You can have a successful and expanding e-commerce business because of many different tactics. Whether you’re selling a niche product that’s in demand, working with influencers to market your brand, or using a successful ad campaign, you can really do a lot to improve your business.

If you’re not yet on the route to this type of success, you should be stopping for a minute and think about how to improve your existing business. 

One key way to do this is by adding automation to make your current business much more efficient and productive. Automation can help you get more traffic on your website, can make your sales funnel more productive and consistent, and can help you improve your process for nurturing leads while freeing you up to focus on more human-centric tasks.  

If you’re the owning of an e-commerce store that’s doing well, you should know that the small, repetitive, menial tasks are necessary every day and eat up your time.

Everything from sending emails to updating social media to updating pricing and product data on each channel takes some time, even if you don’t get a good return value for completing the tasks. As your business is growing, you’re getting more of these frequent tasks to do, taking your time and your team members’ time.  

The good news is, you can easily and quickly deal with these tasks without having them take too much time and affect your productivity. The answer is e-commerce automation: a solution that is easy to implement for your business and it can help you with your recurrent tasks to make your business more streamlined and efficient, thereby boosting your results and your bottom line. 

Time Audits 

You’ll want to run a time audit before switching over to e-commerce automation, so you can truly understand how your time is being spent at the moment.

You can improve your business efficiency and workflow once you know where you’re spending the most time and the same with your employees and their time. By running a time audit, you can delegate tasks better so you can work smarter. 

To do so, identify the tasks that are the most repetitive so you can find out which ones you can delegate, outsource, or automate. Your ultimate end result would be to spend more time on the things that are most important to your businesses so it can keep growing.

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Every day or week, spend a bit of time to look at where you’re spending time and how long each task is taking. Then, you can separate all of your activities between those that are low value and high value.

You want to focus the most on the aspects that bring your business the most value and automate as much as possible the low-value tasks. Here are the top five ways that you can use automation for your e-commerce business.

1. Abandoned Cart Emails 

Each e-commerce business should have an email marketing strategy that covers lead generation as well as lead nurturing. You can keep your brand awareness going, increase traffic to your site, and send out promotional emails to boost sales and send out relevant business information.

Thanks to modern email marketing software, you can set up automated workflows that can send out scheduled messages around important dates based on user activities. For example, the abandoned cart email, that can go out when a user leaves a product in their cart and navigates away from the site. 

This email will usually include the items that were in the user’s cart and a link to go back to the checkout page to finalize the purchase. This helps you get more sales from users that left the page for whatever reason. 

2. Customer Feedback 

If you can get some reviews and testimonials of other customers, that’s the best way to convince audiences that they should buy from your e-commerce shop. You can use automated email marketing to collect the necessary customer feedback.

This can be done using a platform such as MailChimp to send or schedule automated messages post-purchase. You’ll eventually get sufficient customer reviews in social media, review sites, or comments on your site, without having to go looking for them. 

3. Inventory Management 

One of the most time consuming and menial tasks of e-commerce businesses is inventory management. The good news is you can integrate your e-commerce store with an accounting tool like Quickbooks, which can automate key tasks like tracking purchase orders, updating stock numbers, and real-time valuations of your inventory. 

4. Invoicing 

It can be tiresome to request payments, especially if each customer needs a manual invoice created and sent. You can thankfully automate invoices to be created in minutes due to payment or accounting platforms. Automated invoicing can be easily integrated using the correct plugins, so your invoices, as well as your receipts, can be automated. 

5. Customer Service 

Artificial intelligence is real these days, no longer a foggy concept of the future. You don’t need to get a fancy AI digital assistants or virtual coach, but you can get a useful tool that can develop a chatbot for your business without having to do any coding yourself. This chatbot can automate certain conversations that can take the direction of user commands or clicks.  

A simple way to do this is to share with users a link to access your frequently asked questions when certain keywords are inputted in the chatbot. These automated interactions won’t always lead to sales, but it’s always good customer service and help to have an immediate assistant for each customer on your site. 

We’ve just scratched the surface of what automation can do for your e-commerce business, so you can start thinking about how best to use it for your own uses. It’s important to keep the momentum going forward once you find out what automation is all about and do everything you can to find the best software and tools for your needs and maximize your e-commerce business and increase your sales. 

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