Updated: 2022-03-03 14:51:07
Everyone knows that marketing is an essential part of dropshipping, but how much do you know about marketing? In the past, retailers who didn't know anything about marketing could lose the competitive conditions directly unless they hired a professional marketing team with a high cost. But with the popularization of marketing automation, retailers can achieve their marketing goals by relying on simple automated marketing tools and platforms.
If you are still manually exploring e-commerce marketing, you may wish to read this article. It may inspire you on how to improve marketing efficiency.
This article will tell you what marketing automation is, how marketing automation benefits your dropshipping business, what time to invest in marketing automation, as well as a list of the best marketing automation tools.
If you are new to dropshipping, you may need a reliable dropshipping agent to help you automate order fulfillment. Then you'll have more time and energy to focus on marketing.
Marketing automation refers to automating marketing tasks and workflows using software platforms and technologies instead of a person. It can lead brands to reach their target customers at the right time with the right content through the right channel. Marketing automation can improve marketing efficiency while providing customers with a personalized experience.
For example, email marketing automation allows you to save time and energy on sending emails to each customer manually. You only need to customize the emails in advance. The email marketing automation tool will send different personalized emails to your target customers at specific times smartly based on your schedule and customer behavior.
In addition to personalized email marketing, you can also use marketing automation tools to achieve automated social media marketing, lead nurturing, ads retargeting, landing page form collecting, etc.
Source: https://www.smartinsights.com/
Does dropshipping needs marketing automation?
The answer is yes. Marketing automation is not limited to companies with huge budgets or endless customer lists. It can have a powerful impact on businesses of all scales, especially small businesses struggling with time and resources. Therefore, how can marketing automation benefit dropshipping businesses?
Good marketing automation tools can help you identify your target audience and automatically trigger marketing actions based on your schedule and customer behavior. In this way, you can focus more on other high-level tasks and adjust your automated marketing strategy based on the results. It can save your time and resources to focus on growing your business while increasing conversion and revenue.
As a retailer or marketer, you have to learn more about your leads. Marketing automation can help you do this. With marketing automation, you can identify, track and better understand every lead and their needs by interacting with content, messages, advertisements, and emails. And you can develop wise strategies to cultivate potential customers into loyal customers by providing what they need.
You can make leads scoring to understand when they need more follow-up, which can help optimize your marketing campaign to communicate with potential customers who are most likely to make a purchase. You can also customize personalized follow-up based on the observed customer behaviors, and convert different potential customers with the best marketing strategies. Making more sales is possible.
Marketing automation does not do marketing for you but expands your revenue based on your resources and efforts. You need to have some preparations before investing in marketing automation.
• Have a stable and high-quality potential customer base.
• Know the touchpoints and channels where your leads are active.
• Have a content strategy for your leads with different behaviors.
• Know your workflow clearly and have a feasible strategy or plan for lead nurturing.
• Know clearly which of your marketing tasks and processes need to be automated.
• Have a budget for marketing automation.
Simply put, you should know what you have and what you need, and choose the right tool to fill your needs, instead of blindly investing. When you have these clearly in your mind, marketing automation could work perfectly for your business.
Marketing automation tools are software or platforms that automate marketing actions or tasks, streamline marketing workflows, and measure the outcomes of marketing campaigns. These platforms provide automated features in many aspects of marketing, including email, social media, lead generation, digital advertising, etc.
The following are the 9 best marketing automation tools with different features.
SEO Booster is an all-in-one Shopify SEO app which has all the SEO features you want to optimize your Shopify website, then improve its presence on Google. It has both basic and advanced SEO functions, suitable for all users, from SEO novices to professionals. The interface is friendly, clear and the support team is 24/7 available. SEO Booster is absolutely the most worth-considering SEO solution for every Shopify merchant.
Pricing: 7-day free trial. It has a FREE forever plan, a Pro plan ($39/mon), an Unlimited plan ($79/mon), and an annual plan for each is available. Each plan is tailored with your business’s size and the way it develops.
AVADA is an excellent all-in-one marketing automation platform that is specialized for small and midsize e-commerce businesses. It integrates with Shopify and Magento 2, and it has comprehensive features including email automation, SMS automation and SMS newsletters, smart segmentation, reports, and pop-up forms collection. AVADA is definitely the best choice for small dropshipping businesses.
