We know it’s a bit overwhelming to start as online entrepreneurs. You definitely have so many associated tasks that you have to deal with when selling online. It seems like you never have enough time to handle everything no matter how much effort and time you put in: answering the phones, replying customers’ emails about new arrivals, manually processing orders, working on newsletters while managing the product deliveries, etc.
But here’s the thing…
You don’t even need to do all that stuff yourself. The truth is even when you do all the things manually, it’s hard to make sure that the outcome is equally worth it. The day-to-day operational tasks are tedious and sometimes are neglected unintentionally.
There is only one way out: Automation.
Plus, it’s such a waste if you don’t take out the most of a robust platform such as Shopify. Why? Because Shopify helps you to build a powerful store with various apps that can take the burden off your shoulder and tremendously help you automate your daily operations, marketing and customer support.
In this article, we will show you how to automate your Shopify store, which starts with automating your Marketing effort. Let’s take the most from Shopify’s existing resources to streamline your process and start to skyrocket your sales!
Here is the customer purchasing journey after they are aware of your store:
If you want to automate your operations to boost your sales to the next level, you should focus on every single step that a customer makes. At this point, Shopify provides you with top best apps that can optimize your sales at each step, following the purchasing journey.
1. Automate push notifications – Persuade customers to grab some items right away with real-time interactions
Right when customers land at your homepage, you have chances to intentionally introduce your products to them. By using social proof as push notifications to build credibility and create urgency and scarcity, you can bring visitors with real-time updates on your products and encourage them to buy those items right away.
Sales Pop is such an example to help you do so. It builds trust on your brand with social proof by automatically showing recent sales popup notifications. Sales Pop can collect the sales data, sync the order information and display all recent sales popups of the orders that customers have made on your storefront. It brings a real feeling to your site, which shows evidence that there are many happy customers already buying with you, thus customer engagement is increased and visitors are more likely to be converted into buyers. Our customers Skinnytan.co.uk got an average of 100 clicks per day on sales pop notifications, which means they have 100 extra times everyday to successfully draw viewers’ attention to their aimed products and create more sales with those 100 visits.
Not only should you bring customers a real feel of products’ popularity with Sales Pop, you also need to speed up the purchase process by making your customers feel like this is their ONLY CHANCE to grab the products and it’s TIME. An effective tool that increases scarcity and urgency by automating countdown notifications is Countdown Cart. By automatically tracking your store’s stock and digging into the information of a product such as number of views on the product, the number of carts which has the product in, the number of the product purchasing orders that have actually been made, Countdown Cart helps to persuade customers to buy the products as QUICKLY as they can before you might run out of them.
Another powerful tool that also helps push out notifications, yet at the end of purchasing journey when customers tend to leave their carts is Recover Cart Pusher. With its smart algorithms, Recover Cart Pushers automatically detects cart abandonment and sends a push notification to customers on their desktop 15 minutes/1 hour/24 hours (up to your setup) after their carts were left. At this point, you don’t need any emails or SMS to remind your customers to complete their orders, Recover Cart Pusher already automates those notifications even without having your customers’ contact details or having them stay on your sites.
Recover Cart Pusher also helps you push out notifications about your store’s best deals and latest arrivals by automatically collecting subscribers when they click on the Permission box. You don’t even need their private information yourself, yet the opt-in rate is much higher and the effectiveness is more significant than emails!
2. Automate product recommendations – Unlock your full sales potential with the right products recommended to the right persons
Just showing visitors what you have on your store is not enough. Customers believe in references and experiences from other previous buyers. That’s why product recommendations play a key part in building trust and converting visitors into sales. Hereunder we recommend two great product recommendation tools that can ease your pain from all of complicated or manual settings.
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Developed from big data and AI machine learning, Personalized Recommendation collects data, analyzes it, then understands your customers’ behaviors to accordingly suggest the products that they might be interested in with “Bought this also bought” widget or a bundle of products based on their cart with “Cart recommendations” one. As its name says, it automates the product recommendation process and frees you from all of the tedious setups. With its smart learning process, Personalized Recommendation undoubtedly increases the average order value. You don’t even need to be a smart guy who records down your store’s data in order to follow up with your customers’ needs, or fumbles with an app’s setup to create such technically-correct widgets. With Personalized Recommendation, just install the app, and click on “Turn on widget”, that’s it!
No more than 3 minutes and everything’s perfectly set up for you and your customers!
With the help of Personalized Recommendation only, our customer Sparrow Hill Lane has made roughly $570,000 in sales in just 6 recent months, with 24,202 carts added and 3,072 successful orders. Is it just amazing?
