In a brainstorming session, I remember once asking about daily marketing activities that my team wished could be automated. The responses I got were exciting. 

Keyword research. Lead and client scoring. Behavioral targeting. 

And many more... 

The bottom-line of the exercise revealed my team's desire to automate redundant, manual tasks, to thereby increase productivity.   

The good news? 

Most of these tedious marketing activities that you and I do daily can be automated. And that’s so true for the retail and FMCG brands as well. So, through this blog post, I’m going to show you the ropes of marketing automation. Not a generic one, rather, custom-tailored to suit the retail and FMCG environment. 

But before I delve into the implementation of marketing automation techniques and tools, let me throw light on what marketing automation is, to help you get started. 

Understanding Retail Marketing Automation 

You might be familiar with the term, but it’s often used to depict a category of software – which is the marketing automation software.   

According to SearchSalesforce, marketing automation refers to the use of software to automate marketing chores like customer data integration, customer segmentation, marketing campaign management, and so much more to render a seamless experience to its customer base.   

So, ideally, retail marketing automation gives you a leg up in the identification of potential customers and eventually converting them into loyal customers. The entire customer journey between a lead and a sale is nurtured automatically.   

For instance, educating your potential consumer is the key task in the lead-nurturing stage. Marketing automation would aid in supplying informative content that would develop trust and respect for your brand, rapidly.   

Going further, when your prospects come narrowly to a specific product of interest, you can engage them with targeted messaging. They can be tailored to the right group that will help grow retail businesses. Deeper into the inbound flywheel, as the marketing automation system shows yet more focused interest, the qualified lead could be handed down to the sales team. 

The Benefits of Retail Marketing Automation 

Research by Forrester reveals that companies that nurture leads via marketing automation generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at just 33% of the cost. And when you automate CRM lead management, Gartner assures you of a 10% or more boost in revenue within six to nine months. 

Besides these exciting numbers, other benefits come with marketing automation. Let me relay them to you.

Improve Customer Experience 

With marketing automation for the retail industry, marketers can offer a consistent customer experience and forge better customer relationships. In fact, Econsultancy vouches that 93% of companies witness an uplift in conversion rates from personalization. That said, marketing automation would furnish you with a great ROI. 

By equipping you to send behaviorally triggered e-mails alongside website personalization, it will help you create a highly personalized customer experience. 

What’s more, these are highly tailored campaigns that get sent to your shoppers when they perform a specific task - could be an e-mail sign-up or browsing through some products, or abandoning the cart. 

Improve Average Transaction Value 

In the marketing automation arsenal, automated product recommendations serve as one of the most revenue-boosting features. 

If you want to cross-sell and upsell products, you need to endorse personalization in those automated recommendations across all communication channels. As they drive conversions, they would entice your retail customers to spend more on their individual transactions, thus augmenting your average transaction value.   

 Improve Customer Lifetime Value 

Really, marketing isn’t all about acquisition alone, it’s more about customer retention. And a key way to boost revenue is to get your loyal customers to spend more throughout their interaction with your brand. 

With marketing automation in retail, you can thus facilitate retention and loyalty marketing strategies at ease, and also increase your customer lifetime value. 

The retail marketer can automate requests for feedback, reviews; launch special campaigns to high spending customers; trigger consumer engagement and re-engagement campaigns when subscribers become distant. These tactics not only strengthen your rapport with your customers but also increase their lifetime value. 

With such a valuable return on investment, you must tell good from bad marketing automation in retail. For, only when you do it right, you’ll be able to see the results. 

Some great retail and FMCG brands have benefitted much through the implementation of the right retail marketing automation software and techniques.   

Giving those examples below for your inspiration. 

Important Components of Retail Marketing Automation 

Generally, there are various things – data, its processing, etc., that go into a complete marketing automation program. However, all initiatives share four major components: 

• Segmentation 

• Lead Scoring 

• Triggers 

• Actions 

Segmentation 

The foundation of effective marketing automation lies in lists and segmentation. Yours and all retail businesses for that matter, use lists in some fashion. But mind you, sans quality lists, automation ain’t possible.   

Now, lists consist of your target audience. These customer segments could be your potential leads or prospects or existing customers. Ideally, you would want to build or nurture a relationship with them.   

You may segment lists by buyer persona, by the channel via which they transform into a lead. Or by a product or service line or by geographic or demographic data. 

Lead Scoring 

Lead scoring is a process in which you assign a value to a particular contact based on his/her likelihood of converting to a shopper.   

