Promoting your Shopify store or products can take too much of your day if you aren’t automating your workflows. Automating your marketing strategy will help you respond in real time to all customer behavior. It’s a serious advantage, but it can take time to set up.
In this short guide, you’ll learn how to automate a Shopify store, the essential workflows that need to be targeted for eCommerce marketing automation first, and some obstacles you should avoid when trying to set up automation for the first time.
How to Automate Shopify Store Marketing (Step by Step)
Automation is not one of the easiest strategies for Shopify marketing. Fully automating a Shopify store could take years. However, you can start with automating certain functions that take up your day. Anything you have to do multiple times a day that results in a similar deliverable is a target for automation.
For example, you may send a post-purchase email to everyone who buys a product from your shop. Most of these messages will cover the same information with slight variations based on the product, so there is little risk, but a lot of time to be saved with automation.
The same is true of much of the communication you send while managing a store, including welcome emails to new subscribers. Try identifying more repeatable processes in your day, and start applying these steps to them.
| Step 1: Define Automation Goals and Purposes | Start by setting your goals so you can measure the performance of your new automated flows against your expectations. You need to maintain high communication quality when managing an eCommerce store, so you’ll have to plan your workflows a little more carefully than website owners who are only pulling in views. |
| Step 2: Choose the Right Tools for the Job | There are general Shopify marketing automation platforms, as well as automation software tools that focus on automating a single task (for example, email marketing). When you choose your goals, you’ll need to explore all of the most popular tools for that task. |
| Step 3: Connect with Customers and their Data | To write effective automated messages, you’ll need to understand your audience. Audience research and segmentation will help you build superior general and specific templates for your automated systems. Behavior-based customer data can help you predict what actions will create the highest conversion rates. You’ll understand your audience better so you can speak their language, address their real concerns, and appear responsive and genuine in your messages. Having live data allows you to automatically respond with accurate messaging to each major event on the customer journey. |
| Step 4: Build the Workflows | Plan the workflows that will produce the desired result. Flowcharts can be a helpful way to visualize the step-by-step interactions of your automated systems. For example, you want your automated emails sent only under certain conditions. You need to map each of those conditions so you can start matching templates to actions. |
| Step 5: Test and Optimize | Test and optimize every automated process you set up. You need to verify that the right actions are following the right triggers. If you fail to thoroughly test your processes, customers may receive confusing messages that undermine your credibility as a shop. |
Using this process, you can slowly develop automated workflows for all of the most important work you do. Our marketing team has worked with many Shopify store owners, so we know that the workflows you’re about to learn about are among the first priorities.
Some Essential Shopify Automation Workflows Every Store Should Use
If you’re ready to start building automated workflows, start with the ones that have made the most difference for stores like yours. The following examples typically offer a high return on investment.
| Abandoned Cart Recovery | Automated cart abandonment targets users who are only a single action away from conversion with automatic follow-up messages. Automating this outreach helps you avoid missing any chances. Depending on the SMS/email marketing tool you use, you’ll be able to automate messages to arrive: Soon after abandonmentAt regular intervals (weekly, monthly)When the cart item is on sale Automating this process means you reach every member of this high-conversion group. These are just some examples. When you’re testing your automation, you’ll find many other opportunities to send out messages. |
| Post-Purchasing Follow-Ups | Order confirmations are some of the most important messages to send in the eCommerce business. Customers want reassurance that their orders are being processed. Just after purchase is also an excellent time to upsell, cross-sell, or request sign-ups. When you automate this process, you’ll ensure your customers are never left waiting. This confirms to them that your store is professional and encourages repeat purchases and higher average order values. You can also automate post-purchasing messages to deliver product recommendations or request reviews or information about the customer experience. |
| Inventory Notifications | You never want to lose a sale because your customers can’t purchase the items they want. Automated inventory notifications ensure your customers know as soon as an item is back in stock, without you having to do any extra work. This protects you from losing sales to other stores and can help you build customer loyalty by demonstrating the value you provide. |
| Win-Back Campaigns | Retargeting old customers is often more efficient than targeting new customers, and it’s a process that can be fully automated. Win-back email campaigns can be set to automatically reach out to your customers based on the time of their last order, the availability of special offers, or other factors. |
These are just a few examples of automated eCommerce solutions. Automation can be used in so many other areas, including generating social signals.
When you commit to automation, you’ll discover that it can apply across your entire omnichannel marketing effort. The lifetime value of an automation strategy can be incalculable when you start as early as possible.
Learning to automate your operations can take a lot of time and involve a lot of costs in testing. One alternative to learning everything the hard way is to hire an eCommerce team with a history of proven results to build your marketing automation.
Discover More Great Shopify Tips with Orchard Marketing
Automating your Shopify store effectively will take time. You’ll need to test the available marketing automation tools and run different automated workflows until you understand which one your audience responds to best.
Hire an experienced marketing team to automate the most essential functions for you. Orchard Marketing has years of experience assisting clients in eCommerce. We can help you automate all types of marketing campaigns. Contact us to learn more about getting started.