How to Leverage Automation to Grow Your eCommerce Business
Time is one of the most precious and most limited resources that eSellers have. It is difficult to spread your time and talents across all critical activities necessary to achieve your business objectives. Therefore, anything you can do to improve efficiency without compromising quality is a bonus.
The following is a look at several strategies, insights, and tips to help you grow your eCommerce business by leverage automation!
The Buying Process
Managers in companies waste a lot of time putting out fires that often result from a lack of proactive planning. In the same way, eSellers can lose a lot of sales because they cannot keep up with customer questions that require answers before a purchase is completed.
Delivering thorough product descriptions and requisite information proactively is one way to minimize customer questions that stem from uncertainty. In addition to describing your products in detail, offer customer reviews, testimonials, demonstrations, videos, and other tools that help convey value.
Your buying process is also simpler when you do not have a burdensome shopping-cart process. Most online carts are abandoned before completion. Do not require a lot of steps for a first-time purchase. Allow people to buy as guests if they desire, and follow-up via email or another channel to cement the connection with a complete profile. Create automated abandoned-cart emails to attract shoppers back after they leave.
Customer Support
Customer service and support can become a full-time job once your eCommerce business is well-established. Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to enable customer self-support. Interactive Q&A and FAQ features are a great place to start, and you can create these via solutions like Desk.com.
Chatbots have become increasingly popular as well. These service tools pop up as customers explore your site and rely on artificial intelligence for timely engagement and effective resolution of common on-site problems.
Social Media Management
It is imperative that your eCommerce business have a social media presence. Online customers are on popular channels engaging with other users and looking to engage with brands they like.
It takes time to manage each channel in isolation, though. Thus, you need a solution like HootSuite to manage all of your accounts in one central location, or tools like Buffer or RecurPost to automate post scheduling or content repurposing.
Accounting and Bookkeeping
It helps to have some accounting background in eCommerce. The reality, though, is that many operators do not have experience in this field. Therefore, a software solution like QuickBooks offers tremendous benefits for automating record-keeping.
Using third-party apps, you can connect QuickBooks to your online store to automatically pull in sales data. This automation minimizes the time and potential for errors that come with manual entry. QuickBooks also works with TurboTax for tax reporting, and you can sometimes gain free access to QuickBooks small-business features when you utilize TurboTax for tax preparation.
Conclusion
These are several of the areas in which eSellers can automate critical business processes and activities to improve efficiency. Take advantage of these to reduce your manual burden and to improve your capacity to grow your business!
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