How Marketing Automation Can Drive Ecommerce Business Growth

If the customer doesn’t see you enough, they’ll most likely forget about you.

Indeed, the Egyptian saying says exactly this:

اللي بعيد عن العين بعيد عن القلب

“What is far from the eye is far from the heart.”

At RTG, we believe that is true for ecommerce businesses. Consumers don’t see your ecommerce business when they are in the street or browsing the local market. So how do you stay in front of their eyes and near to their heart while they are shopping online?

Marketing automation is part of the answer.

Automation isn’t new; Anyone who has visited Amazon knows they are going to see personalized offerings that others aren’t going to see.

But how does your business compete if you don’t have Amazon’s budget?

How Automation Enhances Efficiency & Improves Customer Experience

Marketing automation involves using software and technology to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. For e-commerce businesses, marketing automation can significantly impact growth by enhancing efficiency, personalizing customer interactions, and improving overall marketing effectiveness.

Here are some key ways RTG’s marketing automation drives business growth for our ecommerce partners:

Automating Repetitive Tasks: Automating email marketing allows businesses to send personalized messages to customers at scale, such as welcome emails, order confirmations, and abandoned cart reminders and newsletters. Social Media Management: Scheduling posts, tracking engagement, and managing multiple social media accounts can be automated, freeing up time for strategic planning. Customer Segmentation: Automation tools can segment customers based on demographics, purchase history, and behavior, enabling more targeted marketing efforts. Personalized marketing: Automated systems can deliver personalized content to customers based on their preferences and browsing history, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Although RTG doesn’t provide automation tech directly, we work with third-party partners to help ecommerce businesses automate as much as possible.

“What we provide is the logic behind the automation (such as managing data and processes,” says Abdelrahman El Naka, Head of Product team and Product Marketing Manager at RTG.

Abdelrahman says ecommerce must be connected to the operations and marketing cycles to achieve effective automation.

Media buying, for example (such as paid acquisition channels) can increase customer lifetime value based on the user experience.

“You’re talking about a specific set of rules,” he says. “You might retarget specific users who are primed for conversion. If you don’t have the necessary data points, you risk sending marketing emails, texts, or other messing to the wrong customers.

Automation Can Make It Easier To Reach Specific Markets

“Localization for the region is very important for our clients.” Abdelrahman explains. For example, Arabic speakers have a wide range of dialects throughout the region, and this puts a demand on businesses that operate across multiple markets.

“Our business clients might want to localize messaging in a way that would suit a customer in Saidi or Egypt or another market. Most marketing automation tools are designed for Western audiences, and their out-of-the-box email templates may not be suitable.”

“The customization we provide saves a lot of hassle for the clients that we work with.”

What does an RTG ecommerce implementation give you? Tools like Klavio and Shopify limit the data at your fingertips; RTG gives you more customization.

“We build custom solutions that are API-based integrations for all data points.”

For example, the picking system we build might alert you when there’s going to be a late delivery, send the appropriate; message to the customer and offer a discount for the next order.

“Since we custom-build everything for your business, we can build very complex scenarios and user flows to push the customer lifetime value as much as we can.”

Trigger-based actions make it possible. Automation can trigger marketing actions based on specific customer behaviors, such as sending a discount code when a customer abandons their cart or a follow-up email after a purchase.

“When the customer leaves a page on the mobile app without adding the product to the cart, you can offer a discount for them to complete the purchase within 30 minutes, for example. Having these systems trigger in a timely manner is extremely important.”

Use Automation to Focus On Your Ideal Customer

Marketing automation goes beyond abandoned carts and offers; you can use it to build stronger relationships. When you design your marketing automation workflows, strive to delight your customer persona. Start by building rules around your core market.

“If you sell luxury items you might be more focused on marketing automation systems that would educate the user and give them exclusive insights about specific products, for example.”

“So when you design your marketing automation cycle, you need to focus on delivering the right message” Abdelrahman says. “If your customer is a stylist, for example, you want to deliver styling tips that they will find useful. You can build your brand message around your customer persona.”

That said, Abdelrahman reminds RTG’s business partners that they need to “be careful not to be annoying” with their automated messages.

“This is the pitfall of marketing automation,” he says. “You try to be everywhere for the user, but it can get to the point where you lose the user.”

Data-Driven Decisions Drives Ecommerce Growth

Automation tools provide detailed analytics and reports on marketing campaign performance, helping businesses identify what works and what doesn’t.

Robusta works with behavior and analytics tools like Microsoft Clarity, Google Analytics 4, Mixpanel, as well as the native social media tools in Meta, Tiktok and other platforms. Collecting and analyzing customer data enables businesses to understand buying patterns, preferences, and trends, facilitating more informed decision-making.

“We track these data points and funnel them to one customized dashboard hosted on something like Tableau, PowerBI or Onesight,” says Abdelrahman. These insights allow the businesses we work with to scale their marketing efforts without a proportional increase in resources, making it easier to handle increased demand during peak times. They also ensure consistent messaging and branding across all channels, even as the business grows.

“Marketing automation is the intelligent part of remarketing. It’s about sending personalized offers that would lead to more conversions. What we specifically offer is making the data available through. customer segmentation engines, AI data visualization solutions—things the marketing team can use to build an audience.”

Through our tool providers/partners (Klavio, Webengage, Emarsys, etc…), we integrate automation into our core offerings and our customer segmentation engines to offer things like personalized offers, birthday offers, personalized content and more.

Other Areas for Opportunity With Automated Processes

What else can your business achieve with marketing automation?

The sky's the limit. Some popular use cases include:

Loyalty Programs: Automating loyalty programs and reward systems can help retain customers and encourage repeat purchases. Customer Feedback: Collecting and responding to customer feedback through automated systems helps maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. Resource Allocation: By automating routine tasks, businesses can allocate human resources to more strategic activities, reducing labor costs. Reduced Errors: Automation reduces the likelihood of human errors, saving costs associated with mistakes and rework. Optimized Spend: Automation tools can optimize ad spend by automatically adjusting bids and targeting based on performance data. ROI Tracking: Real-time tracking of marketing ROI helps businesses allocate budgets more effectively, ensuring maximum return on investment. Faster Speed to market: Automation enables quicker execution of marketing campaigns and strategies, giving businesses a competitive edge in responding to market trends and customer needs. Innovation: Automated systems allow businesses to experiment with innovative marketing tactics and quickly adapt to changes in the market.

By leveraging marketing automation, e-commerce businesses can achieve significant growth through improved efficiency, personalized customer interactions, data-driven decision-making, and scalability. This ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, increased sales, and a stronger competitive position in the market.