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The best time of the year is here because the holiday season is near!
You’ll see families and friends gathering, exchanging gifts, and spending time together. While businesses send out holiday emails, special promotions, and exclusive seasonal goods and encourage the joy of giving.
And that’s where the issue comes in. Consumers are constantly bombarded by messages from so many different sources that it becomes increasingly difficult to filter who to buy from. And as a business that wants to stand out, especially during this period, there’s a lot that needs to be done on the marketing side.
Ecommerce tools can make or break the communication between you and your customers. Automated tools are also extremely important during the holiday period when your operations can get pretty messy and complicated.
We spoke to a couple of ecommerce experts to learn what the best holiday sales automation tools are.
Four of the biggest ecommerce automation tools you need
1. Rewind recommended by Velstar
Backing up your Shopify store’s data should be a best practice for any ecommerce store throughout the year, but it’s even more important during the holiday period. In the months leading up to BFCM, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Boxing Day and the New Year, it’s common for brands to make lots of changes to the ecommerce site. This includes the creation of new landing pages and product offers specifically for said event.
With so many variations and new content parts, there’s always a chance that disaster might strike and something will break, resulting in downtime and costing you a lot of sales. Europe’s leading Shopify Plus agency, Velstar recommends backing up your store with the automated daily backup Shopify app, Rewind.
“It provides the reassurance that regardless, you will have full control of your data and can recover your store in seconds. This is why so many brands, including our client AVON use the app to protect their business.” - Charlotte Davies, Internal Marketing Manager at Velstar Limited
2. Gorgias recommended by Velstar
Arguably, the most time-consuming part of managing a successful ecommerce business is the amount of effort put into providing amazing customer service, and it’s no different during the holiday period.
With all the activities happening across the various events, hiccups happen, including late deliveries, damaged products and payment/discount code failures, which can result in plenty of unhappy customers reaching out to your customer service team wanting their questions answered. That’s where automation tools like Gorgias come in.
Gorgias provides a central location for all your customer support communications, such as telephone, email, live chat and social media, so you can answer your customers’ queries quickly on the channels they use the most. It’s also easy to set up automations for repetitive tasks like answering commonly asked questions, which saves your customers and your support team an enormous amount of time. Just see below how our client Santo Remedio uses Gorgias’ live chat functionality to help their customers get the answers they want faster.
3. Shopify Flow recommended by Velstar
If Shopify Plus powers your ecommerce store, then you should use Shopify Flow. This incredible tool allows ecommerce brands to build custom workflows to automate tasks, campaigns, and processes within your business and across the apps.
For example, if you want to only offer checkout discounts during BFCM to a certain group of customers, you can do so with Shopify Flow.
Want to track high-risk orders in a spreadsheet? With Shopify Flow, you can do that too. The list is endless.
These custom workflows can save your business hours (sometimes weeks), tagging, and assigning customers to various segments. This kind of intelligent automotive tool will not only give your customers a better shopping experience but will also improve your business operations, in turn, improve your bottom line.
4. Klaviyo recommended by Blend Commerce
Klaviyo is a cloud-based email and SMS marketing solution for ecommerce businesses that enables ecommerce stores to send out highly targeted campaigns and automation to get their customers ready for the holiday season and to continue nurturing them after. With Klaviyo, you can do much more than create visually stunning email campaigns. You can build an automated robust, holistic marketing ecosystem.
What can it do for marketing?
There are a million options available when it comes to Klaviyo’s email marketing.
Its unique selling point is its ability to cater to each user's specific needs. You have many more options than simply addressing your customers by their names. You can loop emails into full-blown holiday marketing campaigns to improve reach and engagement, and incorporate dynamic blocks like order information, shopping cart content, product suggestions, and more. You can even take it one step further by showing certain parts of an email to customers who meet specific criteria.
Where Klaviyo’s email superpowers become a significant team player in your holiday marketing efforts is in the realm of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This means that Klaviyo gives you the ability to collect customers that spend the holiday season with your brand, and create highly targeted, personalized and automated flows where you can continue to nurture them and take them on a journey that extends far beyond the holiday season.
By consistently reinforcing how much you value your customers through email marketing, you can transform ordinary customers into brand loyalists who repeatedly come back, increasing both revenue and their value to your store.
What about SMS?
