Marketing automation – a gold rush for the e-commerce world.
Suppose Emma is the owner of a clothing store in the country with a big fanbase as the buyers love the variety they have to offer, and the product quality is also good.
However, after so much success, there were myriad challenges the store was facing – handling the extensive database manually, converting their website visitors into subscribers, customer engagement, and personalized content promotion to subscribers to improve customer retention.
Emma recognized the need for a solution to overpower these problems.
Luckily, Emma got to know about marketing automation tools available for e-commerce stores, which helped her store create healthy, fruitful, and holistic customer profiles.
These marketing automation tools also helped her analyze profiles and segment her store customers into highly targeted audiences, ensuring the right message gets to the right person, on the right channel, at just the right time.
And, with the help of the latest marketing automation tools, Emma could manage her database, sell more, and provide relevant and valuable information to their targeted audience.
To understand more why Emma chose marketing automation to help her e-commerce store, let’s dive right in.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation for e-commerce refers to an advanced platform designed to help marketers capture leads, nurture them further down the funnel, and analyze lead behaviour and campaign performance.
What Marketing Automation does?
Today, many marketers are overloaded with work and dealing with issues like being unable to track engagement and hunting unqualified leads, just to name a few. A world without marketing automation is survivable, would be more like a headache. Thus, in such cases, automation can help scale your programs, deliver more personalized and targeted communications, align with sales, and measure effectiveness.
State of Marketing Automation in 2020?
In 2020, marketing automation is one of the fastest-growing technologies out there.
Initially adopted for large industries, marketing automation tools have become more popular and scalable for small and mid-sized businesses. It has become a must-have for e-commerce businesses.
Take a look at the graph, its currently worth 6.1 billion dollars and is predicted to double in size by 2023, according to SharpSpring’s “Investor Presentation Jan 2019”.
It might show a 14% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years. The highest growth for “through-channel marketing automation” platforms will reach 25% annually, with “lead-to-revenue automation” platforms at 19.4%.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
- Marketing automation allows you to focus on more strategic work and do the rest to manage leads and other functions.
- It enables you to capture, track, manage, and score leads coming in the funnel environment and automate marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels. With marketing automation in place, you’ll better optimize your programs and better demonstrate the ROI of your efforts.
- It entitles you to nurture prospects with relevant and useful information across multiple channels until they are ready to buy. If done nicely, nurturing can result in 60% more sales leads at a 39% lower cost per lead.
- It helps you better understand your prospects and buyers. With buyer personas, you can even deliver personalized messaging at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- It can also help if you are experiencing marketing inefficiencies by automating specific manual workflows, off-load your staff from repetitive tasks, innovate marketing campaigns, and boost the bottom line.
So have you started using any marketing automation tool in your business yet? If not, then there’s no better time than now.
Marketing Automation Tools for E-commerce
Here is the best marketing automation tools list we have curated for all e-commerce businesses across the globe.
1. Wigzo
Wigzo is an omnichannel marketing automation tool that helps many e-commerce companies to streamline their work. It allows B2B and B2C brands to run all aspects of their marketing strategy on a single platform, from concept to execution.
With Wigzo, all actions are getting performed in a unified manner across all channels (Email, SMS, Whatsapp, Onsite, Push notifications, and more). By automating the process, your team can segment and personalize strategies to be displayed to various sets of individuals and define when to deploy what kind of content and campaign, all without sinking an overwhelming extra amount of time into repetitive tasks.
It tracks, analyzes all customers, orders, products, and personalizes the entire marketing content and helps sales-driven marketers to increase ROI.
Integrates with SendGrid, Twilio, elastic mail, Active Campaign, Facebook, Google analytics
Key features:
- Wigzo Automation Suite with web push notification, Email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger help to engage and retain web subscribers by sending them the right message at the right time.
- Wigzo’s advanced Machine Learning Algorithm recommends products by tracking user behavior and products that might interest them. Engaging visitors in personalized communication will help understand their interests and yield up to 24% Higher Conversion Rates.
- Wigzo’s browser push notification was built mindfully and tested to target every visitor who performed an activity.
- Integrating and setting up Wigzo’s automation suite is a 5 seconds task. With no technical support, the user can click on a get app button and start using it.
2. Mailmodo
Mailmodo is a complete email marketing solution enabling users to create and send app-like interactive emails to improve email conversions. As all interactions happen inside the email, this eliminates user redirections for a smoother email experience and higher conversions.
It provides users with a coding-free, drag-n-drop email editor along with a rich collection of AMP Email templates for all popular use cases.
3. Hubspot
HubSpot is an all-in-one, integrated marketing platform, which comes with its marketing automation toolkit. Use HubSpot for Shopify to integrate your online store data with the leading mid-market CRM, marketing automation, and customer service software. HubSpot’s workflows tool is automation beyond email, so you can scale your growth and spend less time on repetitive tasks.
