with the right message.
Integrated Cross-Channel Marketing will reign the modern mobile market
Consumers interact with brands at many platforms, either through email, social media, SMS or on company websites.
In 2020 with modern marketing, brands can provide opportunities to consumers to interact with them across multiple platforms via cross channel marketing.
According to a study, around 85% of the online consumers start a purchase on one device and finish on another.
Cross-channel marketing is the best way for marketers to promote their brand across multiple platforms. Cross-channel marketing intends to provide existing customers and potential customers with a seamless brand experience that improves customer satisfaction and drives higher conversion rates.
Below are a few key benefits of cross-channel marketing strategy in 2020:
- Customer can choose their preferred medium
- More digital touchpoints
- Low-cost brand marketing
- The brand will get more attention
Cross channel marketing along with CRM can create a successful consumer satisfaction strategy and build a stronger relationship with the audience. With this blend of technology, it will be easier for brands to convert visitors into loyal and paying customers.
Cross-channel marketing will be used to unify the all-in-one platform and eliminate most of the challenges and easily track all your marketing channels.
Going ahead in 2020, Marketers will be more successful with a cross-channel marketing strategy as compared to working with a single marketing channel.
Final Thoughts
In recent years, B2C marketing automation usage has consistently risen as approximately 400,000 brands use automation tools, and by 2020, that number will reach half a million. It is a huge opportunity for your brand to dig in deeper into marketing automation strategy and uplift your company growth. The aforementioned marketing automation trends for 2020 will help you plan and execute a comprehensive digital strategy for your business.
Whether you’re a new venture or a growing business, to easily streamline your marketing functions and better engage and communicate with customers in 2020 you must try our omnichannel marketing automation tool Wigzo, to propel your company to the next level.