When combined with an effective email holiday campaign, a complementary SMS marketing campaign can significantly boost revenue, and Klaviyo makes it easy.
Klaviyo’s SMS campaigns allow you to get in front of customers immediately and move them further down the sales funnel since the vast majority of SMS messages are seen within the first minute after being sent.
What makes Klaviyo great in this regard, is that it provides you with strong tools for SMS marketing to build genuine relationships with your most engaged segments and give them exclusive access to seasonal offers and promotions. You can send consumers information about VIP early access, discounts, or just messages thanking your customers for sticking around for so long.
But remember—SMS doesn’t work as well on its own as it does together with email. An SMS message can only say so much. That’s where email plays an important role, giving you the space to give customers as much information as you want and the most important bits you can reinforce via SMS. Beyond this, it’s a special touch for customers, making them feel valued, telling them what to expect and how they can take advantage of the benefits to which they’re entitled.
Shopify x Klaviyo: A match made in heaven
Klaviyo flawlessly integrates with a wide range of tools and platforms; luckily for you, Shopify is one of them. If you have a Shopify store, you can link it to Klaviyo in a flash. Your customer data will be pulled directly across, where it can then be used to increase sales, provide clients with unique experiences, and build stronger relationships with them.
The flexibility, segmentation, and personalisation offered by Klaviyo elevate Shopify email campaigns to a new level, and that’s why so many merchants have turned to Klaviyo for its enormous benefits. If you’re a merchant, you might wonder what exactly those benefits are.
Brace yourself for
- Klaviyo imports all of your Shopify customers' data. You can use Shopify event triggers to generate email and SMS flows. You can also use this information to optimize further or develop new email segmentations.
- Create audience groups based on the information provided by Shopify. All of the customer data that Shopify has captured is imported into Klaviyo, including average order value, conversion rate, purchase frequency, products purchased, and more. This enables you to categorize your clients with measurable facts and maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
- Because Shopify and Klaviyo work closely together you can be confident that you will get the highest quality customer service while using any of these two platforms.
- You can be fully engaged in the customer lifecycle, from beginning to end
- Klaviyo offers cutting-edge data science and automatically generated predictions
- More than 70 one-click integrations are at your fingertips
- Pre-built flow templates that save you time and make your job easier
What has it done for merchants?
Klaviyo is an excellent choice if you’re looking for email marketing success and the email marketing tool has earned a stellar reputation in transforming brands’ growth rates.
One client who reaped the benefits of using Klaviyo was a subscription CBD brand in the ecommerce Specialty industry. Blend Commerce worked with this brand to create a unique way to capture and convert customers.
With opportunities to increase engagement and revenue across all email marketing using Klaviyo, the brand’s Owned Revenue grew in the month of BFCM from $38.9K in 2020 to $40.9K in 2021. Owned Revenue Percentage also catapulted from 29% in 2020 to 40% in 2021.
These results speak to the magic that is Klaviyo and its ability to take whatever business in whichever industry to an entirely new level when it comes to nurturing customers and increasing revenue—which is exactly why we believe you can’t do without it this holiday season.
Bonus Shopify Plus app recommendation: ReferralCandy
If you’re looking for a tool to boost your customer acquisition and customer retention efforts this holiday season, referral marketing is something you should definitely check out. Since it’s the gift-giving season and sharing is caring, it makes sense to turn your brand loyalists into trusted advocates who will talk about your products naturally through word-of-mouth.
ReferralCandy is a referral marketing software that makes it easy for ecommerce brands to engage their most loyal customers and supercharge their existing word-of-mouth marketing.
Holiday marketing isn’t difficult, especially with some help
The holiday season can get hectic if you’re solely relying on manual processes to get things done. Messy inventory can lead to shipment delays, unhappy customers, and bad reviews—everything an ecommerce business wants to avoid. That’s why adopting ecommerce automation tools as holiday support can be the most vital piece you’re missing out on.
Another thing you can’t do without is ecommerce experts who can help you implement a well-established automation process, revenue-building emails, and SMS campaigns to bring you your most successful holiday sales.
Check out the ecommerce experts that have recommended these automation tools
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Cheryl is a full-time Content Manager at ReferralCandy by day and a "Learnaholic" (aka always learning something new) by night. She loves learning new languages, storytelling, and creating experiences that are functional and visually compelling. She's also always lurking on Twitter so drop by and say hi!
