How Does Retail Marketing Automation Help Engage Customers and Boost Sales?
Imagine you open a store selling children’s toys on South-East Avenue in Calgary! What happens next? Do people surprisingly start visiting the store the next day?
The trick is to identify your needs, compare options, and use ideal automated solutions that can assist your team members.
This blog discusses retail marketing automation, its benefits, and more. We discuss the primary features, challenges, and best practices.
Retail Marketing Automation: What Does It Mean?
Brands use software tools to automate their marketing processes. It’s a brilliant method to save your time and resources.
Marketers get personalized customer communication, targeted campaigns, and customer segmentation with this approach.
You can empower yourself to deliver more effective and personalized marketing efforts. It is necessary for a superior shopping experience. Undoubtedly, the Canadian retail landscape is a super competitive world.
Retailers highly depend on small margins on products. Thus, they must get sufficient exposure to their target audience.
You can deliver a consistent experience in both online and offline stores with automation.
Features of Real Marketing Automation
You will find options while searching for a global retail automation tool. Each will provide distinctive features and capabilities. Expert marketers prefer the following in their automation strategy;
Customer Segmentation
A global retail automation tool lets you segment your customer base based on demographics. It is a perfect opportunity to launch targeted marketing campaigns and create personalized experiences.
Campaign Management
You get centralized dashboards, A/B testing, and performance tracking features to optimize all your campaigns. A marketing team can continuously oversee different campaigns to promote their brand.
Automation platform enables marketers to run multiple campaigns for different customer segments. Planning, executing, and tracking these campaigns across various channels becomes easier.
Analytics Tools
Retailers heavily rely on customer data and analytics to plan their marketing campaigns. Global retail automation platforms let you understand customer behavior, campaign performance, and marketing effectiveness.
Why Do You Need to Automate Retail Promotions?
Higher Return on Investment
Retail businesses are very concerned about their ROI. Each futile campaign without results is like burning cash. Automation of repetitive tasks and personalizing messages for the right audience is necessary.
You can save significantly on marketing costs while increasing effectiveness. Your employees can also focus on other critical tasks instead of working on the same activities.
There won’t be any need to hire additional resources for strategizing campaigns. Every dollar you spend on retail marketing automation will return more excellent value and revenue.
Superior Customer Engagement and Conversion
You can have better customer engagement with retail marketing campaign automation. Relevant and timely communications are possible across multiple customer touchpoints.
The best-automated workflows give you more conversions, leads, and sales opportunities. Shoppers expect personalized experiences from retailers. It is up to you how you deliver that experience.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
It would help if you had closer and more accurate insights to run your retail business. Finding data without automation can be challenging. However, retail marketing automation makes it easier to learn customer needs and market trends and measure campaign performance.
Better Efficiency
Efficiency is a primary goal for every retailer. It gives you more control over your marketing and business decisions
Retailers like you can use retail marketing automation to save valuable time and allocate resources. Your business can foresee better customer engagement and innovative and strategic initiatives.
How To Start Global Retail Automation Campaigns?
Customer engagement and nurturing are the primary goals of every retail marketer. 17.4% of marketers consider retail marketing automation as a vital digital marketing strategy.
All you need is a foolproof outline for your global retail automation plan to see results. Let us help you out;
Define Your Campaign Objectives
What are you trying to achieve with your marketing campaign? You must have clear objectives before looking for retail marketing automation. These goals will help you choose the right solution for your business.
You can ask these questions yourself;
- What do you want to achieve with retail marketing automation?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are their needs and preferences?
- Which communication channel do they prefer?
- How will you measure your campaign performance?
Clear campaign objectives will give proper direction to your automation strategy.
Get the Right Tools for the Job
All your marketing campaigns require the correct tools. Many vendors provide all-in-one solutions for retail marketing automation. However, you can choose to have individual solutions according to your requirements.
These are some must-have marketing tools;
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
A CRM is necessary to provide a centralized database for all your operations and data. Your retail business can use it for storing customer lists. It becomes easier to segment customers by location, age, behavior, preferences, etc. Retailers need CRM software to run targeted campaigns.
eCommerce Platform
You will need this platform if you plan to run an online store. Online businesses find it challenging to process orders, manage inventories, recover abandoned carts, and more. Platforms like Shopify and Magento help manage e-commerce businesses.
Email and SMS Marketing Tools
A retailer marketer sends hundreds of emails and SMS to attract customers. Retail marketing automation can help you automate these emails and text messages. You will only send them depending on the behavior and preferences of your customers.
