Ecommerce marketing automation
Benefits of ecommerce marketing
Ecommerce marketing strategies

Cross-channel automations

What is ecommerce marketing automation?

Ecommerce marketing automation is software that makes it easier for marketing teams to perform the repetitive tasks involved in deploying marketing messages. The goal of automation is to connect with potential customers and enhance existing customer relationships at scale by triggering actions associated with rules marketing teams set up ahead of time.

For example, ecommerce businesses use marketing automation for:

• Customer segmentation
• Automated communication on channels like email, text messaging, mobile push, and WhatsApp
• AI-powered personalization, like product recommendations

You might use marketing automation to send an automated message to a customer who abandons their shopping cart, using AI-powered dynamic content blocks to display a customer testimonial for the exact product they abandoned. If they don’t engage with the email, you might send them an automated text a few hours later, enticing them to complete their purchase with a special discount.

A customer relationship management platform (CRM) plays an important role in ecommerce marketing automation by unifying purchase history, engagement data, and behavioral insights across channels, empowering you to deliver more personalized and timely messages.

When your marketing automation technology is embedded in your CRM, you can build richer customer profiles, improve segmentation accuracy, and create more relevant customer journeys.

4 benefits of ecommerce marketing automation

Ecommerce marketing automation facilitates the connection between your brand and your customer, at scale. Here are 4 outcomes you can expect to see if your marketing automation strategy is serving your brand as it should:

1. More—and better—customer data

It’s no longer enough to reach people on one marketing channel. Customer behavior on one channel may look wildly different on another, and the data you have on those potential customers needs to keep up so your brand can respond quickly.

“Consumer preferences and lifestyles change frequently,” points out Ted Hirschey, global head of strategic partnerships at Jebbit. “It’s important to always find ways to ensure the information you know about consumers is accurate.”

The best way to do this, Hirschey says, is to make your marketing automations “more experiential vs. transactional.” “Engage consumers with fun interactions like interactive style guides, monthly style challenges, personality quizzes to inform products or content they should consider, and more,” he suggests.

“The value is that these experiences can help validate whether or not the data you have is still accurate,” Hirschey adds. “If it’s not, replace the outdated information. For any new information collected, brands now have a more enriched consumer profile with valuable data that can be used to inform new automations.”

2. Higher ROI and cost savings

Anecdotally, brands like Titan Fitness saved 75 hours of dev time on email alone when they switched to an automated solution. “You can do the same things in Klaviyo and our prior ESP, but it’s going to take you 5x as long and cost you 5x as much money in the old email solution,” says Brandon Maskell, director of digital strategy and analytics at Titan Fitness.

Quantitatively, ecommerce marketing automation leads to higher ROI. According to Klaviyo’s latest marketing benchmarks, while one-time email and SMS campaigns often get the glory, automated flows (like abandoned cart or post-purchase messages) generate up to 30x more RPR than campaigns because they’re so timely and targeted.

3. Faster sales cycles

“The purchasing journey is significantly more fragmented today than it was 10 years ago. People’s lives are simply busier,” explains Tabish Bhimani, principal strategist at Mastrat. “Because consumers are more distracted, it’s an advantage to use various channels to help remind them of the product they need when searching for a solution to a problem.”

It takes, on average, 6 separate touchpoints for someone to purchase a product. The fastest way to transform separate touchpoints into relevant messages is through ecommerce marketing automation—specifically:

• Zero- and first-party data: This type of data is data you collect ethically—in other words, with the knowledge, permission, and explicit consent of your prospects and customers. Marketing automation not only helps collect this data through tools like sign-up forms, quizzes, and engagement tracking, but also responds to data in real time by sending messages based on customer behaviors.
• Audience segmentation: With zero- and first-party data as a foundation, marketing automation tools segment audiences based on everything from their purchase intent to their VIP status, so your team is in a better position to send them relevant campaigns.
• Personalized outreach at scale: When you know what your customers are doing, you can automate outreach that’s relevant to those real-time behaviors.

4. Better customer experience

The power of ecommerce marketing automation lies in its information-gathering abilities. What you learn about your customers through automation transfers over to their experience with your brand, which helps your brand fulfill the promises it made during the sales process.

