Marketing automation is transforming the way modern retailers engage customers, increase loyalty and boost sales. According to the latest marketing automation usage data from 2021, “automation contributes to a 14.2% rise in sales productivity, as well as a 12.2% drop in marketing expenses.” This illustrates a need for retailers to leverage the expertise of specialist teams who can optimize ROI from automation implementations.
Automation technology enables stores to trigger personalized, omnichannel messaging while gathering customer data to refine experiences. The result? Retailers who implement marketing automation see game-changing lifts across critical key performance indicators (KPIs) like subscriber engagement, loyalty membership growth and customer lifetime value (CLV).
As a marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call can provide strategic guidance, technology implementation and retail automation expertise to help brands architect optimized, data-driven campaigns that capture the full revenue and customer experience potential of automation.
Benefits of Retail Marketing Automation
Retail marketing automation delivers transformative outcomes for brands by bringing together integrated data, omnichannel coordination and trigger-based interactions powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Intelligently automated technology provides a competitive edge through benefits such as:
- Improved efficiency: Automation handles repetitive and manual tasks involved in retail CRM, email sends, campaign management and reporting. This results in considerable time and resource savings that can be reallocated.
- Personalized experiences: Unified customer data enables tailoring of messaging and product recommendations across channels based on purchase history and behaviors. Relevancy can boost engagement and conversion rates.
- Enhanced measurement: Dashboards provide real-time visibility into campaign performance, channel attribution, CLV changes and ROI for continuous optimization.
- Revenue growth: The right loyalty programs, browsing abandonment flows, dynamic ads and personalized recommendations deliver a measurable increase in CLV. Automated upsells and cross-sells can also raise average order value (AOV).
When orchestrated using deep retail data intelligence, automation drives higher productivity, strategic decision-making, customer satisfaction and, ultimately, maximum financial performance. The experts at Creatives On Call can help build a winning retail automation strategy tailored to your brand’s goals, with technology implementations that deliver maximum ROI. Our retail-focused approach drives automation success.
Key Strategies for Retailers
Implementing effective retail marketing automation equips stores to coordinate highly tailored messaging across channels to reach customers at the right times. Strategic automation involves leveraging data intelligence to understand buyer lifecycles and customer journeys. This drives orchestrating targeted marketing offers, content, recommendations and more to align with when a customer entered the awareness phase, made recent purchases, is at risk of churning, and so on.
The marketing specialists at Creatives On Call recommend these core strategies:
Email Marketing Automation
Email represents a primary retail communication channel, given its combination of high deliverability, engagement rates and measurability. Automated email enables messages tailored to different shopper behaviors.
- Welcome series: Onboard new subscribers by delivering educational content and incentives driving initial purchases.
- Cart abandonments: Bring back customers who left items in their cart with timed discount codes.
- Recommendations: Suggest personalized product recommendations based on purchase activity and browsing history using advanced machine learning algorithms.
Well-timed and personalized email automation nurtures loyalty while lifting subscriber value.
Triggered Messaging Automation
Triggers monitor customer actions on ecommerce platforms, mobile apps and online channels to fire highly targeted real-time messaging.
- Browse & purchase behaviors: Someone who frequently buys hiking gear might receive a web push notification about new pole arrivals.
- Push notifications: Shoppers can opt in to updates on orders, deliveries, personalized deals and other updates via mobile.
- Reviews & rating requests: Transactional messages help build your reputation and improve future offerings.
Retail Loyalty Program Automation
Loyalty programs incentivize repeat purchases while gathering data to improve customer understanding over time. Technology automates administration and point disbursement while suggesting ways to progress levels and redeem rewards.
- Member level management: Automate ascension through tiers based on money spent annually, with members receiving increasing discounts.
- Intelligent point usage: Recommend redemption options aligned to member interests for bigger perceived value.
- Reward triggers: Send members exclusive, personalized bonuses around events like birthdays or loyalty milestones.
Lifecycle Campaign Management
AI-powered technology can automate coordinated messaging across channels tailored to a shopper’s current stage with a brand — whether that’s recent awareness and onboarding or retention and reengagement for mature relationships.
- Onboarding series: Welcome new customers while shaping buying preferences through early education.
- Retargeting: Remind more tenured yet passive contacts of why they enjoy your brand when data shows potential re-interest.
- Reacquisition: Recover and diagnose defecting customers through personalized reconciliation offers when their activity declines substantially.
As part of our industry-leading marketing and retail services, Creatives On Call can help assemble the right teams and technology to set up, manage and optimize your retail marketing automation tools. Our retail specialists will ensure your initiatives drive maximum ROI through personalized experiences, revenue-focused performance measurement and continual testing to support your marketing efforts across social media and other channels.
Driving Maximum Return From Retail Automation
The most effective retail marketing automation initiatives follow best practices focused on optimizing performance and financial return from personalized messaging and lifecycle campaigns. Creatives On Call’s retail marketing automation consultants recommend these top tips:
- Set conversion, revenue and engagement KPI goals: Get granular tracking campaign success by establishing quantifiable targets for email clickthrough rates, mobile message opt-ins, increased subscriber lifetime value and order sizes for loyalty members.
- Prioritize VIP shoppers: Not all customer segments hold the same revenue potential. Work backward from highest-value groups like premium status members and big spenders when determining automation priorities, offers and channel positioning.
- Continually test for optimization: Leverage A/B and multivariate testing methodologies to experiment with the timing, messaging, formats, incentives and products featured across automated campaigns. Accelerate learning and refinement.
- Unify data & technology stacks: Use accurate, integrated data across CRM, web, mobile, transactional and other channels to drive a complete view of customers, which enables relevant coordination.
Retail Marketing Automation With Creatives On Call
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call has extensive experience helping brands build and optimize data-driven marketing automation strategies. Our retail specialists leverage deep expertise in marketing technology and retail operations/customer engagement to deliver automation solutions tailored for maximum ROI.
Creatives On Call provides services to identify each client’s unique automation goals, map out personalized cross-channel customer journeys, select and implement the right AI-powered platform, unify data sources for accuracy and continually refine performance through testing. Our automation solutions cover all key retail strategies, from cart abandonment email flows to loyalty trigger management and lifecycle campaigns.
If you’re a retailer seeking to accelerate growth through cutting-edge, customized marketing automation, the experts at Creatives On Call can help assess your needs, assemble a high-caliber team and drive automation technology success — increasing efficiency, buyer personalization, measurable analytics and, ultimately, substantial revenue gains. We also provide retail marketing and social media services and retail web design solutions tailored to your business.
Contact us today to explore campaign possibilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
What types of messaging can be automated for retail marketing?
Retailers typically automate email, Short Message Service (SMS), push notifications, website messaging and chatbots based on customer lifecycle stage and behaviors like purchases, browsing history, store visits and more.
What customer data is used to personalize automated messaging?
Retailers connect CRM data like purchase history with website behavioral data, app activity, loyalty program tiers and more to create a 360-degree view of customers for tailored communications.
What strategies help retailers avoid over-automating communications?
The marketing consultants at Creatives On Call recommend conducting journey mapping workshops, listening to customer feedback and performing testing to prevent ill-timed, irrelevant or excessive messaging that frustrates subscribers. Alignment to brand values also keeps automation meaningful.
