Running an e-commerce business is not a piece of cake. And when you’re looking to scale, the
choice becomes doing everything on your own, or hiring tons of expert labor to help.
But what if there were another way?
Marketing automation is all the rage these days. It involves outsourcing or delegating
time-consuming, complex, or repetitive tasks to one or more software. This frees up time and
energy that you can spend on other tasks.
Here are 5 marketing automation tips that will help you grow your online business.
Auto-schedule social media posts
A big component of social media marketing is posting regularly. While this is usually not a
complicated task, it is quite tedious due to its repetitiveness. This makes it a great candidate for
automation.
There are many examples of AI that help you schedule automatic social media posts so you
don’t have to worry about manually staying on track:
● Later: This is an easy to use software that lets you set times for auto-publishing on
Instagram and other social media
● CoSchedule: Their free marketing calendar is a useful tool to plan out your social media
posts on a macro level
● Socialpilot: Apart from the usual, this produces downloadable analytics reports that help
you gauge how your posts are doing.
You can even automate your social media design creation tasks to some extent by using
PosterMyWall, which is an online poster maker that allows you to create a preset of your
branded content which can be edited slightly and sent out for regular updates and promotions.
You can use their Instagram post templates, for example, to edit premade customizable
templates, to save time and ensure everything looks good and is ready to be posted.
Form an email marketing list
Instead of manually sending emails to individual customers, or even having a manually created
mailing list, a great way to automate the email marketing process is to have an integration with a
dedicated software.
One popular example of a great email marketing software is PosterMyWall. Not only does this allow
you to send bulk emails, but you can also explore a lot of other cool email marketing
automations, including:
● Reminding online shoppers about abandoned carts.
● Engaging lost customers again.
● Cross-selling products.
PitchBox is a great option for creating email marketing campaigns and doing link-building
outreach to improve your SEO.
Use lead scoring
Lead scoring is a marketing strategy in which businesses rate their leads or customers. This
helps you form various segments of customers depending on the level of interest they show in
the business, their engagement, and other aspects of behavior.
You can then nurture these leads if they turn out to be worth spending time and energy on.
You can automate lead scoring by using software that automatically decides what content to
send which customer based on their score or their position in the sales funnel.
There are several marketing tools which have an in-built lead scoring feature:
● HubSpot Marketing Hub: This tool offers predictive lead scoring, which means you don’t
have to manually set up the lead scoring rules. It recognizes the top leads and scores them
on demographic and behavioral lines.
● ActiveCampaign: This tool not only monitors customer behavioral data, but it also tracks
minor actions such as customers opening emails. It then automatically puts relevant leads
on track for nurturing.
Nurture leads
Having automated your lead scoring process, it is now time to nurture the leads that you have
identified as ideal ones.
Lead nurturing involves sending interested people valuable and interesting brand content to
convert them into loyal customers. This process can also be automated using a variety of
software.
Here’s how nurturing leads works:
● Step 1: Create a buyer persona. This reflects the ideal customer you want to target with
your product. It isn’t a real customer, rather a profile. You can create more than one profile
based on how many customers you want to target.
● Step 2: Store information about customer profiles in a database or a Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) system. This will help you in having access to these profiles whenever
you need them.
● Step 3: Send out targeted content and follow-ups.
It’s a long process, right? Fortunately for you, this is where automation comes in!
You can use software like EngageBay to help you out throughout. It will let you email content to
warm leads, using the personalized marketing email sequences it offers. You can even segment
the email sequences for targeted marketing.
Use AI for Blogging
Are machines here to take over our jobs? Are writers going to go extinct? Before you start
panicking, read on.
There are many components to blog writing, a lot of which are pre- and post- tasks which do not
involve actual writing. Pre- tasks involve researching content, keyword research, and creating
outlines. Post- tasks include editing, proofreading, etc.
Although good manual blog writing adds tons of depth and nuance, creating a unique piece that
an AI would find difficult to write from start to finish, you can still take some of the pre- and post-
load of your back by automating it.
And, if you like, you can even use AI to write entire blog posts for you.
There are several types of blogging software out there:
● Software that supports you in writing blogs: These speed up research and brainstorming
processes, letting you know exactly what to write about in order to make waves.
Example software includes Crayon, which identifies gaps in blog content on the internet,
and discovers opportunities for you.
● Software that actually does the writing for you: These write entire blog posts in the form
of relevant sentences and paragraphs for you based on a topic/outline you provide.
Example software includes Jasper.ai. Experts have ‘taught’ Jasper, the AI, to write SEO
optimized blog posts and social media posts.
● Software that improves the quality of your blog post: This tackled the post- part of
writing, including proofreading and editing. Example software includes Grammarly, the
infamous grammar, spelling, and language checker.
With automating blog post writing, the best part is that you get to choose which parts to
outsource, and which you want to keep doing yourself.
Conclusion
As you can probably tell from reading the above 5 marketing strategies, automation – or placing
your business ‘in the hands of machines’ – need not be a daunting prospect.
In fact, it is an extremely helpful decision to make for yourself and your expanding business.
