The ultimate retail marketing automation checklist

Learn all about retail marketing automation, use cases, best practices and tools that are built to ensure your campaigns succeed.

Content Marketing Associate

Monika Karlović

Content Marketing Associate

Why do retailers need marketing automation?

You invest loads of time, money, and effort into ensuring your retail marketing campaigns reach your desired goals. Adding automation into the mix will help you amplify marketing efforts and enable real-time engagement with behavior-based triggers – allowing your brand to interact with your customers at the perfect time.

Automate retail marketing tasks

Retail marketing automation helps you make marketing campaigns more efficient by allowing you to automate a wide range of tasks and use cases. Here is a list of the most popular instances of automation for retail marketing:

Benefits of automating retail marketing campaigns

Increase lifetime value

Actively engage customers at every stage of the customer journey with personalized and relevant interactions to increase lifetime value. 

Form lasting connections

Make customers feel valued through customized and timely engagement across all channels and touchpoints. 

Boost loyalty

Nudge customers to continue shopping and send loyalty offers automatically rather than waiting for them to re-engage with your brand. 

Automate customer journey

Increase efficiency by setting automatic triggers that drive marketing teams’ productivity and optimize the entire customer journey. 

The retail marketing automation checklist

Welcome new users

Start off your customer’s journey with a welcome message and boost engagement by:

  • Thanking your customer
  • Personalizing the content based on their signup data  
  • Including a clear CTA
  • Adding a failover channel  
  • Segmenting the campaign based purchases  
  • A/B testing recently viewed items versus best-sellers to see what converts  

Improve cart recovery rates

  • Remind them they have something left in their cart  
  • Assure you’re holding it for them – albeit for a limited time 
  • Showcase the items they abandoned with images and links to the basket  
  • Include recommendations based on what has recently been added  
  • Setup a trigger that halts the reminder if they made a purchase  
  • Incorporate push notifications if you have an app 

44%

average open rate for cart abandonment emails

30%

average click-through-rate from email to abandoned cart

18%

average conversion rate for cart abandonment emails

Promote recently viewed items

Send automated and personalized messages based on browsing behaviors:

  • Thank them for viewing the web shop
  • Offer additional assistance or an incentive to complete a purchase  
  • Use product images and offer recommendations
  • Include a link to the items viewed
  • Set a trigger to halt messaging when they add the item to their basket or make a purchase

Send delivery campaigns

Keep engagement going post-purchase with an automated delivery campaign:

  • Ensure you leave enough time following a purchase to the time of delivery  
  • Be contextual and remind them what they bought  
  • Set up triggers for transactional notifications, delivery updates, and review requests  
  • Thank your customer 
  • Segment customers based on lifecycle stage 

Send repurchase reminders

Create new sales opportunities with repurchase reminders:

  • Include an image of the product and link to purchase  
  • Offer a gift or incentive for repeat purchase  
  • Segment communication based on customers lifecycle stage  
  • Include upsell recommendations 

Re-engage dormant customers

Re-engage customers and boost sales with automated messaging:

  • Remind them about the benefits of shopping with you  
  • Segment based on customers’ past lifetime value to offer personalized incentives
  • Include recommendations based on past behavior
  • Add a failover channel  
  • A/B test newest products versus personalized recommendations to monitor conversions 

Automate loyalty campaigns

Ensure customers feel important with personalized loyalty messages:

  • Thank them for being a loyal customer 
  • Personalize the offer according to their habits  
  • Recommend products with AI-based product recommendation
  • Segment your loyal customers based on tiers
  • Add a failover channel

Set up special occasion campaigns

Send your customers special offers on their most important dates or milestones:

  • Trigger the communication based on a specific date on their People CDP profile  
  • Personalize content based on lifecycle stage and past behavior  
  • Include product recommendations and a gift according to membership status, past behavior and interests 

Boost conversions and ROI with marketing automation best practices

Now that you are familiar with which aspects of retail marketing you can automate, and have a checklist to guide you through campaign planning, dive into marketing automation tactics that help drive better results.  

Transform campaigns with a retail marketing platform

Create personalized retail marketing campaigns with automation, segmentation, and precise targeting.

Omnichannel customer engagement solution

Automate your marketing campaigns, set up message flows, take advantage of send time optimization and more on Moments. With a drag-and-drop interface, you can build and optimize personalized campaigns with ease.  

Customer data platform

Retail marketing automation starts with relevant and unified data. Collect insights and data on customers based on their behaviors to set up triggers and personalize campaigns with People CDP.

Start automating retail marketing campaigns today

Sep 15th, 2020
6 min read
Content Marketing Associate

Monika Karlović

Content Marketing Associate