"With this Sales Automation in Marketing, you increase your revenue."

In this article, our guest author Sebastian Hansen reveals what sales automation is and how you can use it to increase the revenues in your online shop. In line with this, we give you a few top tips so you can start right away.

What is sales automation?

As the name suggests, it's about an automated process that supports the sales activities in your online shop. Automation routes (journeys) are set up in corresponding tools, which trigger a so-called "event" by themselves at certain "triggers".

Triggers can be different events: for example, a completed purchase, reaching a certain stage in the offer process (funnel), the purchase of a particular product group or service, elapsed time since the last purchase, visit to a special landing page, social media interactions or even an uncompleted purchase process.

An event is then usually the reaction following the trigger - mostly in the form of a personalized email, SMS or push notification in an app or browser. Also, automated play-outs of advertisements in social channels, Google ads, or offline measures can be corresponding events.

The goal of a sales or Marketing automation is to drive your shop's sales activities and identify missed or unused opportunities, persuading your customers accordingly. The key is relevance. In other words, the right offer must reach the right recipient at the right time on the right channel. More relevant communication is achieved through better segmentation and personalization based on behaviour data. This is exactly where marketing automation comes in.

What is the benefit of using sales automations?

In sales or marketing automation, customer data is collected and interpreted. The subsequent communication is oriented towards the interests of the recipients and is automatic. The technologies used will help your company to manage its marketing activities across the various online channels (e.g. email, web, social media) and to automate manual or repetitive tasks and processes.

The biggest and most important advantage of using automated sales activities is clearly the possibility of easy sales increase through more effective and efficient customer outreach. The good thing is: You don't have to contact each customer individually, but the marketing tool does this job for you. Specifically, this means: 

• By regularly comparing and prioritizing, you can simplify and scale your processes and thus promote more growth in your company. 
• A sales automation software operates regardless of your business hours, even at night or when you're on vacation. 
• Once campaigns are set up, the administration effort is very low. Your team has more time for creative strategy development or content creation, for example.
• Your existingdata is used rather than lying in silos. When different tools are linked, for example, CRM and newsletter tools new synergies emerge.
• By using certain tools, you always get a second chance for successful completion of the sale by attracting visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts back to your shop or motivating inactive users to make a purchase.

Where are sales automations used?

The use of sales automation can be very different. Whether you run a small webshop or a large online platform. Wherever customer data is collected, corresponding mailing routes can be set up. The use of sales or automation software is particularly suitable for operators of online shops or platforms. These can also be set up as a cross-channel measure (online and offline).

Whether your business is more in the B2B or B2C sector has no impact on the success of your sales lead automation - that is, the automated processing of new/existing contacts. If your company is jumping on the current D2C hype train and therefore in direct contact with your (potential) customers, you have the best prerequisites to automate your sales funnel. 

Marketing automation tools usually have a positive effect on your corporate practice by optimizing the interplay of marketing and sales. In the best-case scenario, this is how it works:

The consolidated work of marketing within the system generates qualified leads for sales (e.g. via the website) and passes these on to sales for further processing thanks to CRM integration. The sales staff can continue to work in your CRM tool as usual, but also receive additional information from marketing - e.g. they gain insight into all campaigns and content with which a lead has been played out. The data flow works just as well in the other direction. An opportunity that sales assess as not yet ready to buy, for example, can be passed back to the marketing team. From there, the lead receives relevant and personalized content.

There are different objectives that marketing and sales automations follow. We would like to show you some examples of marketing automation: 

Upselling

In sales automation with the goal of "upselling", the idea is to invite existing customers to further sales activities through personalized offers. 

An example: customers have booked a hotel on a holiday platform. As a follow-up to the booking, they are now also offered cheap rental car prices on-site via email. So you are selling an extra service package as an "add-on".

Re-Engagement

The goal of re-engagement is to maintain the customer relationship, even if the last purchase was some time ago. 

Example: A customer has bought a coffee machine six months ago and you know from your data that this customer comes from Cologne and due to the very hard water there, she needs a new water filter after six months. Therefore, you contact the buyer again via her preferred channel and offer her the product accordingly.

