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So you’ve jumped into the eCommerce world – that’s great!
You built your own Shopify eCommerce store, one of the easiest eCommerce platforms, and it looks amazing.
You even added the Oberlo plugin, an eCommerce solution that helps with product integration, and loaded your Shopify store with the hottest, trending products on the market right now.
You’ve even made a few sales already.
So what’s next?
Next, we need to start automating your store so you can focus on better marketing, increasing your profits, and just enjoying life – that’s why you started an eCommerce store right?
Too many eCommerce stores are managed by hand when most of the work could be automated.
Most business owners tend to believe that a program/plugin cannot do as much as they can if they have their hands on it.
That’s not true!
In fact, it’s the reason most eCommerce stores fail – or make a minimal profit.
Since you’re here, you want to know how to increase your store profits.
Well … by using automation!
We’ll discuss a few ways you can use automation to increase your store profits and reclaim some of your lost time.
Start With A Welcome Email
When a visitor signs up with your website or your subscriber list, do they get a welcome message/email thanking them for being a subscriber/customer?
If not, you’re missing out a great opportunity to close an easy sale and create a long-lasting relationship.
Welcome emails are some of the most effective marketing tools that can be used to increase your store profits.
Why?
If a visitor signs up with your website or subscriber list, they intend to open your emails.
Which is why you need to get something special in front of them.
Don’t just send them a “Hi! Thanks for being a customer with us. If you have any questions, please call us at 888-111-2222.” Instead, make it valuable to them.
Send something along them lines of “Hi Jane! We appreciate your business and we want to make sure you have the best experience possible. For signing up with us, here’s a $10 off coupon good for anything in our store.”
This can easily be automated using plugins like Mailchimp which is designed to work seamlessly with Shopify eCommerce stores.
Give Extras To Your Best Customers
You know the customers we are talking about. These are the customers that MAKE you money.
But did you know that you could convince them to buy even more from you?
Did you know that you could convince your “less than best” customers to buy even more from you too?
How?
Through loyalty programs!
Why not give your customers an incentive to keep buying?
What kind of incentives?
Discounts!
Whenever they buy something from you, give the loyalty points. When they get enough loyalty points, they can buy something extra at no cost to them – make sure the points still favor you though.
A great plugin that works with your Shopify store is the Bold Loyalty Points & Rewards plugin.
It makes setting up a loyalty program for your website easy and it’s free if you have less than 50 loyalty members on your website.
Revive Dead Customers
Earlier we talked about rewarding the best customers – the ones that MAKE you money.
Now we’re going to talk about the customers that aren’t making you any money, yet.
Dead customers are those customers who purchased one time, several months back but have fallen away completely.
There are plenty of reasons why this could happen, but the most common include:
- Lack of communication.
- Lack of interest in your products.
- They found a better price from a competitor.
Automation can actually help with the first two reasons (the third reason is on you).
When a customer buys something from you, you should have an option to subscribe to future updates and sales available to them (and automatically checked).
If they opt-in to your subscriber list, you’ve got a chance to reach them in the future.
But if you aren’t sending out emails, you’re wasting valuable opportunities to increase your store profits.
So, first things first, make sure you are sending out emails regularly. This could be once a week, or once a month. Find out the best response frequency through tracking codes.
Next, they may have become bored with your current product offering.
Did you add new products that they might be interested in?
If so, let them know.
This too can be automated. You can have a plugin like MailChimp send out automated emails based on certain subscriber lists (hopefully you’ve grouped your subscribers).
You can send out a “We value your business. Here’s an extra $20 off anything in our store!” email.
If you seem to be getting little to no response, it could be that your email list is “dirty”. This is where the emails used weren’t any good to begin with.
If that’s the case, clean the list so you aren’t sending out junk/spam email.
Next, make sure that your email isn’t on a spam list. To do that, go to gmass.co and type in your email. They’ll check to see if your email is marked as “SPAM” or “PROMOTIONS”.
If your email address is marked as “SPAM” or “PROMOTIONS”, you probably want to switch where you are sending emails from – otherwise you’re wasting your time.
Conclusion
Here’s the thing, automation is designed to help you reach your customers more effectively.
It is not supposed to be used to do everything for you.
There still needs to be a human touch involved in every transaction.
The idea is to reduce your overhead in such a way that you become a more valuable asset to your store and to your customers.
Automation can definitely help to increase your store profits, but used improperly, it can also crush your store profits.
The points we mentioned are good places to implement automation, without losing the human touch that your customers still desire.
If you aren’t using automation to help you with your store, there’s a good chance you’re leaving profits on the table.
