As an online retailer, there are hundreds of things that you need to do during the day in order for your business to run successfully. Everything from hiring to material sourcing to HR to fulfillment falls under your umbrella. With so many things going on during the day, keeping on track of tasks and making sure nothing slips through the cracks can take up most of your day. Start with learning how to automate your Shopify store!
Thankfully, there are easier ways to run certain parts of your Shopify store and business than trying to manually do menial tasks. You can focus on big picture tasks that need more of your time, like business growth and product testing. And here at Flowify, we can help!
If you choose to automate your Shopify store functionality like marketing and customer service tasks, you can save yourself a lot of valuable time while helping your business run smoother. In this article, we’ll talk about what Shopify automation is and the benefits it can bring to your business, as well as some of the processes that can benefit from automation.
Shopify automation, also known more generally as ecommerce automation, is the utilization of software to help you plan, execute, run different tasks, processes, and campaigns that can help your business grow without manual intervention.
When you first started out, it was probably easy enough to manage things on your own or with a small team. However, as you have grown your retail business, increased your customers, and created more products to sell, the odds are that things have seemed to get out of hand and there’s no capacity to manage certain time-consuming tasks like sending follow-up emails or publishing content to your website.
How can you automate your Shopify store? Automation helps take time-consuming tasks out of your hands and put them in software that will run those parts of the business for you while you spend your time on the tasks that require a hands-on approach.
Benefits of Shopify Store Automation
Ecommerce automation or Shopify automation can bring about many important benefits to your business. As mentioned above, the biggest benefit of automation is the help in removing manual work from repetitive tasks. Think about it: have you had a certain task that’s constantly at the bottom of your to-do list that matters to your business but keeps getting pushed aside for other projects? That’s probably a good example of the type of task that can benefit from automation.
Automation also helps you scale faster by making sure you can avoid falling behind and putting your focus and attention on high-value tasks rather than menial work. Automation also helps you collect better data on your business and create more accurate reports. Because automation runs through software, it has the built-in tools needed to record real-time, detailed data about everything it does.
How to Automate Your Shopify Store Processes
The first step of automation in your shopify store is to use the software that is already available to you. Shopify Flow is a program that Shopify Plus users can use to automate different tasks. That can help you work smarter, not harder in your retail business. There are other tools that will integrate with Shopify if you don’t want to use Shopify Flow, but all automation software tools should help with the following areas of your business:
Marketing
Marketing is often put to the side in order to make sure that other tasks are taken care of during the day, but it’s incredibly important to grow your store. Automation technology can help you create specific marketing campaigns with many steps for advertisements, social media posts, and conversions to help bring in more customers without you needing to do everything manually.
Customer Support
Your customer support is another area that can end up being neglected when you have a busy schedule. Automation can help you automate emails asking for reviews after purchases, answer frequently asked questions through a chatbot or other tool, and send out notifications when an order is being processed, shipped, and arriving at a destination.
Emailing
Sending out emails is an important part of your marketing efforts, but is often one of the first things to get pushed aside. A regular emailing cadence can help you keep in contact with customers, remind them of upcoming deals, and even let them know when they still have things in their carts. Rather than sending out individual emails at random, automation can create email workflows that are centered around certain time or action triggers.
Here at Flowify, we are here to help you find out how to automate your Shopify store and accounting processes. Get in touch with our team to discover available solutions and services with our convenient app!