Pricing: 14-day free trial. It has plans for free, pro ($9+/mon), advanced ($49+/mon), and enterprise (custom pricing). The pricing is based on the number of contacts and features.
Keap is an all-in-one marketing automation software with 20 years of experience and over 200k+ users. It has hundreds of integrations includes BigCommerce and WordPress, etc. It can save your time by automating every repetitive task like sending email, text messaging, lead capturing, following up, client management, payments, and so much. And its customizable CRM can help you optimize your customer experience. It is a perfect software for small business owners.
Pricing: It has a 14-day free trial. The lite plan starts at $56/mon and is for new businesses. The pro plan starts at $119/mon and is for growing businesses. The max plan starts at $140/mon and is for established businesses and their teams. The pricing is based on the number of contacts, features, and users. All plans include access to a small business growth coach and unlimited emails.
Sendinblue is a diversified marketing automation platform that can help you optimize the customer journey from the whole marketing process. From communication to personalization to conversion, it contains everything you need to create powerful and engaging campaigns. The most exciting thing is that it is designed for SMBs, and the pricing plans are friendly.
Pricing: It has four plans for free, lite ($25+/mon), premium ($65+/mon), and enterprise (custom pricing). All plans come with unlimited contact storage. The pricing is based on email volume and the number of features.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a complete inbound marketing tool to convert more right audience into customers. It is different from other marketing automation tools because it focuses on content marketing and search marketing, attracts visitors through blogs, social media, ads, etc. It is powerful for SEO, ads tracking & management, social media management, live chat, etc. For inbound marketing automation, HubSpot is worth a try for small businesses.
Pricing: It has three plans for starter, professional, and enterprise. The pricing ranges from $45 to $3200+ based on the number of marketing contacts and features.
Constant Contact is a smart email marketing automation platform that offers everything you need to turn leads into contacts into loyal customers. From exquisite email creation to powerful list-building, from trigger email to contact segmentation, it has them all to make your customers maintain engaging and converting. In addition, you can check the email marketing results in real-time. It is also a tool for Facebook ads creation and social media management.
Pricing: It has two plans. The basic plan starts at $25/mon with a maximum of 5 users, and the plus plan starts at $45/mon with unlimited users. The pricing is based on the number of contacts.
AdRoll is one of the best-known digital advertising automation tools. It has the power to retarget customers through re-engagement wherever they go online, on whatever device. You can easily create campaigns that include video, display, email, and native cross multi-channels. And AdRoll will make sure that your campaigns are executed by reaching the right people and getting the best placements online.
Pricing: The starter plan is free with 5,000 emails to send per month. The growth plan has a 30-day free trial, and after that, it starts at $25/mon with 20,000 emails to send per month. The ad-on pricing is based on the number of emails you need.
Buffer is a social media content planning and scheduling tool that allows you to easily plan, collaborate, and publish thumb-stopping content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand. It has an analytic tool to measure social media performance, create reports, and get recommendations to grow engagement & sales. And the new landing page building tool can help you showcase the best of your brands. Buffer is definitely the best helper for social media marketing.
Pricing: It has a free plan for free but only can manage up to three social channels. The essential plan offers a 14-day free trial. After that, it is $6/mon/channel with unlimited channels. The team pack add-on plan is double the price of the essential plan.
PushOwl is a Shopify app with push notifications that can convert one-time visitors into loyal customers. It can send your promotions straight to your customers’ screens to improve visibility, and remind visitors about items left in their carts. In this way, it is more intuitive and more efficient than email notification. In addition, PushOwl provides campaign reports to help you analyze how your campaigns are performing. It is a simple but powerful tool for Shopify store owners.
Pricing: It has a forever free basic plan with 500 impressions per month. The cost of business plans with 10,000 to 30,000 impressions per month ranges from $19 to $57 per month. The enterprise plan is for custom impressions over 30,000/mon.
As an online retailer, whether you are at the stage of exploring, growing, or scaling, you’ll need marketing. Marketing automation can help you implement your marketing strategy, acquire, nurture, and convert leads in a more efficient way, and increase your sales and revenue with smarter strategies. The start of marketing automation could become the turning point of your dropshipping business to a higher level.
With the right marketing automation tools at the right time, you can get twice the result with half the effort. Just try out some of the best marketing automation tools with free trials, and you’ll find value in it.
It only takes a few minutes
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