Ecommerce with Marketing Automation – Lesson 3: Extend Communication | Blog SALESmanago – Customer Engagement Platform for impact-hungry eCommerce marketing teams

Communication is the essential part of customer/brand relation building. Both information and feedback are vital parts of this bond. Even though we live in a digital era, we are still obliged to treat the customers as individuals rather than the nameless and faceless mass on the other side of the screen.

In Lesson 1 I wrote a lot about one of the basic tools to communicate with your customers and customers-to-be: Email. The modern software brings many features that allow you to make each email tailor-made for every contact in your database. And this should be your number one tool when you want to inform, ask or congratulate a user.

In Lesson 2 I have widened your knowledge about email possibilities. I told you a bit about dynamic emails (absolute must-have when it comes to recommendations, upselling and cross-selling) and abandoned cart recovery emails (up to 67% of abandoned carts can be recovered by a simple act of sending a proper email).

Now it’s about time for you to learn the supporting strategies – Social Media and Web Push notifications.

Automate Social Media

From teenagers’ hype to an overwhelming background of everyday reality – that’s how Social Media has evolved recently. Nowadays it’s hard to find a spot on the web with no social media plug-ins or buttons such as: ‘Like’, ‘Share’, or even ‘Log in with your account’. They’re everywhere. They are used by Average Joes, high-class influencers, CEOs, and brands. They allow a perfect two-way communication between the companies and their audiences.

Even though they seem more of a fun than work, a person who wants to master them must apply a bit of a scientific approach to posting and tweeting. Every successful marketer knows their KPIs to track to:

measure the efficiency of their actions and find out which are to be changed or modified
identify most efficient actions
get transparent feedback on their work
spot problems
measure cost-to-effect ratio

What’s more, they avoid the ‘Spray & Pray’ tactic at all costs. They know whom they are speaking to, they recognize given channel specifics and they adjust actions’ density to all other factors. Their secret ingredient is a pinch of automation magic.

Connecting social media activities to a marketing automation platform opens up a whole bunch of new marketing opportunities. First, it allows you to queue up posts on the most popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter and measure their performance. Secondly, it engages information about contacts gathered in your database while you create so-called Custom Audiences – a group of recipients for which Facebook creates a database comparison (between its own database and the database of the company wanting to create the Custom Audience).

Effective Facebook campaigns are targeted at those groups in your area of interest that are most likely to engage. Precise targeting is the key to success here. You can create Facebook target groups based on individually monitored user behavior, such as: adding a tag to a contact, reaching a specific scoring by a contact or opting out from mailing.

Integration of the marketing automation platform with Facebook Ads is aimed at addressing the social media gap: while most of the marketers admit that they use Facebook for business purposes, only 45% think it works.

The whole process including the preparation of ads is created directly in the system, without the necessity of switching to the Facebook Ads panel. In the system, users will also find full analytics of activities via the social media channel.

71% of people who have had a good experience with a given brand via social media are most likely to recommend it to their friends.

Keep reading on social media:

Marketing on Facebook – What Am I Paying For?!

Why and How to Personalize Facebook Ads with Marketing Automation?

Social Media Guide for Ecommerce [Free Ebook]

Or try Social Media Automation out yourself for 14 days, for free.

Web Push Notifications

Web Push notifications are a great example of permitted communication. The average CTR for this medium is 30%.

The web push is a simple, short notice, which enables communication with users who have visited your website and agreed to receive special notifications. Web pushes’ greatest advantage is that you don’t need a user’s email address to send them these notifications! Web push also works for anonymous contacts.

The contact does not have to be on your website, to receive such notification. The only requirement for this kind of notification to appear is that the users agree to get them via an agreement form. A contact doesn’t even need to have an active browser window or use it at the moment. The processes responsible for sending Web Push notifications remain active, even if the window is closed.It allows for both real-time communication and planning activities according to current events.

What does the web push implementation give you:

a new way to communicate with contacts in your database
communication with anonymous contacts (notifications do not need an email address to be sent)
a new criterion for database segmentation
improvement of sales performance by introducing personalized content for a specific product with redirection to an appropriate subpage
the possibility of expanding the database by redirecting users to a landing page
an additional tool for progressive profiling
an easy way to highlight the offer

Example? Imagine that you deliver food. An hour before major sporting events, you can remind users that they must order food via your app or website in advance, to eat delicious, hot snacks during the match.

Or maybe you have a typical apparel ecommerce. You have a great deal on bathing suits, so you put that information on a notification, add a pretty image and mention that the offer is time limited. Alakazam – the traffic on your is just thrice the normal.

The possibilities are truly enormous. Your messages will be displayed to each user who will confirm their subscription while on the site, which in turn enables the messages to be shown by the browser. If someone declines you her permission – nothing is lost. The consent form can be displayed again after a time you can specify in advance.

Web Pushes are awesome, and we know it!

Read our awe-inspiring Ultimate guide to web push notifications

Send them for 14 days, for free.

Check also previous lessons:

Ecommerce with Marketing Automation – Lesson 1: Solid Foundations

Ecommerce with Marketing Automation – Lesson 2: Building Revenue