How to win the marketing automation game with data-driven marketing strategies for e-commerce in 2021

Sumeet Narang
Globant
Published in
5 min readFeb 17, 2021
Win the Marketing Automation game with a data-driven marketing strategy

Despite the current crisis, data-driven marketing strategies and marketing automation are still among the top investment priorities for enterprise digital solutions.

What is the definition of data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing refers to strategies that are built on insights. We discover and pull these insights from customers based on their website interaction, engagement, behavior, and preferences. We can optimize the performance of data-driven marketing with marketing automation.

How does audience segmentation work in data-driven marketing strategy?

There are different types of audience segmentation that can be classified as demographic, psychographic, interest, behavior, and custom audiences. My personal favorites are behavioral and custom audiences that include the audience for lookalike and retargeting

Audience segmentation strategy is a gold mine of opportunity for marketers to engage with prospects and convert them with the right data

5 tactics to drive Audience Segmentation in Data-Driven Strategy:

5 types of Behavioral Segmentation for eCommerce Startups

Let’s talk about behavior, you can actually build the segmented list based on:

#1: Create a segmented list for Abandoned Cart Users

#2: Create a segmented list for Retargeting Customers

#3: Create a segmented list of the average order value (AOV) of customers

#4 Create a segmented list for Past Customers

#5 Create a segmented list based on Engagement Metrics

Segmentation plays a big role in data-driven strategy. There is no need for guesswork when you have the right customer data to market

With automation tools, you can get into more granular segmentation that can improve reach, engagement, and conversion.

Data-Driven Marketing Examples of Successful Ecommerce Startups:

While interacting with an application like Bigbasket or Healthify, you have a perception that their offer is specially made for you, especially when it comes to personalization everywhere.

The best examples are the airline or retail industries An eCommerce brand similar to amazon, Cleartrip has spearheaded different customer touch-points. They have proven that communication should be personalized across different channels and devices. The advantage is that “Your brand image remains consistent across channels.”

I am citing interesting examples of how top start-up companies are using data to make decisions that increase their success and profitability.

Data-Driven Marketing Examples

Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business. Midsize Business and Enterprise companies:

You probably have a lot of digital touchpoints like your website, your blog, your social channels, an app, an e-commerce platform, and maybe also offline channels. Marketing automation helps you keep track of the customer journey across all touchpoints.

It is fairly possible to receive data-driven insights when we have a unified view of our customer audiences. This is only possible with the marketing automation tool.

We have mentioned the marketing automation tools based on small business, mid-size business and enterprise business. Data Source-g2.com

Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business. Midsize Business and Enterprise companies:

How to adopt a data-driven marketing automation approach?

  • Integrate data drive marketing strategies
  • Optimize your digital marketing channels
  • Know your customers well with data
  • Personalize customer journey at every stage
  • Show the next best offers
  • Create a better user experience on website or app

Top 10 Marketing automation features:

  1. Lead Management

2. Email Campaign Management

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Customized Email Templates

5. Dynamic Personalization

6. Segmentation

7. Retargeting

8. Cross Channel Campaign Orchestration

9. AI-Based Analytics

10. Recommendation Engine

Marketing Automation Features

Let’s take a look at a few examples for the above features:

5 Facts About Email Marketing

Based on the research, I would like to mention that,

Series of welcome email has more than 90% open rate- Hive.co

11 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM have the highest spike for email opens-Hive.co

Welcome emails can create a 86% lift in the unique open rate of 30%- Entrepreneur

84% of B2C welcome emails reach inboxed and have a 23% read rate- Statista

Examples of Dynamic personalization:

One obvious example is Amazon, I am sure you across with powerful recommendations:

  • You might be interested in…
  • Customers also viewed…
  • Customers who bought X also bought Y
  • Inspired by your browsing history

5 Best Practices that you should follow to rule Data-Driven Strategy:

Best Practices for Data-Driven Strategy
  • Abandoned email- Send an automated series of abandoned cart email to customers who left items in their cart. Ecommerce companies are prime examples of leaders here.
  • AB testing- Whether its a website or email, you should do testing to see what is working best. The best example is Optimizely. You can AB test your web page.
  • Third-Party Tool- There are a lot of third parties tools that can help you to increase conversion rates and improve lead quality. Web engage and Snapap are examples of these kinds of tools.
  • Remarketing- This creates valuable touchpoints where you can actually turn your leads into customers.
  • Stay Compliant- US laws are pretty strict for GDPR, but we should be able to remarket and collect the data for those who accept the cookies.

Wrap Up:

In conclusion, every business and smart marketer should have a customer-first approach. Make your customer experience worthwhile from the website to messaging and see what magic happens with their data.

To outperform any campaign, cross-channel marketing, the right content strategy, and audience segmentation is key. This will surely help to win the game of marketing automation with data-driven marketing.

To know more about a popular automation tool like SFMC, please read the article Guide to Salesforce Marketing Cloud(SFMC) Ecosystem

--

--