This is a crucial process for your marketing team when it comes to determining when a lead is qualified enough to be passed on to the sales team. When I talk of effective lead scoring, I mean you to continue marketing, to nurture leads until they’re willing to buy.   

So, you pass only the most qualified leads to your sales team – thus, saving them valuable time by allowing them to focus solely on the prospects that are likely to be the most valuable to the company. 

Triggers 

By definition, triggers are defined thresholds that ignite a specified action from a marketing automation solution. For instance, with a trigger, you can indicate when your software should send an e-mail to a customer with a gift coupon. 

Another trigger case in point could be to prompt your software to offer a discount on a product to a customer who was close to the point of purchase but had abandoned the cart.   

Why one of the simplest triggers is to send a welcome e-mail for joining your newsletter. 

Using the triggers wisely can help you automate the entire customer journey, right from the awareness to the advocacy level.  

Actions 

An action is an event that occurs after a trigger is launched. For instance, in the example of e-mail sign-up, the process of sending the automatic notification email is what falls under the ‘Actions’ event. 

Retail Marketing Automation Workflows with SWAN 

Ideally, a combination of the above four elements is vital in creating a workflow. At a minimal framework, you need at least a trigger and an action. Subject to your enterprise size, the number of digital marketing channels, personas, and possible triggers and actions, you can even have hundreds to thousands of workflows. 

In its simplest form, every workflow will have this basic structure: If X, then Y. 

Let’s see how you can create automated marketing strategies with SWAN. 

As a case in point, let’s suggest that you want to send a welcome e-mail with relevant content to your Customer A who has opted-in to your e-mail list. But let’s assume that at your customer’s point of entry, his prior behaviors indicate an interest in a specific product. 

Now, let’s say that your Customer B who has also filled out the same form, however, has a different interest. So, here he wouldn’t receive the same value from the exact same content meant for Customer A.   

This is where the need for personalized experience arises. 

You cannot afford to send prospects nearing the point of purchase to a landing page delegating an introductory webinar. Because, by this time, the prospect-brand relationship has already been established. The customer is well familiar with your brand and would have been exposed to the information already. So, in this case, you would preferably want to send this prospect to a landing page that nudges him to book a demo. 

However, in most cases, you wouldn’t want these actions to take place immediately. An e-mail drip campaign is sometimes all you need to illustrate and effectuate the concept of delays in action.   

So, in an e-mail drip campaign, you have a specified sequence of e-mails sent with pre-determined delays between those marketing messages. This is applicable while delivering e-mails in a sequence designed to gradually convince a prospect to make a purchase over a few weeks or months. 

By drip automating this campaign, you could send the next message in the sequence of every few days, rather than bombarding your prospect’s inboxes. 

Besides, the following are other tasks that you can automate in full or in part using SWAN. 

• Email marketing campaigns 

• Social media campaigns 

• Customer behavior tracking [Consumer behavior, purchase behavior, online shopping behavior, etc] 

• User onboarding 

• Cross-selling/Up-selling 

• Campaign management 

• Data management 

• Referral and customer loyalty program  

• Loyalty marketing analytics and other data-driven insights on campaigns, email marketing, etc. 

• Product recommendation 

Get Started With Retail Marketing Automation 

Advanced marketing automation technology can yield long-lasting results for your business. If you are planning to start, do it now.   

And here are the three main activities that you need to get automated. 

• Time-consuming tasks 

• Repetitive tasks 

• Triggerable tasks 

• Other manual tasks 

For your business forefront, classify your marketing chores as under these three bullets and get going with marketing automation implementation. If you would need help, simply let us know. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What does a marketing automation tool do? 

A marketing automation tool helps you implement your marketing campaigns without having to manually send e-mails, messages, or social posts. A good marketing automation tool like SWAN would help you with audience identification to craft the right message to the right audience. Besides, SWAN can also trigger actions based on schedules or purchase behavior, or pre-defined events. 

Who needs marketing automation technology? 

At a time where customer loyalty is comparable to the morning mist, it’s vital that folks in the retail and FMCG space leverage marketing automation. Into the bargain, research by Forrester reveals that companies that nurture leads via marketing automation generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at just 33% of the cost. That said, marketing automation promises an invaluable ROI for online and brick-and-mortar stores. 

How do you start a marketing automation plan? 

Follow the action points below to get started with your marketing automation plan. 

• Gather all descriptions and campaign ideas 

• Be well-informed of your data repository 

• Import the vital data onto the marketing automation tool 

• Keep your campaign ideas up-to-date 

• Look for opportunities that add value to your contacts