Direct Mail Tool
The Retail industry is heavily dependent on offline marketing. A direct mail API can provide the ideal integration for your CRM to launch automated offline campaigns. These tools are becoming common among retail marketers.
They ensure an omnichannel marketing presence across different mediums. Marketers can sync their offline and online strategies with multiple customer touchpoints.
Create a Reliable Customer Database
Gather customer information from online forms, past purchases, and surveys. This data is based on demographics, engagement level, browsing behavior, and purchase history. It helps you personalize messages and grab your audience’s attention.
You require real-world data after selecting the retail marketing automation tools. The customer database is the lifeblood of your retail business. Their demographic information will be necessary for your future campaigns and strategic decisions.
Define Automated Workflows to Save Time
It would help if you defined workflows for triggering automated action based on customer segment. These flows will be wholly automatic and won’t require any human intervention.
You can explore these excellent examples of successful retail marketing workflows;
- A welcome series is a great idea to engage new users on your website. You can trigger it automatically to send a series of welcome emails.
- Abandoned cart recovery requires immediate attention. You can set up automated email or direct mail whenever a user leaves their cart without placing the order.
- Retail marketers often create a workflow to send emails whenever a customer completes a purchase.
You can set automation workflows on different tools or preferred channels. Global retail automation relies on multiple marketing tools to target diverse audiences.
Constantly Monitor and Optimize Your Campaigns
You cannot leave everything in automatic mode while using retail marketing automation solutions. Constant efforts are necessary to monitor your marketing strategy. Anything can go wrong with changing market trends and consumer demands.
You must take a proactive measure to analyze your performance data and make necessary adjustments. There are various vital metrics to note, such as;
- Conversion rates
- Click-through rates
- Revenue growth
- Customer acquisition cost
What Things to Avoid When Outsourcing Promotions?
Here are the primary things you should avoid doing so that you are not completely immersed in automation and forget about quality.
Completely Removing Human Touch
Automation is an additional helping hand, not a complete replacement. Don’t just automate your campaign for the sake of automation.
Your marketing team must create a stable balance between automation and genuine human interactions. It’s your key to win more faithful customers. Automation can bombard them with too much automated text or irrelevant content.
You shouldn’t rely on automation by eliminating every human interaction.
It could alienate your customers from your retail brand. People love human interaction in marketing messages. They want that personalized touch to get a better customer experience.
No Proper Testing and Optimization
Expert marketers prefer measuring their campaign’s performance. You must follow the same to measure the ROI of your automation strategies. Don’t show negligence while launching your campaigns.
Lack of testing also means lost opportunities. A/B testing is the best method to evaluate the effectiveness of emails and workflows.
How to Make the Correct Decision: Know Your Brand
Your choice depends on many factors, like
Price
Check the prices of all platforms before investing in them. Also, check whether the cost justifies the features you get for the services.
The retail advertising solution should help you promote your brand to a targeted audience without draining your entire marketing budget. Hence, compare and negotiate prices to choose the best platform.
Your Buyers’ Expectations
Check whether you can fulfil your customers’ expectations using the retail marketing automation service. If not, consider another option that does.
For example, imagine your target audience needs a better onboarding experience. You must look into solutions that add value to your strategy and let you onboard customers properly.
Your Needs
All solutions offer different features and benefits. Thus, you must list your goals, preferences, and requirements to match them with the platform’s offerings.
Use PostGrid Print & Mail for Sending Offline Items and Getting Sales
PostGrid print and mail API could be an ideal platform for retail marketing automation. The API gives you unlimited sending possibilities with automated workflows. You only need to integrate the platform with your existing system or platform to get the benefits.
PostGrid’s API: Your Retail Marketing Automation Partner
PostGrid offers many advantages and high-tech features, like
Address Verification
You can standardize and parse addresses along with verifying them against the Canada Post databases and NCOA files. Thus, rest assured that your mailers land at the correct locations.
Tracking in Real-Time
You can track items whenever they enter the printing phase up to deliveries. Hence, stay updated and never miss out on your chance to follow up with customers and sell more items.
Deep Analytics
The centralized dashboard lets you evaluate campaign performance and deliverability. These clever insights are necessary to optimize future retail marketing automation strategies.
Low Prices
We offer many packages to suit your unique needs. You can select one and get started! Our prices are the lowest in the country, and you can grab bulk discounts by sending large mail volumes.
Highly Personalized Marketing
PostGrid lets you hyper-personalize individual mail pieces with precision. Variable data printing technology and a built-in template editor give you complete control over your mailers. You can easily target your specific customer groups with our API.
Sign up now for offline marketing automation retail!
