Best Inventory Management Automation Use Cases
Inventory management is an indispensable part of every retail store. A small mistake within the process can cause disruption to the whole value chain. Yet the inventory accuracy rate within the US is only 63%, which is simply disappointing. Consequently, a lot of store owners have deployed inventory management automation to get rid of human error and save time for more powerful investment. In this blog, we’ve listed 4 ways that automation software has made inventory management more cost-effective and time-efficient. 1. Auto-publish product You don’t have to update new products all the time. However, it is not easy during the holiday season when everything needs to be aboard at midnight, or when you’re operating in another region with a completely different timezone. This would be eliminated with inventory management automation. All you need to do is update the product information on your store and determine the date and time you want it to be published. The app will then take care of the rest and you’ll be free from this tedious task. We recommend using Atom8 – BigCommerce’s top automation platform, to deploy your eCommerce automation workflows. Atom8 has no-code automation, so any store owner can easily eliminate redundant tasks with a simple workflow like this. More: 2. Send notification in case of low stock Your inventory stock changes every time an order is placed. This is why it is so daunting to keep track of every item at a time. If you are unaware of out-of-stock products, you’ll risk dissatisfying your customers and lose your revenue. With inventory management automation, you can tell the system to send your staff a push notification when the stock inventory reaches a certain threshold. This way, you’ll have enough time to reorder while still serving the best of your customers. Especially with BackOrder, your customers can preorder the product and have it delivered right after it is restocked instead of having to wait for the fulfillment first. 3. Auto-tag orders & customers There are 2 reasons why customer segmentation is so important to your business success Therefore, you should always tag and categorize orders right after it is placed. Set up a workflow to tag your customers based on their location, gender, age, order size, and purchase life cycle. This enables you to take special care of each segment and nurture them better. 4. Auto-generate data to a spreadsheet Simply segmenting customers on your CRM doesn’t make so much change without analyzing it. You need to feed your data into a spreadsheet so that you have a better look at it. Thanks to Google Sheets integration, Atom8 can automatically cover all these time-consuming tasks on a pre-scheduled basis, saving you a lot of time and effort. Final note In general, you should never ignore your inventory. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that you might be extremely busy during this turbulent time. Therefore, an inventory management automation system would be an easy way out for you. No more fuzzling with manual inventory counting, you’ll have more time to accelerate your performance.
Holiday Marketing Ideas For Maximum Impacts
People spend trillions of dollars each year on the holiday season. Therefore, a failure to push the gas on your holiday marketing ideas would halt your business development. Your holiday marketing campaign should be placed everywhere, from emails, social media posts, and blog content. It also needs to cash-in on that purchasing behavior around specific holiday seasons. That way, you can get to the top of your customer’s minds when they’re thinking about making a purchase. In this article, we introduced 7 strategies to help you master the next holiday season. 1. Create a holiday calendar The most popular holidays are Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and New Year. However, it’s not only winter events that you can stimulate your marketing activities around. Other holidays that possess great opportunities to boost your sales include: Valentine’s Day Easter Thanksgiving Mother’s and Father’s Day The 4th of July Back to School or College Halloween Yet building up a new marketing campaign might take up to 12 weeks. That’s why it’s always helpful to have a calendar marking all the holidays you are celebrating at the beginning of the year. This way, you won’t risk being so occupied with other tasks that you huddle over the holiday assets just one week before. 2. Segment your customer before starting Customer segmentation is a significant factor for every successful campaign. Each customer has different demands when it comes to holiday shopping. A smart customer segmentation strategy enhances your understanding of customers’ behaviors, hence better prepare personalized promotional campaigns for each segment. Moreover, the holiday dates vary across regions. Launching a Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November in Canada would be a terrible idea for they’ve celebrated it more than a month ago. You can segment your audience based on: 3. Create holiday-themed landing pages and distinctive holiday content Hundreds of retailers join the game every day during the holiday sales season. The challenge is to distinguish yourself from others. One of the effective holiday marketing ideas is to build a distinctive landing page so that your customers can find the wanted product with the least difficulties. This should be done at least a month before the sales season. Otherwise, you’ll be flooded with tons of work and have no time to optimize your pages. Here are what a festive holiday landing page can do to your business: Introduce you holiday hot-sales items and special deals Take SEO advantage when people search for holiday, sale, deals, offers, coupon, discount, and other related keywords Incorporate special popup for personalized gifts or offers 4. Make a creative holiday video Video is always a notable way to catch people’s attention, especially when it is catchy enough. That’s why businesses always try to come up with a creative idea tailored to the holiday season, to name but a few: T.K.MAX The Lil’ Goat campaign for Christmas, Hyundai’s #BreakonStereotypes campaign or Star Sports’ #CheckoutmyGame campaign for International Women’s day, etc. The key is to show your customers how interesting and trustable your business is. Share it using your social media channels, post it on your “About” page, attach it in your signature so that as many people see it as possible. The goal is to get your video viral on digital platforms. By targeting the customers’ emotions, you can accelerate their trust in your business and open the way to a higher conversion rate and revenue. 5. Run social media giveaway 3.5 billion people are active on social media these days and there’s no signal of slowing down. A social campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms would help gain more and more eyes on your business. Furthermore, people like free stuff, especially during holiday seasons. Something completely free, a free add-on with an order, or just a big discount can foster the holiday spirit of giving in your store. Ask your followers to comment, share, like and tag their friends so that you gain even more engagement on your giveaway. 6. Use automation When it comes to holiday marketing ideas, don’t get down in the weeds doing things manually. The more you can automate your holiday campaigns, the more time you’ll have to double-down on what’s working as you go. Therefore, it’s a good idea to integrate your store with an automation platform. The app will streamline your process from inventory management to delivery. All you need to do is preparing the necessary materials and it will take care of the rest. For example, you create a holiday-themed landing page a week before Christmas and the app will automatically publish it at midnight, without the owner having to stay up late to do it. This saves you a lot of time and resources to spend on more meaningful activities. CONCLUSION As you can see, holiday marketing ideas can be anything from a simple thread of tweets, right the way through to a full-scale TV advertisement. The most important thing is that the planning of your holiday campaigns shouldn’t start the night before the big date. It takes time to plan out your ideas, design the creatives, and get sign-off. It sounds like a lot of work for one small period but remembers: the holiday seasons are some of the biggest times for spending. Make sure you take advantage whilst you can.