Ecommerce automation improves the customer experience through:

• Order and service notices: Automated transactional notifications keep customers informed about order status and product updates, which improves transparency.
• Instant customer service responses: AI customer agents can triage surface-level customer inquiries and give immediate answers to common questions, which can easily improve customer satisfaction.
• Feedback collection: Automation makes it easier to collect more customer feedback through review requests and post-purchase or post-support surveys. Great brands fold this feedback into their product development, which in turn creates more satisfied customers.

7 components of a smart ecommerce marketing automation strategy

Your ecommerce marketing automation strategy is deeply intertwined with your omnichannel marketing strategy, which focuses on creating a consistent brand and customer experience across multiple online and offline channels. Automation is what makes this strategy scalable.

Your approach to ecommerce marketing automation will overlap significantly with your overall marketing strategy, except here, you’ll focus on defining the parts of your omnichannel strategy that are good candidates for automation.

Here are 7 marketing automation components that will make sure you get the most out of your strategy:

1. Unified data foundation

A unified data foundation is the backbone of any effective ecommerce marketing automation strategy. For most B2C brands, data lives across multiple systems—ecommerce platforms, loyalty programs, review tools, customer service software, and more. Without integration, marketers are left piecing together fragmented and outdated views of their customers, leading to generic campaigns and inconsistent customer experiences.

A unified data foundation solves this by centralizing all customer information into a single source of truth. When your ecommerce platform, marketing channels (like email, SMS, and mobile push), and customer touchpoints (like reviews, shipping, point of sale, and customer service) are connected through a B2C CRM, every interaction gets smarter. Your automation tools can react to real-time signals, like a new purchase or support interaction, and deliver timely, relevant messages that build trust and loyalty.

The impact goes beyond efficiency. Gartner estimates that poor data quality and disconnected systems cost businesses more than $12 million per year. With unified data, teams spend less time exporting and reconciling spreadsheets and more time crafting meaningful customer experiences. The result: consistent, personalized, and scalable marketing that drives both revenue and retention.

When Dollar Shave Club consolidated their fragmented systems into a single B2C CRM, they reduced total cost of ownership by over 30% and campaign set-up time by more than 60%. Unified data gave them the flexibility to automate complex customer journeys without heavy developer support, turning customer insight into action faster than ever before.

2. Dynamic audience segmentation

“You have so much customer information at your fingertips, and so many merchants are skipping out on an opportunity to do something meaningful with that,” says Jen Brennan, director of digital marketing at Northern. “They take a very broad paintbrush to segmentation, and there are better ways to do it.”

Whereas brands used to blast their entire subscriber list with the same messages or approach segmentation manually, today’s most effective marketing automation strategies use dynamic audience segmentation, where segments expand and shrink based on real-time data on your customers.

Your audience segmentation strategy will evolve as you discover more about:

• Who your customers are: where they’re located, their lifestyles, their basic needs, their price sensitivities, etc.
• How your customers buy: online behavioral precursors to engagement and purchase intent

The best marketing teams segment their lists based on behavioral triggers, such as:

• Website visitors: getting down to the product description page level
• Campaign engagers: people who open and click on certain messages over others
• Buyers: to increase average spend and repeat purchases
• App activity: to engage with your “stickiest” users

Ecommerce marketing automation makes this sorting process easy by removing the manual work of separating contacts within your subscriber lists across email, SMS, mobile push, and WhatsApp. In turn, it makes it easier to personalize your campaigns and flows for different groups of people.

3. Automated messaging across channels

Cross-channel automation keeps your brand connected with customers at every stage of their journey, from first interaction to long-term loyalty. Instead of managing separate automations for email, text, mobile push, and WhatsApp, a unified automation strategy uses behavioral triggers to create timely messages across channels, meeting each customer where they’re most likely to engage.

