How To Deal With Common Ecommerce Issues Using Automation

By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce

Sep 10

Ecommerce can be a rewarding industry. Launching an online business gives you the freedom and control to carve your own way in the digital sphere.

But ecommerce is not without its headaches. There are several issues that every digital entrepreneur faces at some point during their business journey.

Thankfully, there’s a solution: automation. Such technology turns all your ecommerce headaches into an ecommerce breeze — read on to find out how.

Crush your customer service

A happy customer is a loyal customer. But an unhappy customer? They’re anything but.

Managing customer complaints and queries can be time-consuming. But it’s an important part of growing a successful ecommerce business, so it’s not something you can avoid.

Thankfully, automation lets you provide better customer service. It mitigates the time spent on mundane or repetitive queries and lets you focus on the most pressing complaints and issues.

Chatbots are the most common form of customer service automation. By adding an AI bot onto your website, you can deal with frequent or simple requests (such as stock queries or delivery information).

Consequently, your customer service team is free to provide more nuanced requests quickly and personably. Install a chatbot to your online store and create a range of scripts that deal with the most common queries you face. You’ll save time, deal with more queries, and keep your customers happy all at once — not bad.

Save your struggling social media

Social media is a crucial component in any ecommerce business. It gives you the power to circumvent competitive SERPs and create an online community that generates leads, drives sales, and bolster your branding across platforms.

Managing one social platform whilst juggling the rest of your business can be tricky. But coordinating multiple social platforms while doing so is downright impossible.

With such a valuable marketing channel is worth nurturing, and automation makes it possible.

There is no shortage of social media automation platforms, each with different functions and features. SocialOomph is one scheduling tool that many businesses use to coordinate and schedule their social posts, letting them plan their content months in advance in a single sitting.

Other platforms still let brands monitor mentions of their business on social, helping them spot potential PR crises and finding prospective sales opportunities into the bargain.

Ace your abandoned cart revenue

Abandoned carts are one of the leading causes of lost revenue for ecommerce brands. Your customer is all but set to pay and then they abandon their purchase. It costs online businesses an estimated $18 billion of lost revenue every year — no small sum.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. Email automation prevents abandoned carts by sending a sequence of chaser emails to the lost lead. Each email builds on the last, offering different messages and different benefits (such as discount codes or freebies) to compel the abandoned customer to buy.

And this is all done with minimal involvement on your part. Simply plan the sequence ahead of time and then let your automation do the rest. Email automation tools like ActiveCampaign make chasing abandoned carts easy, and its automation well worth investing in.

Succeed at smart enterprise scaling

Every entrepreneur is after growth. But as your business grows, so too do the problems you face. Orders increase and your customer base grows, placing strain on your business infrastructure.

This results in either ad-hoc workarounds that are akin to putting a Band-Aid on a serious wound, or more hires — a costly process that growing businesses can ill afford.

A third solution, however, is ecommerce automation. This transforms all the daily repetitive tasks associated with a scaling business, letting you focus on more urgent matters. From customer segmentation to price updates, ecommerce automation does what a human does, but better and for less.

And it’s easy to do too. Ecommerce automation tool lets you implement automation with an intuitive visual builder, creating workflows from scratch that foster business growth.

While not every automation tool is as easy to use, many are. It’s accessible and straightforward, and saves you time and money as your business grows — it’s a no-brainer.

Kill it with customer retention

In the busy world of ecommerce, it’s easy to lose yourself down a tunnel of chasing new leads. But as you pursue these potential customers, all too often your existing customers get neglected. And as a result, you lose them.

If you want to increase your revenue, you need to keep your old customers on board. But how do you balance regular lead generation with sustained customer retention?

If you’ve gotten this far in the article, you already know the answer.

Automation turns all the minutiae of customer retention into automatic tasks. Whether you need customer feedback after a purchase, want to send a freebie or discount to a customer on their birthday, or just want to remind your loyal shoppers that you value their custom, ecommerce marketing automation has you covered.

Chasing new leads is a necessity for every ecommerce business — that’s a fact. But so too is nurturing relationships with your existing ones. You’ll increase your customer retention and enjoy sustained profits for a long time to come.

Ecommerce is a rewarding — but challenging — endeavor. But automation makes those challenges easier, and it’s growing in sophistication everyday. Take inspiration from the above and let automation streamline your online business and enjoy sustained business growth in 2019.

To learn even more about building a successful ecommerce business, bookmark my blog and how-to guides, and check-in regularly for the latest tips and advice.