The best marketing software for ecommerce allows marketers to manage multi-channel campaigns from a single dashboard. Using the right tools and strategies will help you nurture leads, increase sales and improve your customer life-time value.
Ecommerce is undeniably an ever-evolving industry. If you’ve been involved in the game for any substantial amount of time, you know that things can change dramatically quickly. In the world of Ecommerce marketing, things are no different.
This article will go through some of the best marketing automation software for small to midsized ecommerce businesses. While there are many ecommerce platforms and plugins, this post focuses on marketing software that can help you automate your online store, help generate more sales through email, and receive data and insights about the performance of your campaigns.
If you have an eCommerce store, your marketing toolkit can be the difference between ranking on Google and falling flat. We reviewed the best marketing software for eCommerce solutions so you can decide which one fits your business needs.
What can eCommerce marketing automation platforms do?
According to Marcus Taylor at VentureHarbour, “At a fundamental level, marketing automation is about optimization. From optimizing your staff’s time, to optimizing which customers your sales team focuses their effort on, the scope of marketing automation goes way beyond simply automating your marketing department’s repetitive tasks.”
In a nutshell, a marketing automation tool is a piece of software that allows you to automate a lot of the functions that marketers are used to doing manually: sending emails, scoring and nurturing leads, posting to social media – and much more. The definition is as long as the proverbial piece of string.
Dotdigital (formerly Dotmailer)
Since 1999, this marketing automation platform has built its services around email, the number-one performing digital marketing tactic. More than 70,000 customers in 150-plus countries use Dotdigital to build automated email programs that follow the full length of a customer’s journey.
- Pricing – Packages run from $150 per month to $600 per month with a 20% discount for nonprofits and charities.
- Ease of use – Dotdigital is one of the simplest as well as the most powerful platforms on the market. It’s a great place to start for growing businesses that are familiar with Email Service Providers like MailChimp and who now want to take the next step.
- Features – Training, Campaign Management, Creative Studio, Strategic Services, and Custom Integrations. Integration with Yieldify.
- Best for – Email marketing professionals who need an all-in-one package with powerful capacity in a drag-and-drop template.
Oracle Bronto
Focused on high-growth eCommerce retailers all around the globe, Oracle Bronto provides email services that can integrate with all commerce platforms. Bronto also gives users the capacity to deliver responsive social and mobile media campaigns with an emphasis on cart abandonment recovery. The platform includes an array of powerful apps beyond core functionality.
- Pricing – Free demo. Quote-based plan.
- Ease of use – Capterra users gave Bronto 4 out of 5 stars for ease of use.
- Features – Drag-and-Drop Automation, Post-Purchase Campaigns, Cart Abandonment Reminders, VIP and Loyalty Programs, Precise Segmentation. Integration with Yieldify.
- Best for – eCommerce retailers who need an ultra-powerful marketing automation platform with an intuitive interface.
Sender
Sender is a rising star. This tool provides a full range of features to help lead to effective email marketing. Sender is most suitable to send newsletters, automated follow-ups, or triggered emails and transactional emails.
- Pricing – Free Forever plan up to 2500 contacts and 15 000 emails/month. The paid version starts from $10/month for all premium features and supports 24/7.
- Ease of use – Rated as a TOP3 user-friendly email marketing tool by Capterra.
- Features – Drag&drop design-builder, Advanced subscribers and campaigns management, Drip automation (with triggers for abandonment carts, birthdays and etc.), Pop-ups, and forms builder.
- Best for – Smaller businesses looking for a user-friendly tools with all premium features, high deliverability for the best price in the market.
Google Analytics
This is the most common tool used by businesses. It helps to better understand your customers. The insights you can gain from Analytics will help you evaluate how your market, content, products, campaigns and more are performing.
It’ll guide you to where your investments are failing so you can take action. Google Analytics for eCommerce business also shows you how many people were on your website and how many followed through with a purchase. This can help you make better strategies, product pages and more.
Kissmetrics
This tool helps you understand your customers and their behavior. It answers common analytical questions like your most-engaged users, best-performing products and the customer leaving rates. This, in turn, will allow you to invest in better marketing campaigns so you can get new customers and keep the old ones.
Elementor
Used by more than 6% of all the world’s websites, Elementor is a powerful WordPress website.
Boasting a powerful WooCommerce builder, Elementor is the weapon of choice for those looking to create WordPress-based online stores without having to write a single line of code.
What sets Elementor apart is the slew of marketing-oriented features it offers web designers and individual users.
With Elementor, you can arrange for visitors to be met with marketing and promotional material at strategic moments.
Leveraging Elementor’s powerful popup form builder, you can capture new leads and expand your potential customer database. You can also integrate with an almost infinite number of 3rd party platforms, including CRMs and other sales enablement solutions.
Klaviyo – Best integration reporting and segmentation email marketing software
Klaviyo prides itself on its integrations, reporting, and customer segmentation. According to the developers of this software, it “helps growth-focused brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook, and Instagram marketing.”
