WooCommerce is one of the best and most popular WordPress plugins that site owners use to sell products and services on the platform. It is a robust solution for eCommerce site owners, no matter how big or small it is. Similar to Shopify, you can make buying from your site much easier for customers. It also offers a wide variety of third-party integrations to suit your needs and improve your site’s performance.

However, every eCommerce site boils down to sales. If you’re not able to sell enough on your site, then you need to reassess your tactics and strategies so you can improve your conversion rate.

Part of what makes online selling confusing are the different processes involved. Even if you have a comprehensive profile of your target audience, you still need to execute on your site to not only convert them into customers but also convince them to visit your site in the first place.

There are many ways such as optimizing your content for search engines, promoting your products and services on social channels, and more. However, you cannot manage every little detail of your marketing process and expect to do a good job on each.

Therefore, to avoid spreading yourself too thin on marketing your eCommerce site, you need to find a way to take the burden of repetitive marketing tasks away from your shoulders so you can focus on growing your business and looking at it from afar.

Enter marketing automation

Marketing automation pertains to setting various marketing-related tasks to autopilot. Instead of manually setting them up yourself, you can just create triggers that will propel specific tasks to be performed for you without lifting a finger.

As an eCommerce site owner who wants to keep his or her process lean and agile, settling on marketing automation is the best way to scale and grow your WooCommerce site so you can generate more sales.

Marketing automation highly complements your email marketing strategy. Since email is one of the best ways to convert leads into customers or clients, you can rely on a marketing automation platform to dispatch the emails to subscribers depending on the triggers you have set.

The most basic and common way that marketing automation takes place is when you receive a confirmation email upon subscribing to the site’s mailing list. For eCommerce sites, however, it’ll take more than just the basic marketing automation features to get your target audience excited enough to buy from your site. Below are just some of the ways that you can use marketing automation to the advantage of your WooCommerce site:

Send discount coupons

Since people subscribed to your site because they’re interested in what you have to say, sending out discount coupons on special occasions (holidays, events, etc.) can help close the deal with your leads so they can become your customers.

In fact, 58% of consumers prefer receiving discounts through email, 20% choose discount coupons on print, and 10% via text message. Therefore, it is crucial that you launch a discount coupon strategy so you can increase your sales using this approach.

While effective, you have to consider the downfalls of abusing discount coupons to get a sale. You need to strike a balance between when to offer discount and when not to.

Recover abandoned carts

There are various reasons why people abandon carts on online shops. However, you need to consider that almost 70% abandon their carts online. Imagine a number of sales you’re losing because they left your site just before completing your order.

Therefore, instead of worrying why they left, cart abandonment recovery lets you concern yourself with how to get them back. It allows you to send an email to abandoners and asks them to complete their order on the site.

Image from Really Good Emails.

When done correctly, your online shop can increase your sales through cart abandonment recovery from 21-35%, according to the examples and case studies featured in Smart Insights.

Re-engage with inactive subscribers

If you have dormant subscribers in your list, you can send them an email to reconnect with them with your online shop. You can also send them a discount coupon for good measure. The effectiveness of your re-engagement campaign depends on the approach you want to take. You also need to consider the different factor that makes up your brand such as tone, audience, values and others.

Image from Really Good Emails

That said, here are interesting ways on how some companies used email re-engagement to win back their inactive subscribers and users.

Tools to use

As mentioned earlier, WooCommerce has a library of third-party integrations that you can choose from. It’s one of the selling points of this WordPress eCommerce plugin, which allows your site to grow faster and increase your sales at the same time.

Below are some of the best plugins that complement your marketing automation strategy:

Moosend

To launch an end-to-end marketing automation strategy, consider using Moosend on top of your list of eCommerce tools. Initially an email marketing platform, Moosend has expanded its offering to include robust marketing automation features so you can create triggered responses depending on what your subscribers do.

From here, you can send birthday emails to celebrants (if they entered they birth date), time-released campaigns for special offers on holidays and others, and more. You can also profile your subscribers based on different identifiers so you can send them personalized emails for more sophisticated campaigns.

Recommendation Engine

Product recommendations is not necessarily a part of marketing automation. However, wouldn’t it be awesome for a plugin or tool to suggest to customers products related to the ones they’ve recently purchased from your site? That’s precisely what Recommendation Engine does. By automatically upselling products that visitors are most likely to buy from your site, you can increase your chances of hiking up your sales.

inSite

This plugin allows your WooCommerce site to adapt the content that shows on the page. Using various triggers such as date, time, the number of visits, location, and others, inSite increases personalization and helps turn visitors into customers much easier.

Conclusion

As a WooCommerce site owner, you need marketing automation more than ever. Given its ability to make all burgeoning tasks easier for you, marketing automation cuts the time spent on implementing so you can focus on tracking the results to improve engagement and sales of your online store.

If you’re also looking for a general WordPress automation tool, check out Thrive Automator.

Either way, I hope this post gives you a general idea on how marketing automation can benefit not only online store owners, but also webmasters in general.