If you own a business, there is one resource that is more valuable than any other: time.
Unfortunately, there isn’t an unlimited amount of time, so you want to make sure you prioritize your tasks accordingly. It can be hard to manage all your business tasks, especially as your eCommerce business is growing.
That’s where automation comes in. Automation will help you focus on the most important tasks while the time-consuming tasks are put into autopilot mode. In this post, we will be discussing how to automate your eCommerce business to optimize your business’ success.
What is Automation?
Automation is basically just using software to turn manual tasks into automated tasks and workflows. When automated, these tasks can send internal or external emails, support tickets in your help desk, notifications, and many other actions. Automation can save you and your employees time for more important tasks like customer service and bigger picture ideas.
To make sure things run smoothly, you can set up multiple conditions that need to take place for the automated workflow to run. Automation is best used on smaller, mundane tasks that don’t take a lot of work, just a lot of time.
Why You Should Automate Your
eCommerce Business
Reduce Costs
If you have been looking for ways to reduce costs in your business, automation can help. Automation can give you more availability of hours for your business. Also, it allows you to focus on the quality of your employees rather than quantity. This way you don’t have to have a person doing the time-consuming tasks and they can focus on bigger picture tasks.
Decrease Human Errors
Even though humans can be efficient, we are prone to committing errors. Human error is something that cannot be avoided completely. Automation can help limit the chances of errors in your business processes. Although we can’t use software to operate our entire business, integrating automation into certain parts of your business can be extremely beneficial. Also, it will help greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the human errors that can cost your company.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Making sure your customers are satisfied is one of the most important ways to grow your business. Customer satisfaction has always been a crucial factor in running a business. Automation is a great way to ensure that your customers are satisfied. You can use automation to give your customers more accurate and consistent service. For example, order tracking and updates can be sent out immediately after orders are placed. There are many ways that automation can help improve your customer’s satisfaction.
Now, we will provide you with some examples of how to automate your eCommerce business.
How to Automate Your eCommerce Business
There are so many ways to automate your eCommerce business. These are just some of the most common ways to apply automation to your company.
Automate Inventory Management
It can be hard to keep track of your business’ inventory all by yourself. If a product runs out it can mean missed sales and upset customers. Automating your inventory management can help avoid this. With automation, you will know when a product is low in stock. Using WooCommerce, you can trigger notifications for items that are low in stock. You can also set out-of-stock notifications. Using this, you can immediately know when an item needs to be reordered.
Abandoned Carts
According to Baymard Institute, 69.57% of eCommerce shopping carts get abandoned. Sending out an abandoned cart reminder can help you bring those potential customers back to your store. With automation, this becomes an even easier task. Once you integrate your eCommerce software with a mailing provider of your choosing you can easily set up abandoned cart reminders. An abandoned cart email can help businesses gain more sales from visitors who might have left due to certain reasons such as insufficient funds, bad internet connection, etc.
There could be many potential reasons for customers abandoning their carts. Usually, serious buyers will only abandon their carts once they realize the deal they’re considering isn’t worth their while. Some things that could put off customers could be extra shipping rates, no express shipping, and a complicated checkout process. Automating certain parts of your checkout process could help your customers follow through with their purchases. You can automate the shipping feature to automatically show the buyer’s location and offer rates in their currency. Another way could be to automate a discount application to certain customers that have earned titles such as “subscriber” or “gold member”.
Schedule Social Media Posts
Social media can take up a large portion of your time. Scheduling your posts automatically can help save some time in your business. At Webaholics, we use Hootsuite to schedule our future social media posts. Even though this can be a small task, it can free up time to work on growing your social media instead.
Welcome Emails
Email marketing is still one of the top ways to market your business online. Automating a welcome email for your new website visitors is one of the easiest ways to generate sales. There is much software that can take care of this automation for you. Make sure that you do your research and pick software that will integrate with your business smoothly. Including something like a discount code or free shipping in your welcome email will help increase your likelihood of gaining a new customer. A good example of an email marketing solution would be MailChimp.
Sale Scheduling
With online competition constantly growing, sales have become more frequent than ever. As a business owner, it’s important to let your customers know you have a sale going on. You can keep your audience engaged by reminding them of sale countdowns and teasers for new products. This can build momentum and attract more traffic to your website. Automation can help you prepare for any sale you have – small or large.
If you are operating a larger ecommerce business, it can be especially difficult to manually adjust all of your prices when you have a sale. Using automation, this time consuming process can be taken care of with the click of a button. When the sale goes live, the prices will be changed automatically. You won’t need to waste time and you can turn your employees to more important tasks.
Shipping & Tracking
Shipping out orders and providing tracking information can take up a huge portion of your employee’s time. Automating some of these tasks can help free up time and minimize some human error. When you integrate your WooCommerce with ShipStation, you can complete several of those tasks with one single click. You can create and print shipping labels for your orders, mark all your WooCommerce orders as complete, and generate and send tracking numbers. Being able to do all of this with one click will open up a lot more time for your employees.
Customer Service
Customer service is the part of your business that should have the least amount of automation. Having that human touch in your customer service is vital to keeping your customers happy. However, automation can still play an important role in your company’s customer service. One solution you can use is a platform that uses ticket submissions instead of the contact us form. This way you can have a dedicated place for ticket submissions instead of just receiving emails in everyone’s inboxes. When you have support tickets, you can filter and prioritize tickets automatically. Tickets can also be automatically assigned to certain employees when they are submitted.
Make sure you’re keeping your automation in customer service to a minimum. Your customers are the most important part of your business and deserve that human touch to help them with whatever they might need.
Conclusion
There are so many more ways you can automate your eCommerce business. Using automation in your business can help you save a lot of time for yourself and your employees. Automating certain aspects of your business allows you to focus on the more important parts of your business and less on time-consuming tasks.
Take the time to do your research and find out which automation solutions will work best for your business. Pay attention to factors like reliable customer support, guaranteed data validation, and availability of real-time processing. Don’t rush your research process, take your time and remember your business needs. Automation can have a huge impact on your business once you find the solution that fits you.
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