Pros
- Easy to use and intuitive drag-and-drop functionality
- Analytics tools to monitor campaign effectiveness
- Excellent segmentation and customization capabilities
Cons
- More expensive compared to others on this list
- Lack of extensive email design features
Omnisend – Best ecommerce email marketing software for beginners
Omnisend easily integrates with powerful ecommerce software and offers features such as automation, segmentation that provides adequate data for targeting specific users for a campaign, active subscriber growth with pop-up forms, channel selection, and reporting.
Pros
- Cheaper when compared to tools like MailChimp and Klaviyo
- Easy automation set up
- Provides follow-up campaigns and newsletter campaigns
Cons
- Minimal templates to select from
- Lack of flexibility in customization
- Lacking in reporting capabilities
MailChimp – The best all-in-one eCommerce email marketing software
MailChimp delivers features that have come to define the email marketing software space. These features include segmentation, CRM, behavioral targeting, customer journey, marketing automation, transactional/trigger-based email, reports, A/B testing, surveys, and recommendations.
Pros
- Great free plan that has a CRM
- Comes with a broad range of tools, including geo-tracking
- Excellent integrations, including Google Analytics
Cons
- High subscription fees
- Automation capabilities lacking compared to other options
- Steep learning curve for the interface and navigation
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign’s pricing makes it an attractive option, with good value for money spanning across a number of features. Its feature set is more focused on acquisition than conversion, so marketers looking for landing pages will be disappointed.
- Pricing – starts from $17/month, rising depending on the feature set and the number of contacts.
- Ease of use – A simple platform with a wide variety of self-learning guides and courses makes this an ideal option for those happy to work their own way through it – more substantive services have to come from a partner agency.
- Features – Email Marketing, Site and Event Tracking, Contact and Lead Scoring, SMS Messaging.
- Best for – Smaller businesses looking for a good entry-level solution.
Google Docs
This very famous editing and collaborative platform help you write content on the go and keep track of it. Businesses can use it to write content together, or share for editing and publication with ease. It also allows you to change formatting, track changes, and add images.
You can access Docs from anywhere. All your ideas and documents are stored in a cloud. With a simple login from your email ID, you can seamlessly write and edit from wherever you are. All you need is a stable internet connection- but you can even get Docs to sync new additions offline!
Grammarly
This marketing tool for an eCommerce business is the best way to get content to proofread so it’s clean and understandable. You can set contexts for writing too. This means that the tool will analyze your content differently based on the context- business, academic, casual, and more.
You can add it to Chrome as an extension so it works on Google Doc. As a business, you can buy a premium subscription for unlimited checks! The free trial is excellent to see how the tool works.
Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool website with features to access photographs and fonts. It includes templates for design presentations. Also includes templates for various social media formats. Pictures can be edited with filters, stickers, icons, shapes, and fonts.
Canva is not only easy to use but is available for free. To join, just sign up with an email id. The website has a blog to learn the basics. Businesses can use Canva for fun info-graphics. These are great to share on blogs and other social media platforms.
Slack
It is a website where discussions about projects, announcements, and projects can be shared among the users. The users can communicate in channels, organized by a team or project. Conversations, chat rooms, and files can be searched and information about other users can also be learned.
Slack is a free tool, where the user can sign up and join pre-existing organizations or create their own workspace. Slack is also one of the best customer experience tools for eCommerce business.
HubSpot
One of the most-recognized names in marketing automation tools, HubSpot offers a full stack of sales, marketing, and CRM tool dedicated to business growth (we also use it here at Yieldify). Its products integrate online and social media marketing activities, including email, SEO, contacts, and analytics.
- Pricing – Prices range from free to $2,400 a month.
- Ease of use – Good, and improving regularly with recently-added features such as drag-and-drop email builders.
- Features – Calls-to-Action, Progressive Profiling, A/B Testing Landing Pages, Segmentation, SEO Recommendations, Blog Analytics, Integrated Social Publishing.
- Best for – Marketers who need a powerful, all-in-one tool for segmentation, contact management, push-button social media control, and report creation. Hubspot’s weakness is that it’s not really built for eCommerce, but this is changing with features such as a native Shopify integration and ability to connect a custom store.
What is eCommerce marketing automation and how can it benefit my team?
For a marketing or eCommerce business, eCommerce marketing automation’s benefits include reduced staff costs, improved accountability, and more consistent marketing of creative – instead of repetitive – content.
There are three things that every piece of eCommerce marketing automation software needs to have:
- A database – you’re going to be triggering activities depending on what your contacts do, so you need all of that data captured and stored.
- A way to orchestrate actions – simply put, ‘workflows’. This is the core of what we mean by ‘automation’.
- A way to create eCommerce reports – the point of the tool is to become more effective, so you’ll need to be able to see whether or not you’re getting it right.
Conclusion
It has been estimated that almost 70% of the people on Earth now have access to Internet. Sales in ecommerce are growing at a rapid rate. If you run an ecommerce business, you should be looking to grow your sales both in volume and in profits.
Ecommerce marketing software is about providing the best options for marketplaces and engineers for ecommerce store. Marketing automation software allows us to send emails on a large scale and automate marketing activities within our e-stores.