How to Put Your Ecommerce Sales on Autopilot

When you’re growing an ecommerce business, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the operations and overhead, from packing slips to customer service. But when you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner, you need less on your to-do list & more mental bandwidth to innovate & strategize your way to success.

Fortunately, there are ways to automate various aspects of your ecommerce business, from inventory to shipping. Here’s a look at where to start & how to do less while earning more. 

Switch to POD to Eliminate Inventory & Shipping

Managing inventory, product production, packing, & shipping can take up hours of your day. Instead of focusing on the busy work, you can switch to POD & get back to the areas you love, whether that’s designing or marketing. 

CustomCat supercharges your online store with dozens of products to choose from. Upload your designs & apply them to our hoodies, athleisure wear, mugs, art canvases, pillows, & more. Grab one of our easy integrations for our online store, & we’ll do the rest. When someone buys your product, we get busy fulfilling & shipping it out with a white label reflecting your online store. You can sell more while getting more time back in your day.

Get started with CustomCat now.

Offer Digital Downloads

If you want to expand your offerings without increasing your physical inventory, you can look to digital downloads. Selling through platforms like Shopify or Etsy enables automated tools to sell downloadable:

• Wrapping paper
• Stationery
• Invitations
• Pages for planners
• Graphics
• Artwork
• Photographs
• Ebooks
• Any downloadable creative assets

The best part about digital downloads is the ability to create it once & sell it repeatedly without the need for restocking. Customers can access their purchases instantly without you needing to spend any time sending out their details manually & answer calls & emails. 

Design a Winning Drip Campaign that Converts

When done correctly, automated email campaigns, or drip campaigns, can supercharge your sales on autopilot. The goal is to nurture your leads & convert them into paying customers by sending out secret promo codes, flash sales, & VIP access. 

You can create and schedule email sequences in advance & target specific customers. For example, segment all of your buyers who love quirky, seasonal designs for like-minded sales during Black Monday & Cyber Monday or throughout the year. You can set these emails on autopilot without needing to do any work except ensure it’s running & check your results.

It’s also wise to set up a drip campaign for first-time customers to entice them to come back & buy again. Remember, you won’t make a sale from every email, but the goal is to keep nurturing those customers & establish a longstanding relationship.

Create a Rock Solid DIY FAQ Guide

Creating a well-written, information-packed FAQ can eliminate the need to spend hours on customer service & help convert potential buyers. Studies show that 70% of website users expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. In other words, people want to find the answers they need–when they need them.

Get started by looking through your emails to determine which questions customers ask the most often. Here are a few examples:

• What is your return policy?
• Where’s my order?
• Can I change my order? 
• What materials are your shirts made from?

Make the FAQs short & sweet, & easy to understand. Include your email, online chat function, or other resources so customers can find exactly what they need.

Automate Your Social Media

Social media keeps your audience engaged & updated on your products & sales, but consistency is vital. Instead of winging it & trying to pull together your posts across multiple platforms, automate the process instead. Tools like Buffer & Planoly make it easy to schedule months’ worth of social media posts in advance, including images & a CTA.

You should still plan to set aside a little time to respond to comments or throw a few emojis up to foster engagement. The goal is to streamline social media while eliminating the engagement component that helps nurture customer relationships.

Leverage Abandoned Cart Apps

Abandoned carts are a goldmine for increasing your sales on autopilot. Use apps like PushOwl Recover Abandoned Cart or Pushdaddy WhatsApp & Live Chat to design a simple web push campaign. You’ll also get plenty of opportunities to track performance to better understand customer behavior.

When someone abandons their online shopping cart, it triggers an auto reminder for customers to complete their order or sweeten the deal with a limited-time discount code. You end up rescuing lost revenue & scoring new customers in the process.  

Cross Sell & Upsell to Drive More Sales

Cross-selling & up-selling similar & like-minded products give customers more of what they want while increasing your sales. You can bundle products together or recommend relevant products during checkout for last-minute impulse buys that entice customers to add more to their carts.

The results are impressive. Studies show that 10% to 30% of most e-commerce revenue is generated through Upsells. It also gives you more insights into the type of products & designs your customers really want.

Zap Repetitive Tasks

If you realize you’re working on the same tasks over & over again, you can find a Zap for that. Zapier works across 5,000 apps to help with everything from marketing to ecommerce, which the company claims could save an average of four hours a week.

Zapier uses “zaps” to create triggers from events you specify. If you turn to Trello for project management tasks, you could create a Zap to create new cards from every Shopify order. 

There are all kinds of tools you can use to help automate and run your ecommerce business. Get the round–up here.

Know When to Step Into Your Online Business

Automation is key to alleviating time & stress in your ecommerce business. But at some point, you need to step into your business & own the process. Optimize & refine everything you can while working diligently to grow & guide your business. Focus on slashing the busy work while leaving more room to strategize & shatter your revenue goals. 

 

What are your favorite ways to put your ecommerce sales on autopilot? Let us know by leaving a comment below!