Once you’ve got your e-commerce business all set and running, you’ll realize that the only way for it to continue growing and reach its full potential is by using some specialized tools to simplify or improve some of the processes and automate your workflows.
Communicating with your website visitors 24/7, sending email campaigns to your prospects, and keeping your social media profiles active are just a few of the numerous everyday activities you and your team will need to handle in order to keep your customers satisfied and improve your e-store business results. And that’s impossible to handle without a certain extent of automation. And even if it were possible, it would be completely cost-ineffective.
Here are some of the best solutions you can find to streamline your e-commerce business and achieve some great business results.
Live chat
Your online store will have many visitors just browsing around, trying to find a particular item, just like in real life. When making their purchase decision, some of them would need more information and they would like to ask around, immediately. So, if you can’t provide them with the answer momentarily, they are going to walk away and find someone who can, and potentially never come back.
One of the best solutions for advancing your customers service is by responding to your prospects’ request right away, and you can do it by installing a live chat window on your webpage. You can use live chat software for:
- Giving instant information to your customers
- Promoting your popular products by displaying automated messages on certain pages
- Automate an exit-discount offer to your prospects
- Personalizing communication with your customers by using the data you’ve collected on them
- Handling billings
- Order management
- Co-browsing
Stats say that 42% of customers prefer to live chat as they don’t have to wait and more than 90% are satisfied with this feature. Some of the best-known tools used are LiveChat, Tidion, LivePerson but they differ in the features they offer, so choose what best fits your needs and your budget.
Email automation
Outbound email campaigns are a great way to generate leads for your e-commerce and nurture them through the sales funnel. Still, days of manually doing email marketing are long gone, and most serious companies have switched to automation, which makes the whole process of sending a campaign much easier. Plus, with the right data and a high-quality contact list, you can segment your audience with a click of the mouse, and make sure you’ve sent your offer to the right people.
Moreover, your email can be personalized down to every detail, which will result in a significant increase in your open and CTR rates. The same applies to your sales as stats claim that marketers see an average of 20% increase in sales when using personalized experiences.
Some of the best-known tools for you to try out are MailChimp, OptiMonk, and Autoklose, so take your pick and monitor your metrics.
E-commerce personalization
Personalization matters not only for the results of your email marketing campaigns but also for the overall customer experience your e-commerce provides. Your customers crave content which fits their needs, and they want personalized recommendations when they come back to your store. Such tools collect data from your different channels, analyze them and enable you to deliver omnichannel personalized service to your customers at every touchpoint.
It’s a good idea to consider tools such as Monetate, Omnisend, Bronto or Act-On and deliver your customers just what they are looking for.
CRM
With your e-commerce business growing, some issues will be too difficult to keep track of, and yet in order for this trend to continue, you’ll need to address them strategically and timely. This is particularly important when it comes to customer relations and issues such as shopping cart abandonment and canceled orders. One of the crucial things is to keep your customers and get them to come back, so you need to deal with these issues right after they emerge, and a CRM tool will help you with that, as it will send an email automatically to your customer encouraging them to complete their purchase, or schedule a call for some of your employees to handle this situation.
Some of the best known CRM tools are Pipedrive, Act, Zoho, and Salesforce. Most of these tools integrate with other tools pretty well, but if you want a more holistic solution, you can consider unified NetSuite implementation.
Analytics tools
You will have a great advantage when it comes to the design and the functionality of your website if you use some analytics tools to get data on your prospects’ behavior while they’re browsing your store. You can easily gather data on pages your visitors most often visit, demographic data, how they reached your store, as well as keep track of conversion rates, scrolling patterns and heatmaps. This data is invaluable when it comes to optimizing your web pages and analyzing the effects of every change you make in the store.
Some of the most recommended tools used for analytical purposes are Crazyegg, Google Analytics, and Hotjar.
If you haven’t started utilizing tools to advance your business, now is a perfect time to begin. Your competitors are using them already, so turn the odds to your advantage.