You can upgrade your marketing with Hubspot by creating abandoned cart email nurturing, smart CTAs in content, product-specific re-engagement ads, etc. It will power up your campaigns with workflows to automate ongoing manual actions.
Integrates with Facebook, Eventbrite, AdWords, Facebook ads, SurveyMonkey, Zapier
Key features:
- Lead nurturing on autopilot with email drip campaigns
- Quickly visualize, customize, and personalize your workflows.
- Use advanced segmentation logic to determine who gets enrolled in your workflows and when.
- With HubSpot marketing automation, you can use each lead’s behavior to tailor emails, content, offers, and outreach at scale.
4. Pardot
Pardot offers powerful marketing automation to help marketing and sales teams find and nurture the best leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI.
Pardot provides a full solution that helps marketers create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals.
Key features:
- Generate more leads and move them quickly through the pipeline
- Engage buyers on their terms with dynamic, personalized campaigns
- Understand each step from click to close, capturing real marketing ROI
- Keep your pipeline fully stocked with a steady flow of high-quality leads using Pardot’s landing pages, forms, search tools, and social connectors.
- Turn sales data into marketing action by triggering campaign activity off of CRM data.
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing automation tool that helps you reach the right contacts with the right message at the right time along with advanced segmentation and personalization.
Integrates with Facebook Audiences, Typeform, Salesforce, Unbounce, Google Analytics, Instapage
Key features:
- View preferences and behavioral data to personalize buyer interactions
- Create custom segments, tags, and lists to send timely and relevant emails to different groups
- Quickly reach out to customers regarding an abandoned cart or product review.
- Boost your current email marketing strategy with machine learning capabilities like Predictive Sending
- Show each customer the content that matters to them with conditional content and product blocks.
6. Eloqua
Eloqua is a cloud marketing automation offered by Oracle that aims to help B2B marketers and organizations manage marketing campaigns, and sales lead generation.
Eloqua sends marketing advertisements to mobile devices, email, video, and search results pages.
You can use it to set up complex email campaigns, and ideal for businesses requiring a high level of sophistication. With Eloqua’s workflow tool, you can even manage your CRM, inform lead scores, and nurture your contacts with email campaigns.
Key features:
- Eloqua features a marketing campaign planning canvas and email automation to target customers and prospective clients.
- It stores the information of tracked customers and prospective clients such as company, job title, name, address, email, and phone in its database for analysis.
- Eloqua users can set up workflows and drip campaigns that qualify leads based on whether they complete an action such as opening an email or clicking a link in an email.
- Seamless integration with third-party tools like Dynamics, salesforce
- It can customize link tables to receive personal reporting/track records of the emails.
7. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is powerful marketing automation and email marketing solution that helps businesses become more proficient at using email and social advertising to acquire, convert, and retain customers.
It automatically sends a targeted welcome email when new leads are highly interested in your brand.
With Constant Contact, you can help your organization create more efficient and strategic email marketing, so you can save time while growing your business.
Integrates with Quickbooks, Salesforce, Office 365, Facebook, Google, WordPress
Key features:
- It segments your customers based on their purchase activity or uses a pre-segmented list, including your best, recent, repeat, one-time, and lapsed customers.
- It captures lost sales by automatically sending a customized abandoned cart email to customers who have left items in their cart.
- Its drag and drop products and share discount coupons from your store into an email within seconds.
- It shows reporting that lets you see how much revenue your emails are driving and compare them to daily Shopify sales revenue.
- With constant contact, you can reach new audiences with social marketing and make it easy to find customers on Facebook and Instagram to drive website traffic.
8. Marketo
Marketo is enterprise-level marketing automation that can quickly scale for any business that wishes to grow rapidly and efficiently.
It is a cloud-based marketing platform for all types of organizations that wish to boost digital marketing efforts.
Key features:
- It helps lead generation by effortlessly enticing and engaging with potential customers from the start of their customer journey through tactics like search marketing, landing pages, web personalization, forms, social media, and behavior tracking.
- It scales cross-channel with automated campaigns to personalize a lead’s experience and convert them into a customer. It helps in batch and real-time triggered emails, automatic segmentation as lead behavior changes, and mobile marketing abilities to reach customers wherever they are.
- Marketo integrates with most CRM systems, allowing you to identify your most valuable leads and automatically bring them to your sales team’s attention. Your sales team can then focus more on converting leads instead of dead-end contacts.
- Campaign tracking includes useful tools such as a web-based calendar to easily coordinate your team, dashboards, and ad hoc reports to quickly identify and share critical findings. Campaign performance tracking to spot what’s working and what’s not fast.
9. EngageBay
EngageBay is a marketing automation tool for e-commerce websites. It turns information about your site visitors into actionable insights that can help you boost your sales. It provides CRM, Marketing, and Sales capabilities to small and medium-sized businesses at the most affordable rates.
Manage all your marketing, sales, and support activities on a single platform.
Key Features:
- EngageBay enables a company to automate its outbound marketing.