These automations not only drive conversions, but also reinforce a consistent, personalized experience that builds trust and advocacy over time. We’ll get into a few of these in greater detail later, but here are some of the most powerful lifecycle automations for ecommerce:

• Welcome flow: Regardless of channel, the first post-sign-up interaction sets expectations and tone. Replace a simple “thanks for subscribing” with a multi-step welcome sequence that introduces your brand, highlights top categories, and offers a first-purchase incentive.
• Browse abandonment flow: When a shopper views products but doesn’t buy, trigger a message that reignites interest, showing related items, customer reviews, or low-stock alerts via their preferred channel.
• Abandoned cart flow: Remind customers of what they left behind with coordinated follow-ups across email, SMS, or push. Use urgency cues like expiring discounts or limited stock, and personalize content based on what’s in their cart.
• Post-purchase flow: Thank customers immediately and nurture the relationship with educational content, product care tips, or recommendations for complementary items to encourage repeat purchases.
• Review request flow: A few days after delivery, automatically request feedback or reviews while the experience is still fresh. These moments generate authentic testimonials and user-generated content that drive social proof.
• Loyalty and reward flow: Celebrate loyal customers automatically by sending updates when they unlock new rewards, reach new tiers, or gain early access to exclusive sales or launches.
• Win-back flow: Reach out to customers who haven’t purchased in a while with messages tailored to their past activity or preferences, reminding them why they loved your brand in the first place.

4. Cross-channel orchestration 

Your customers don’t experience your brand through a single channel. They move fluidly between email, SMS, social media, mobile apps, and your website.

In ecommerce marketing automation, cross-channel orchestration is how you make sure every message across those touchpoints works together as part of one connected experience. Instead of running isolated campaigns in each channel, you can use automation to coordinate timing, content, and delivery based on a unified view of the customer.

An effective cross-channel orchestration strategy allows you to:

• Plan and automate messaging across channels: Build and launch coordinated sequences that include multiple touchpoints—like an email announcement, a text reminder, and a push notification—triggered by the same action or event, from one place.
• Keep messaging consistent: When a new promotion or product drops, update all channels simultaneously so that customers always see the right message and never encounter outdated or conflicting offers.
• Respect customer preferences: Use AI to automatically deliver messages through the channel each customer is most likely to engage with next, whether that’s email, text, push, or WhatsApp.
• Adapt content by format: Tailor messaging to each channel’s context. Try an engaging story in email, a short reminder in SMS, or a quick visual in push, while maintaining a consistent tone and brand identity.
• Capture data everywhere: Every interaction across channels feeds back into a shared data foundation, creating a unified customer profile that informs future segmentation and personalization.

5. AI content creation and marketing optimization

AI has transformed marketing automation from rule-based workflows into dynamic, self-optimizing systems that learn from every interaction. Instead of relying on guesswork or manual testing, AI analyzes customer behavior, predicts future actions, and personalizes messaging at scale, so your campaigns and flows continuously improve over time.

AI can enhance nearly every stage of ecommerce marketing automation. Here are just a few examples:

• Campaign and asset creation: AI can instantly generate marketing strategies, campaign ideas, and creative assets for product launches or seasonal promotions, helping teams move faster and stay consistent with brand voice.
• Predictive analytics: Machine learning models can anticipate future behaviors like next purchase date, churn risk, or lifetime value (LTV), allowing you to trigger replenishment reminders, re-engagement flows, or exclusive offers before customers even realize they need them.
• Message optimization: AI can test subject lines, creative elements, and send times automatically, ensuring every message reaches each customer at the moment and in the format most likely to drive engagement.
• Performance insights: By continuously learning from your data, AI can highlight what’s working and suggest improvements, so your team spends less time analyzing reports and more time developing strategy.
• Real-time customer support: Integrated AI agents can answer questions, recommend products, and guide customers through their shopping experience, bridging the gap between marketing and service.

6. Customer service automation

The lines between marketing and support have blurred. Every conversation, return, and question is part of the overall customer experience, and each one offers an opportunity to build trust, loyalty, and retention.

A smart customer service automation strategy connects 3 key components which feed back into the marketing-service loop that makes up a strong customer experience:

• Self-service through a customer hub: Empower customers to help themselves with access to order tracking, returns, FAQs, and account details in one place. A self-service hub reduces support ticket volume and provides customers with immediate answers, while capturing valuable behavioral data that can inform future marketing and personalization efforts.
• Conversational support through AI: AI customer agents can do more than just provide instant, personalized responses to customer questions about orders or store policies. They can also turn service into a revenue driver by recommending complementary items, answering questions about products, and guiding customers toward the next best action. Because they draw on your full customer dataset, these interactions feel tailored rather than transactional.
• An AI-powered helpdesk for your team: Behind the scenes, a connected helpdesk consolidates messages from every channel into a single view. This empowers your support team to see full customer context with every conversation, including marketing history, order data, and recent activity, so they can resolve issues faster and deliver a consistent brand experience.