Once you’ve got a chance to suggest potential products to your customers, how about getting them to pay more each time they purchase without planning at first? Based on your store’s historical data, Boost Sales can help you achieve that by its targeted upselling and cross-selling deals. It can automatically pick up the most appropriate products to recommend based on customers’ shopping behavior or bundle up items that go well together into an irresistible combo to suggest your customers. All you need to do is to activate these smart up-sell offers on your store!
One more great feature of Boost Sales is that it detects the last step of purchasing journey then suggests them more relevant items that customers might want to buy before checking out. Sounds cool, isn’t it?
Check out definite tips to take out the most of Boost Sales here!
Boost Sales automates all the process of selecting the right products and showing them to your customers, so you don’t have to set it up yourself. It’s completely not idle talk! You can track everything on the dashboard of how much sales your store’s made, number of carts, number of successful checkouts and then assess your store’s performance with current using upsell/cross-sell deals.
You can see hereunder is a real sales that one of our customers who has successfully made it to the top by taking the most out of Boost Sales! If they could make it, so can you.
Amazon boosted the revenue up to 35% with these upselling and cross-selling techniques. How many percents do you want to crack?
3. Automate your email marketing efforts – Nurture relationships with your customers and subtly uplift sales
You might feel like something is missing here. Yes, I’m talking about newsletters – email marketing, the most effective tool that automates email sending process to the next level and boosts ROI to its highest (every $1 spent in marketing can generate $38 in ROI, according to Campaignmonitor).
Data from Pewinternet shows that 92% of adults in the United States use email, and 61% of these email users are checking and sending emails on an average day. In addition to the huge amount of email users that you can leverage to reach your targeted market, the cost for email marketing is comparatively low yet it brings the highest ROI. Hence, keeping in touch regularly with your customers with email marketing campaigns even when they’re not shopping on your store drives intangible values to your business growth.
Keeping in touch regularly with your customers even when they’re not shopping on your store drives intangible values to your business growth.
Customers engagement can start from automatically sending them a lovely welcome email 30 minutes after their first visit to your store with the help of Happy Email to frequently keeping them engaged with the latest information from your store such as New Arrivals, Products-that-can-be-bought-in-cycle promotion or Cross-sell collection that might interest your buyers.
First, let us talk about sending a NATURAL 30-minutes-after email on behalf of you as a store owner. We both agree that making a first impression great to your customers is a crucial part to keep them with you for further orders. Yet you definitely don’t want to be too rush, which might be a bit annoying to your new visitors. To make the flow more natural, it’s recommended that you should wait like 15-30 minutes to send the welcome email after their first visit to your store.
With beautifully-written personalized messages, Happy Email automates welcome emails and seamlessly sends them 30 minutes after customers’ first visit. You can still enjoy your holidays while achieving the target of making your customers feel welcomed and connected.
First impression is important but not all. Keeping relationships and connections with your customers along the way is unsurprisingly crucial if you’d rather be their top-of-mind option. Developed with AI technology, Mailbot can be your email assistant which helps you send out perfectly prepared weekly newsletters to keep your customers updated about new products coming or automatically generate and cross-sell a new collection based on their previous purchase history. Even more, Mailbot can track your stock and analyze a products’ life cycle then create personalized emails to promote that product, just in time when your customers need to buy it again (for example: skin care items, house cleaning products, etc).
You need proof that Mailbot can really skyrocket your sales with those engagement and cross-selling emails? I got this statistic back for you. This shop started with Mailbot 6 months ago, and here is the performance that they’ve achieved so far. They got $5,115,126 in sales with ~ 169K emails sent. It’s undoubtedly that emails cannot be underrated.
However, don’t get me wrong that Mailbot is only powerful in terms of machine learning and automation, when it comes to customized themes or designs, Mailbot also provides you with multiple graceful options to make your emails stand out and attractive to your customers!
Checkout how to effectively use Mailbot to boost your sales here!
The coolest thing we found about the app is it also provides store owners with useful insights, thanks to in-depth Analytics & Optimization. All campaigns’ results are reported in 1 dashboard for you to keep track of your KPIs and how Mailbot’s helping you to reach them. You’ll have all details in your hand from the number of subscribers, orders, emails opened, slipping away customers who come back, orders by loyal customers to generated revenue with Mailbot. Everything is transparent and easy to track without any effort of setting up since all actions are automated for you.
Since automating your Shopify store can help you achieve an incredible sales goal, there is no reason to hold it back. These automatic apps are really a game-changer which makes you sell more and feel less stressed. Time is absolutely yours, and you deserve to have a work-life balance, spending time with families and friends instead of staying at home racing with the clock to support your customers.
Give automation a shot and let us know how much you’ll be achieving in the comments 😉
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