If you run any kind of ecommerce business, you know how important marketing is. Marketing is an engine that drives your sales. But marketing is also an art own and can be very overwhelming at times. Luckily, there is a way to help streamline all marketing tasks, improve lead management, and impact your overall revenue. It’s marketing automation.

We experience marketing automation all the time: when you buy something online and you get that automated email saying: “Hey John, thank you for buying that, we’ve seen you were looking at that as well, you might be interested in this, these ones are currently on sale and go perfectly with that thing you bought two weeks ago…”

However marketing automation is much more than automated emails.  This powerful tool allows you to deliver an automated response for every action or inactivity demonstrated by your audience.

You probably know the basics of marketing automation: it streamlines, automates, and monitors routine marketing tasks. Embracing marketing automation is an easy way for businesses to scale their marketing efforts, as well as save on time, energy, resources and skills.

It allows you to profile your leads and learn valuable new information about each and every prospect or customer. Using marketing automation together with content personalization allows you to automate a great user experience and make it personal to each of your website visitors, which ultimately results in a greater number of sales. So, instead of cold calls and sending bulk emails to unqualified leads, the sales team will have more time to invest in leads most likely to result in sales.

It’s imperative to deliver relevant, personalized content to customers, which requires a lot of work on driving visitors to your website, turning them into leads, collecting, qualifying, organizing and nurturing those leads to close a sale. This is a huge amount of work for your sales and marketing team. However, modern marketing methods are all about enabling your business to do more with less, by taking all of sales data and information and easily storing it in one location. That is why marketing automation platforms have become essential resources for sales teams, service agents and marketers.

Another advantage of marketing automation is that you can use all the information to better understand the needs and challenges of the prospects. It makes engaging potential customers possible through their entire life cycle – from first visit to completing a purchase, while being able to see what’s working and what isn’t at the same time.

Marketing automation software tracks all your marketing efforts in a single platform. It is able to combine different aspects of ecommerce marketing such as audience segmentation, customer relationship management and omni-channel engagement in one tool. That makes it easier for businesses to automate personalized, contextual engagement for their prospects and customers in a timely manner.

One of the most flexible marketing automation tools suitable for ecommerce is SharpSpring. SharpSpring stands out for its ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast number of third party ecommerce solutions like Magento. This feature is crucial for marketing agencies. Moreover, if you track your sales through this marketing automation software you can pull relevant information such as the demographic, purchase type, amount of purchase and more to generate customized ad campaigns and distribute them in the future.

ShaprSpring offers a number of features that are useful for ecommerce growth:

• Lead scoring, which provides insights into the leads’ interests, engagement level and likeliness to make a purchase.
• Synchronizing purchase, product and customer data from multiple ecommerce solutions
• Analysis features which help you find out what your hottest items are, who are your big customers, most frequent shoppers and more.
• Personalized communication, sending tailored emails to customers showing exactly what they are interested in and most likely to buy.
• ROI analysis and creating reports that help you understand your success rates during a certain time frame, including customer lifetime value and the average order value.
• Improving your sales cycle by sending highly relevant content to your leads.
• Track abandoned carts and bring customers back with an automated campaign.

Marketing automation is a great tool for boosting ecommerce sales and improving relationships with customers. If you focus on points in the process where you can add value for customers, they will be much happier and much more likely to engage. That is ultimately what leads to more sales.