When these systems are embedded in a CRM, customer service becomes a two-way loop that feeds directly into your marketing automation. Support data, like satisfaction scores, returns, and conversation outcomes, can trigger tailored follow-ups, segment updates, or campaign pauses, while marketing data like past purchases and reviews can inform support conversations so customers never have to repeat themselves.

7. Reporting and metrics

Effective marketing automation doesn’t stop at sending campaigns. It depends on measuring what truly drives growth. And for ecommerce brands, success isn’t just about opens and clicks. It’s about understanding which messages, channels, and customer segments lead to repeat purchases, higher LTV, and long-term loyalty.

A connected CRM plays a central role in all of this. By unifying data from your ecommerce, marketing, and customer service systems, your CRM provides a single source of truth for reporting and analytics. It empowers you to tie marketing performance directly to customer behavior, revealing who your most valuable customers are, what keeps them coming back, and how to engage them more effectively.

Here are just a few examples of what you can achieve with a strong reporting and metrics framework powered by a CRM:

• Go beyond surface-level engagement. Track LTV, repeat purchase rates, and retention alongside traditional metrics like open and click rates to see how marketing impacts real business performance.
• Test and optimize continuously. Use A/B testing to refine subject lines, calls to action, and timing. Small iterations, tested one variable at a time, compound into significant gains in engagement and revenue.
• Measure attribution accurately. Adopt multi-touch attribution models that reflect the full customer journey across email, SMS, and other channels, helping you identify which interactions are truly driving conversions.
• Analyze customer sentiment. Monitor reviews, ratings, and response rates to gauge customer satisfaction and feed those insights back into product development and messaging.
• Benchmark against peers. Compare performance with similar brands to uncover opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

5 cross-channel marketing automations to set up right now

1. Welcome series

Your welcome series is the first interaction your brand has with someone, most commonly after they sign up for email, SMS, push notifications, or WhatsApp marketing.

Welcome flow emails are the second-highest converting flow overall, and the top 10% convert 5x as many people as the average, according to the latest Klaviyo benchmarks.

The 4 most common types of welcome series are:

1. Brand story: Your goal here is to share your mission and values to build trust.
2. Thank you: Your goal here is to show appreciation to create future goodwill.
3. Conversion: Your goal here is to encourage action to convert new subscribers to new customers.
4. Getting started: Your goal here is to familiarize subscribers with your products to show how your brand adds value.

This example from cereal brand Magic Spoon hits all 4 categories. They express their brand story with bright colors and an offer of appreciation: “A free bowl & spoon, just for you!” To snag a conversion, they offer the free bowl and spoon when you sign up for a subscription.

Photo: ReallyGoodEmails

2. Abandoned cart emails

An abandoned cart flow re-engages shoppers who add products to their online cart but leave the site without purchasing them.

About 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute. And according to Klaviyo’s latest marketing benchmarks, abandoned cart emails drive the highest RPR and average placed order rate of all flows. In other words, if you’re not sending abandoned cart messages that educate people and nudge them to buy, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. 

And remember: abandoned cart automations don’t need to hit your abandoners on the head with discounts right away to be effective. Wedding ring brand Manly Bands, for example, automates a two-part strategy to their abandoned cart flow. They start with an automated email that has no purchase CTA. Instead, it’s a one-question survey that asks: Why didn’t you want to buy?

Customers who respond get a personalized follow-up with a coupon. In January 2023, the placed order rate for this flow was 4.8x the median for Manly Bands’ peer group, according to Klaviyo benchmarks.

If you’d rather be more straightforward, Morgan Mulloy, director of retention marketing at Avex Designs, says the best abandoned cart messages highlight customer support options. Abandoned cart messages are “a great place to list out return policies, shipping estimates, and channels for assistance,” she suggests.

Hair care brand Only Curls exemplifies a customer support strategy with their cart abandonment email. It works because it’s more like an email you would get from a personal contact than a brand.