- Automation can consist of follow-up messages, email drip campaigns, multi-channel publishing, data integration, and more.
- You can nurture leads with targeted content, tailored for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- The platform also takes care of your sales funnel by automating the email marketing process and collecting your potential customers’ emails.
- It allows conversion tracking, lead notifications, email marketing/autoresponder, analytics to track your success, and more!
10. LeadSquared
LeadSquared is a lead conversion and marketing automation platform that helps B2B & B2C businesses track, nurture, and manage their leads seamlessly.
LeadSquared is more like a one-customer journey automation tool focused primarily on the lead nurturing phase of the process. The device designing helps move leads through the funnel faster, so you land more new customers in less time.
You can quickly build trigger-based prospect communication workflows rapidly. With Leadsquared, you can reach your customers on their preferred channels such as – email, text messages, WhatsApp, phone calls, or self-serve portals based on their activities, queries, or periodically.
Key features:
- Trigger highly-relevant and personalized offers and communication campaigns. You can also perform custom list actions, like sending all the leads in one list to a call center application.
- Start capturing leads from all your channels (PPC ads, social media, your website, and more), and set up auto-responders to keep the leads engaged till your agents can call them.
- It reduces the lead leakage, Intelligent lead prioritization automated sales and marketing processes with detailed sales and marketing analytics.
- It also integrates with multiple business tools and has its developer platform, where users can build custom business logic.
11. Drip
Drip is a full-featured marketing automation solution designed for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.
You can increase engagement and drive more revenue with Drip marketing automation.
With Drip, e-commerce marketers worldwide are starting to see their customers in full color like comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation.
You can even send targeted emails to first-time or returning customers, build a visual workflow of their campaigns, and manage their leads.
Integrates with Facebook, Drift, Privvy, JustUno, FOMO, Textiful.
Key features
- Drip gives e-commerce stores the ability to collect, organize, and use every ounce of customer data across your marketing channels. From page visits and email opens to ad clicks and cart adds, gain clarity around customers in every part of their journey.
- With every email and automation you create, Drip provides a clear insight into the metrics you care about. Understand where your revenue is coming from, what’s working, and what you can do better.
- Dashboards in Drip show you must-have email engagement metrics and revenue details, such as revenue per person, for every email and workflow.
- Drip has a visual workflow builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Marketers can build workflows through six steps: action, decision, goal, fork, delay, and exit.
- Targeted email messages, including drip campaigns, broadcast emails, and one-off emails
12. Act-On
Act-On is a growth automation platform designed for enterprise brands. It can optimize your marketing initiatives, helping you enhance customer experiences, increase engagement, collect in-depth information to analyze target audience behaviors, and deliver truly exceptional buyer journeys that nurture long-lasting customer relationships.
It connects and streamlines multiple marketing tactics to create a dynamic engagement program through Act-On’s single automation solution.
Key features:
- Build a communications flow with ease using Act-On’s automated program designer, with drag-and-drop functionality to help you create an engaging experience for your customers
- Act-On allows you to define, plan, and execute your messaging strategy while targeting buyers and combining tasks — all in one scalable platform.
- Automated nurture tools leverage “if-then” logic and conditional personalization to provide the most targeted messaging and content based on user behavior and engagement across multiple programs
- Automated messaging enables timely customer outreach based on audience behaviors and priority communications — emphasizing auto-responses, transactional emails, event-triggered emailing, follow-up messaging, and alerts.
- Act-On’s data management tools empower you to apply information from multiple sources, channels, and mediums to understand better and anticipate customer behaviors and implications, helping you adapt and improve marketing program performance in real-time.
13. Wiser
Wiser is a marketing automation tool that helps retailers and brands turn omnichannel data into action that increases revenue, reduces costs, and improves marketing effectiveness.
Wiser offers one of the most comprehensive pricing strategy and automation tools in the market.
The tool can help with everything from A/B testing your prices to estimating demand and helping you find the right sweet-spot to maximize your bottom line.
As demand and other market forces change, Wiser does the heavy lifting, so your pricing strategy always works—for you and your customers.
Key features:
- Wiser collects and analyzes online and in-store data with unmatched speed, scale, and accuracy.
- The Wiser platform then blends these insights with advanced workflow software to drive business value for brands and retailers. Using a unique combination of data science and human validation, Wiser offers integrated solutions for every retail aspect, all in one place.
- It is a one-stop for MAP pricing, dynamic pricing, price intelligence, retail auditing, and more retail analytics services.
Final Thoughts
In this modern western world, marketing automation has a significant part in lead generation and nurturing customers.
As the competition is fierce, brand loyalty gets knocked out each year, thus automating your processes is a must for e-commerce businesses.
Lastly, as the industries are getting back on track after a big hit from COVID-19, don’t let your e-commerce store struggle to find a way to stand out from the crowd and grow. You must invest in a credible, proven omnichannel marketing automation tool for marketing in 2021.
