27.11.18

For most of us, the festive season brings Christmas songs, longer, sun-filled days and the anticipation of gifts under the tree. For retailers, it also brings Black Friday, Christmas sales, longer, work-filled days of pick and pack, reporting and a never ending inbox of customer service emails to respond to. Typically, Christmas is the busiest time of year for our merchants who only have a few days of respite to enjoy the festive period before they’re back in the office.

So what do all retailers really want for Christmas? Time.

As a Digital Partner to some of Australia’s largest online retailers, we decided to assume the role of Santa Claus for one day to give our merchants a glass of Pimm’s, some lunch and some practical advice about how to create more time for themselves in their marketing plan.

So, how do you actually create time? Automation.

There are a lot of companies in the industry promising automated solutions and time-saving products but investing that time up front to find the right solution, when you’re already time-poor, isn’t always feasible.

We firmly believe in the power of automation. We also believe in the power of personalisation. We know your customers want to speak to a human if they have a question or a concern and no technology will ever replace that touch point which continues to be the main driver of engagement.

What we can do with automation, is replace all the manual effort which goes up to that human touch point. You don’t need a member of staff to email your customers their tracking numbers. You don’t need a member of staff spending hours managing your inventory. You certainly don’t need someone manually uploading  your social media posts. These are just the small things which automation can help with.

When you start to look at the bigger picture, automation can manage your entire customer lifecycle for you. It can also run marketing campaigns for you by predicting what your customers will engage with the most. For Shopify Plus merchants, your MSM can help you get set up with Messenger Chatbots to field those popular Q&As to relive pressure on your customer service team over the Christmas Period.

One of the things which we are most passionate about as an agency is innovation. By harnessing the power of technology, we can automate your most manual processes and give you that time back to use on more strategic tasks. By understanding and interpreting larger pieces of your business such as your ERP, we can create automation to sync your orders, customer data and inventory between your eCommerce Platform and physical retail stores.

Creating these automated processes to handle the tasks which drag you down will free up your team to innovate and create new strategies and ideas to drive more customer engagement and sales into your business.