Source: Only Curls

3. Win-back flows

The harsh reality is that not all your brilliant integrated marketing campaigns are going to capture revenue from every person who receives them. But there’s a solution for that: a win-back flow.

A win-back flow targets people who haven’t bought from your store or opened your communications in a long time to motivate them to interact with your business again.

“A long time” is different for every business. You might have long sales cycles because your products are expensive, for example. But a contact is generally considered “inactive” if they haven’t interacted with your brand in any way in 3–6 months.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should wait a long time to plan your win-back strategy and content. “Start planning your win-back series earlier than you think you need to,” advises Cory Smith, director of lifecycle marketing at Bamboo. “If you wait too long, it makes recouping your customers that much harder. Don’t be afraid to try to coax people back earlier than seems necessary.”

AI-powered predictive analytics can make win-back flows even smarter. By using models that forecast churn risk or predict when a customer is likely to lapse, you can trigger re-engagement messages proactively, before someone tunes out completely.

Rather than targeting everyone after months of inactivity, you can specifically identify high-value customers who are at risk of churning, for example, and personalize your outreach based on their past behaviors.

Win-back flows use trial and error to see what will re-engage people, but if you include one thing, make it social proof. This example from cereal brand Surreal uses a customer testimonial to pique interest among the disengaged parts of their list.

Source: ReallyGoodEmails 

With a little scarcity—“Seriously, these are moving fast”—the brand may be able to sell a few boxes to people who otherwise would have been cleaned off their list for the sake of email deliverability.

4. Transactional messages

Transactional messages are sent to one person to confirm a transaction, communicate important information, or deliver a specific notification about something like shipping.

Transactional messages have high open rates because they contain essential information. According to the latest Klaviyo benchmarks, post-purchase email flows (which include but are not limited to transactional messages) earn the highest average open rates of any email automation at 59.7%.

An automated transactional message may be:

• Order confirmation: This message confirms the details of a customer’s purchase, including the order number, the products they purchased, billing information, and shipping details.
• Shipping and tracking notification: This message keeps the customer informed about shipping timelines and includes tracking information to help the customer monitor the progress of their package.
• Delivery confirmation: This message confirms successful delivery of the package, which is crucial for reporting lost items.
• Account basics: Common examples include messages like password reset requests, account update notifications, or renewal reminders. 

Note: Just because these messages are transactional doesn’t mean they need to be boring, or that they can’t reinforce the customer relationship in some way. This example from Wildfang contains some nice touches customers appreciate, like which items they saved money on with a discount code. The total amount of savings is the last little piece of flair that makes the customer feel special.

Image source: Wildfang

5. VIP and loyalty rewards programs

A loyalty program is a customer retention marketing strategy that uses rewards like discounts, early access to new products, or exclusive access to additional products or brand features to encourage new customers and existing customers alike to continue buying from a brand.

So how do you automate a customer loyalty program? It starts with integrations with your CRM. “To build a successful customer loyalty program, you need to ensure that your technology stack is integrated, and your loyalty data is being successfully passed from one platform to another,” says Fiona Stevens, head of marketing at LoyaltyLion.

What this means is that your customer data and your loyalty program are talking to each other, and they’re reacting to the online purchasing behavior of your customer.

This doesn’t need to be complicated. “Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t need to,” says Tabish Bhimani, principal strategist at Mastrat Digital. “Focus on actions and standards customers are familiar with and build on that.”

Bhimani recommends using data about each customer’s points, tier level, and VIP status, and then echoing that back to them in every campaign and abandoned cart message.

Bokksu, for example, automates their points program through simplicity. When someone creates an account in their system, the system begins assigning point values to each profile based on the actions they take. With a loyalty program integration, the program almost runs itself—and LTV increases with almost no extra legwork.

Image source: Really Good Emails

Ecommerce marketing automation is something you can build on over time

Ecommerce marketing automation starts with a strong B2C CRM foundation. By unifying customer data across every channel, you can automate personalized journeys that respond to real behavior in real time. 

As your strategy matures, AI helps you predict what customers need next, while shared insights across marketing, service, and analytics keep every message relevant and consistent. With a connected CRM and marketing automation platform, your brand can scale smarter, turning data into relationships, and relationships into lasting growth.