Marketing has many different disciplines, and even more ways of applying them.
But the one we’re going to talk about here is all the more singular in that it’s based on automating repetitive marketing tasks to the greatest possible extent.
Let’s find out how you can use marketing automation to save time and boost your e-commerce results. 
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a marketing trend that aims to automate certain repetitive tasks linked to the discipline, such as sending e-mails or automatic responses, validating orders or sending personalized offers.
Marketing automation is based on the use of various tools and software to automate these tasks.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
Of course, automating repetitive tasks has an obvious benefit for any e-tailer’s way of working, namely to be faster.
But there’s more to marketing automation than that.
Significant time and productivity savings
Marketing automation obviously has the potential to save valuable time for the user, enabling him to automate his most repetitive tasks and concentrate more on the strategic aspect of his marketing.
This will translate into better results, as the user will have more time to focus on other aspects of his business, and will offer his customers a better overall experience on his website (more prospects followed up, fewer customers left unanswered, more personalized messages and offers, etc.).
Better flow and data management
By automating a certain number of tasks, you can not only plan certain actions in advance (and therefore without improvisation), but also centralize workflows within one or more software programs.
This centralization provides a better overview in real time of the status of your marketing strategy, and therefore greater reactivity in the event of problems (or simply if you wish to test a new strategy).
This improved flow management also has another significant advantage: the retrieval of multiple, reportable data.
There’s no need to dwell on the importance of regular data for effective marketing strategies!
Start implementing a marketing automation strategy for your store
Let’s take a look at how you can use marketing automation to save time and boost your e-commerce results.
It’s important to note that marketing automation involves a number of different techniques, so the tools and software needed to implement it are also quite distinct. 
Create automatic e-mails and reply sequences
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when talking about marketing automation is automatic e-mails and response sequences.
In fact, manually sending several e-mails each time a prospect performs a conversion action on your store (subscription, shopping cart, purchase…) can quickly become unmanageable, as can replies to recurring questions asked by certain visitors (wink to those unfamiliar with the “faq” concept).
This is why it’s a good idea to prepare automatic e-mails in advance, either directly in the options of your cms (Prestashop or other) where possible, or by using software such as Mailchimp (the benchmark for automatic e-mail and e-mail sequences) and, why not, more innovative software such as SMSmode, which offers the possibility of generating automatic messages directly on your customers’ cell phones.
This kind of “a priori” programming of mails and automatic replies also enables you to set up A/B tests, where you can test one pre-recorded mail sequence, then another, to find out, for example, which offers the best conversion rates.
Automatic responses can also be provided by chatbots integrated directly into the store, which can efficiently filter most recurring questions and improve the user experience.
Free chatbots are available as addons on most cms, like this one for Prestashop.
Use data to send personalized offers
The easy retrieval of data made possible by most marketing automation software (such as Catchr, which specializes in data analysis) makes it possible to acquire extremely interesting information about visitors’ needs and behaviors.
In this way, it’s possible to program the sending of automatically personalized offers to existing customers and the most promising prospects.
These software programs and add-ons work in much the same way as the cookies collected by many websites and social networks, to provide you with tailor-made offers (which follow you even outside these platforms!), so they can have a huge positive impact on e-commerce results.
Comment and notice management
Moderating comments on social networks or reviews on your site and on Google can be extremely time-consuming, but it’s also essential if you want to maintain control over your brand identity.
Marketing automation makes it possible to automate much of this moderation work, for example by programming the highlighting (or silencing) of certain comments, automatic responses or review checks.
It’s always important to keep an eye on the comments and opinions concerning your business, but most of the work can be automated by one or more software programs.
To conclude: the importance of integrating marketing automation into an omnichannel marketing strategy.
Knowing how to use marketing automation in e-commerce is first and foremost a matter of working comfort, as it enables you to delegate the most time-consuming tasks to programs and concentrate on the essentials.
But its full potential will only be realized when it is integrated into an omnichannel marketing strategy.
In doing so, it can make it possible to test, collect and process data far more efficiently than would be possible with an entirely manual marketing strategy.
The subsequent implementation of a marketing campaign, precise objectives and specific results evaluation methods (KPIs) integrating marketing automation tools, will therefore be a decisive advantage for e-tailers wishing to take their results to the next level.
As a 15-year e-commerce and marketing expert, I can help you create and integrate specific tools to boost your store’s results.
Please do not hesitate to contact me so that we can discuss your needs together.
