Is This The Easiest, Cheapest, Most Effective Marketing Tactic?

It’s a familiar feeling for retailers: you’ve got a stack of marketing ideas on the back burner, you’re waiting until you have a spare couple of hours or days, but more important or urgent things just keep coming up.

Retailers are busy. So any campaign that takes too much time or has a learning curve (real or perceived) just keeps getting pushed down the list.

Marketing automation is often one of those ‘too hard’ tactics that can seem overly complicated, technical or overwhelming.

However, of all the more technical marketing tactics, automation is possibly the easiest to set up, and delivers pretty eye-watering results for the little time it asks of you. It’s also cost-effective and highly targeted—driving revenue with little effort and almost zero maintenance.

In this article:

• What is retail marketing automation?
• Why retailers should invest in marketing automation
• Top 3 automations for retailers
• Getting started: FAQs
• The verdict

What is retail marketing automation?

Retail marketing automation is the use of software to automate simple, repetitive marketing tasks for retailers, such as sending out emails or SMS campaigns. It usually refers to personalised responses to customer actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter.

A robot works at a computer sending out marketing emails. Image generated by DALL-E.

Using product data, customer details, customer behaviour and more, your marketing messages can be highly relevant and targeted. All this ensures you’re giving customers a customer experience that feels as though it’s been crafted just for them.

If you’re using any kind of software to manage your customer experience, you’re probably already doing automated marketing without even realising it.

Why retailers should invest in marketing automation

Automation is an antidote to poor database engagement and low email or SMS open and click rates. 

With automated marketing, you’re responding directly to an action or data point specific to that particular customer. It helps you strike while the iron is hot. This ensures you’re giving customers a customer experience that feels as though it’s been crafted just for them.

We’re all consumers ourselves, so we know it can be frustrating receiving dozens of promotional emails a day that just aren’t relevant or interesting. But who doesn’t love getting ‘Happy Birthday’ offers and discounts?

While ‘marketing automation’ sounds like something reserved for big-box retailers with deep pockets, it is actually surprisingly easy to set up for any business, big or small. 

It doesn’t need to be expensive, over-engineered or complicated. It can look, feel and sound like your brand. And you can invest as much or as little time in it as you want—the simplest automations can be set up in a few clicks. That’s right, it doesn’t have to wait until you’ve got time off after the busy holiday period, when you’re burnt out and just want to relax.

Top 3 automations for retailers

Here is a list of three retail marketing automations you can set up quickly to start generating a stream of consistent, predictable revenue.

1. Happy Birthday offers

This is one of the most popular automations with our Advanced Marketing retailers.

You can set this up in any way you like. You could send an email or SMS with a voucher, like a free shipping code or a discount, for example. Our Bralette Club automatically gifts their customers 100 loyalty points on their birthday, encouraging them to participate in their loyalty program and get shopping to earn more.

How Our Bralette Club’s automation works:

1. On the customer’s birthday, a trigger adds 100 points to their loyalty account.
2. An email is triggered, notifying them of their updated points balance. Then customers can use their points to claim rewards.

2. Welcome new customers

Start with a great first impression, introduce your brand and encourage first-time visitors to come back again.

When customers sign up to your marketing list, join your loyalty program, or make their first purchase, give them immediate value with a thank you gift. With Lightspeed Advanced Marketing, you can set up an automated welcome email with your choice of rewards. 

Pro tip: Add product recommendations and exclusive offers to your Welcome email to incentivise a repeat purchase.

3. Bring back idle customers

“We miss you!”

Send an incentive to customers if they haven’t shopped in a while. This gives customers a friendly nudge to come back to your store and get a freebie or discount on their next purchase. 

Lightspeed Advanced Marketing customer Our Bralette Club activated an automated win-back campaign offering a 15% discount across everything in their store. This campaign generated over $4,000 within 4 months. 

How it works:

1. A trigger fires when a customer hasn’t made a purchase in-store or online within a certain time period.
2. An automated email goes out with an offer as an incentive to come back and shop again.

Pro tip: To further drive conversions, Our Bralette Club included personalised product recommendations—making it a difficult offer to resist! 

Getting started: FAQs

What kind of data do I need?

Connect your point-of-sale and ecommerce store to your marketing automation software (you can do this seamlessly with Advanced Marketing). This will pull in all the data you need to trigger automated emails and SMS messages: SKU, customer purchase data, recency of last purchase, total amount spent, etc. With Advanced Marketing, you can build up your customer profiles beyond this too: include their birthdates, loyalty program points balance and more.

What is a “trigger” and how does it work?

A “trigger” is criteria or parameters you set that, when met, activate the automation. This could be a customer action (a sign up or purchase) or it could be something else (the date is equal to a customer’s birthdate).

Can I track sales from automations both online and in-store?

Provided your automation software connects to both Lightspeed POS and your ecommerce store, you can track sales that come from your automations no matter where they occur.

The verdict

Marketing automation punches above its weight in ROI. You pay a subscription cost for the software, connect your POS and ecommerce store, set up your automations (which in most cases are pre-built for you), then simply track and optimise them for sales. 

It’s cost-effective compared to other more labour-intensive and expensive marketing tactics, and it reaches people at those golden moments where purchase intent is comparatively high.

Want to try it?

Lightspeed Advanced Marketing for Marketing Automation

Lightspeed Advanced Marketing makes it easy to set up automations. Start with a library of tried-and-true automated email and SMS flows for retail, and watch the sales roll in. Looking for more advanced functionality? Lightspeed Advanced Marketing makes that easy, too. Build custom automations based on your own defined triggers for even more personalised, targeted marketing.

• Segment audiences using pre-built groupings, or generate lists with custom criteria
• Easily build attractive and purposeful emails with a simple drag-and-drop builder
• Choose from a range of proven email and SMS automations in the Automations Library, or build your own custom sequences
• Report on the success of your automations and see their direct impact on revenue

Sign up for Lightspeed Advanced Marketing for free here.