Shopping cart abandonments

Customers who came very close to completing a purchase but did not carry out the last step - namely the purchase and payment process - can be addressed again. Perhaps the timing wasn't right something got in the way, the internet connection was interrupted or another provider was drawn upon for comparison - through appropriate automation, you have the chance to convince your potential customers after all.

Chross-Channel

Customers are not responding to your promotional emails? Then try it via other channels. Do you reach them via SMS, push or maybe offline / direct mailing? What works well and what doesn't is stored as information in the database/CRM to contact customers directly via the preferred channel in the future.

Loyalty Programmes

Loyal customers are rewarded, and loyalty programs are implemented. Vouchers after multiple purchases in the shop, exclusive products for customers who have belonged to the customer base for more than a year, or collecting points for later use. Loyalty programs strongly support the long-term binding of customers and can be an important component in marketing automation.

What should companies pay particular attention to when creating and introducing sales automations?

As with any project, the strategy and objective must first be clarified when introducing sales automations.

Ideally, your company's sales and marketing managers will jointly define the objectives and set up a project plan based on them. At this point, external service providers such as digital agencies or consultants often come into play. Thanks to their expertise, they can conduct corresponding workshops or carry out user research with you. 

• Is there a marketing strategy? 
• Have you developed a campaign strategy and a content strategy? 
• What form must a lead take in order for it to be useful to you? 

Only then can the processes be successfully mapped on the automation platform. The way you analyse, segment and derive targeted communication from your data ultimately determines how much your sales increase. The most important task of the tool or provider you work with will therefore be to assist you in developing your individual solution for marketing automation.

Next, you should take a closer look at your customers' customer journey: 

• What touchpoints are there?
• Where do users possibly drop off or can they not be guided further through the sales funnels?
• What works well in your webshop? Where is there a hitch in performance?

This also involves the use of collected tracking data, A/B testing and information from your CRM in order to gain a 360° view of your customers. 

On the basis of this information, you should then search for a suitable provider for such automations together with your IT department. You need to ask yourselves: 

• How much budget can and do I want to spend on a marketing automation tool?
• What should the tool be able to do?
• What interfaces to other tools should there be? 
• Who will use the tool?
• And does my preferred provider comply with the GDPR or does it match the legal requirements of my company?

Once you have done this groundwork, you can evaluate where a small "reminder" in the form of an automated email makes sense, and set up a corresponding automation in your automation tool's journey builder. 

An example of successful & efficient sales automations

An example of good sales automation is a welcome journey set up for the nexum customer Avoury®. For the introduction of the new brand, a route was built for one year. Based on purchase and consumption behaviour or personal data, optimized content is played out to customers. A fully personalized video, for example, is part of the introduction to the brand and creates a direct personal connection. 

Which tools are useful in creating a sales automation? 

Today's extent of communication processes can hardly be managed manually. Therefore, the use of a marketing automation platform makes sense. The software solution, in addition to your CRM, undertakes almost all the work of marketing, as customer communication takes place exclusively via the solution.

When choosing a system, it's also helpful to look at the existing system landscape. If, for example, the Salesforce Service Cloud is already in use, then the Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Salesforce Pardot could be the tool of choice, as standard integration apps can be used. 

It is also important to include in the evaluation how many data pools need to be connected, whether data needs to be disseminated bidirectionally and whether there is an internal IT/infrastructure available for setting up interfaces. 

If the focus is more on simpler routes and lower budgets, Mailchimp could be shortlisted if the respective GDPR issues have been cleared by your data protection department. 

Shopping Cart Abandonment Journey in Mailchimp

Recover lost customer in Mailchimp

The above mentioned sales automation tools are just examples. Each tool has its pros and cons and based on the requirement capture, the required features can be compared and prioritized with the tools and prices. More tried and tested tools are:

Emarsys

Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue)

Mailjet

HubSpot Marketing Hub

CleverReach

Marketing Automation in the HubSpot tool

You will find even more choice in our category Marketing Automation on OMR Reviews. 

Conclusion on sales automation

You really should do it! It's worth it to take a look at missed opportunities and consider how prospects can become paying customers. 

Once automation is in place, the "service effort" is rather low. It's important to check KPIs you've set at regular intervals and readjust if necessary.