How to Embrace Automation in Ecommerce and Improve Your Lead Generation

You’ve built it and they came. Now what? Only a handful of leads were sent down the sales funnel and promoted into paying customers. For some mysterious reason, the rest of your prospects aren’t really responding to the message you’re trying to convey. The ecommerce world is spinning at the speed of light, yet your lead gen is confusingly slow. It’s time to give it a boost and put it on auto-pilot.

Here’s how to embrace automation, improve your traffic, and catch high-quality leads.

Put Retargeting on Autopilot

Ecommerce leaders know better than to rely on a single channel when communicating with modern-day consumers, be they potential buyers or existing customers. The omnichannel approach to marketing seems like the only viable option for generating, nurturing, and converting high-quality leads. But, as its name suggests, this technique requires you to be at multiple places at the same time.

Since that’s nearly impossible without some help from automation, all reliable marketing tools now come with lead generation features that can help you build and launch highly targeted campaigns on multiple channels. You simply create your message, schedule posting for later, and leave the rest to the system. The entire process is a breeze, as long as you know who and where the ideal customer is.

By integrating omnichannel automation with CRM systems and email, savvy marketers can target and retarget any kind of lead. Depending on who they are, prospects can be found across social media and online channels and addressed in a highly personalized way. All this and more can be automated with cutting-edge marketing tools, designed to maximize your lead generation efforts by huge 451%.

Set Up Automatic Segmentation

It goes without saying that these robust automation systems include features for super-segmentation as well. That’s increasingly important in the context of today’s customer experience, which forbids ecommerce brands from unifying their message across different channels. Modern-day leads expect the same personalized treatment, which calls for further and even narrower audience segmentation.

Getting to know who to approach on social media and who to address via email, just as well as what to offer to different types of your ideal buying persona, is a tricky feat. Not only do you need a reliable tool for data collection and analysis, but you also can’t do without a powerful segmentation feature that would automatically qualify all potential customers as either sales-ready prospects or cold leads.

Generate Real Data in Real Time

The omnichannel approach, which we’ve already established as the only reliable strategy for growing a business in this newly reshaped ecommerce landscape, is difficult to achieve and maintain. With every separate channel comes a separate influx of leads, each one of them demanding a different kind of interaction. Furthermore, the larger the number of these channels is, the more data you’ll amass.

This kind of business intelligence is precious in all competitive markets, but only if you know how to interpret it right. Once again, it falls down to automation to collect and analyze this data before you can convert it into explicit, actionable knowledge. In terms of lead generation, this ensures a much deeper insight into different prospects, which is served to you by automation tools on a silver platter.

Outsource Prospects to Chatbots

Once you’ve acquired this know-how and retailored your lead gen strategy in a way that fits different channels and different consumers, you can finally start targeting and addressing real prospects. Remember, you’re in the omnichannel arena now, which means that you won’t be able to do it alone. You’ll need either a team of at least a dozen marketers and sales reps or a single automation system.

One chatbot, if properly designed and implemented, should be able to cover all lead generation tasks assigned to a five-member team. Maybe more, if you use a sophisticated chatbot platform such as SnatchBot. It can cover multiple channels at the same time, which includes not only social media and email, but your ecommerce store itself as well, and handle just as many interactions at the same time.

Chatbots are growing in popularity among customers, which means that this solution will automatically put you ahead of your competition and generate high-quality leads. And, speaking of automation, a chatbot will streamline all interactions, providing both pre-purchase help to newcomers and shopping assistance to sales-ready prospects. Include NLP and ML, and the upper hand is yours.

Employ AI for Sentiment Analysis

Chatbots are not only business tech solutions that rely on AI, NLP, and ML to cross the gap between robots and human beings. Sentiment analysis tools use them as well, and with a single, straightforward purpose – to give you a better understanding of the consumer. Needless to say, they too fall into the category of intelligent automation systems, designed to listen and respond to customers’ needs.

Similarly to marketing automation tools and their analytical features, sentiment analysis feels the pulse of the audience and transforms it into actionable insight. However, it does it in a more sophisticated manner, by crawling social media, gathering public opinions, and assessing comments and brand mentions of individuals and entire groups. This is social listening 2.0, empowered with AI.

Though sentiment analysis doesn’t automate lead generation per se, its contribution to business intelligence is far more superior to what traditional marketing automation and sales tools have to offer. In fact, sentiment analysis is so powerful that the lead gen process is automatically streamlined, as satisfied customers continue to recommend a brand and send prospects directly to an online store.

With AI technologies such as sentiment analysis and free chatbot platforms like SnatchBot, business automation no longer refers to basic autopilot tools that respond to human command. The future of automation is an entirely robotic solution that’s capable of learning and communicating on its own. Be an early adopter, and you won’t need a special lead gen strategy. They’ll come uninvited.