Update BigCommerce Order with HTTP Request
Atom8’s latest feature, HTTP Request, is a powerful tool for store owners to create workflow using BigCommerce API. This example workflow using HTTP Request updates incoming orders with accurate customer information, even when they are not logged in. Even if your customers have been logged out or forgot to re-login to their account before purchasing, BigCommerce store owners can now accurately track and update their orders to the correct customer using Atom8. In this example, our workflow uses an HTTP Request action to get the Order Email from BigCommerce API. The action is triggered everytime an order is placed, regardless if customers are logged in to your site or not. This action also checks to see if the newly entered email has already existing in your pre-exisiting customer email list. If the workflow detects a match for the new email and an existing customer email, you can then set another HTTP action to update your order with the customer’s existing information. Update any order with HTTP Request can drastically increase your order management accuracy. Here are two seperate orders made using the same email. While one is registered as a guest purchase, the other order was made while this HTTP Request workflow was activated. The order made while Atom8 workflow was active has the correct customer’s name, email, and other attributes. Using HTTP Request, Atom8’s automation capabilities are now greatly expanded. You can check BigCommerce’s API documentations to see what’s possible with Atom8’s HTTP feature. Or, you can contact us for a free product demo session anytime.
How to Create a Workflow Template
In the previous article, we’ve discussed 6 steps to create an efficient automation workflow. Yet before having a workflow run across your store, you need to visualize the workflow you want to automate in the form of a diagram. This is called the workflow template. A workflow template lists the involved steps on the lines. Each step consists of an event, triggered by event conditions or a delay and a response. Why do you need a workflow template? There are 2 reasons why this is essential to your work: Your team should all agree on what will be handled by automation and what manually. You should use standardized symbols and terminologies so that your staff can understand it coherently. Ask them to give feedback on the original version to optimize the process It prevents you from getting confused while designing the workflow in your automation app. This is because the template makes clear which step takes place before others and what the expected result should be. An example of a workflow template would be: How to create a workflow template? 1. Identify the starting and endpoint Whatever happens within the process, make sure you know what is the kick-off stage and what your expected outcome is. 2. Gather information Speak to your people at different departments to ensure your workflow is as accurate as possible. Outline what activities are involved in each step, signify who is in charge as well as the potential bottlenecks and improvements coming along with it. 3. Remove all inefficiencies Categorize your information into ‘must-have’, ‘nice-to-have’, and ‘not necessary’. Then, reflect back to your goal and decide if this specific task is meaningful for achieving the outcome. If not, consider optimizing, or just simply removing it. 4. Test the results Something can always go out of control. After having your template, build a workflow accordingly and run it. Keep an eye on the activation and be ready to fix any error that arose along the way. Create your own workflow template In fact, it doesn’t take too much time to create a workflow. You don’t need a professional tool, either. Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides would be good enough as well as the visual is clear. You can also find a template that can be immediately applied to any automation platform in our library. Once you’ve activated your workflow, review your process monthly or yearly to improve as you go. If you are on BigCommerce or Shopify, wonderful! Be sure to check out our automation platform Atom8!
5 Online Merchandising Strategies to Increase Sales
Good online merchandising strategies help store owners take control of how visitors perceive your brand and shop on your website. The more attractive your merchandising, the higher chance of driving brand engagement & awareness. Merchandising can both increase the average order value (AOV) from your customers and inspire customers to return in the future, two of the main ways businesses see growth in revenue. From best-selling to collection-based products, homepage layout to category pages, photography to social proof, eCommerce merchandising is an indispensable part of any online store. Seemingly insignificant nuances of your online merchandising strategies can be a game-changer in the fierce eCommerce competition. What should you take into consideration? Here is a list of 5 online merchandising strategies you can implement today. 1. A mobile-friendly layout Mobile eCommerce purchase is expected to grow by $3.56 trillion by 2021, making up for 52% of online traffic. The shift to omnichannel urges eCommerce retailers to adapt their merchandising strategies to ensure a seamless experience for their customers across devices. Companies with a mobile app have an absolute advantage in the omnichannel world. If you don’t have one, make sure that your website is responsive and optimized for mobile and tablets alongside desktops and laptops. Besides pleasing your current customers, a mobile-friendly layout helps attract news customers by boosting your search ranking for portable devices. 2. Easy search and navigation In order to make a purchase decision, customers should be able to find a product. If it takes so long for them to find the desired item, people would be worn out and turn to your competitor. There are multiple ways to make your website more user-friendly such as: Place a visible search box so that visitors can look for the right product without going through every page. Incorporate every product with an appropriate category tag such as coats & jackets, tops, dresses, jeans, knitwear, etc. Bring new offers and best-selling products to the top of your product page Change the photos within your hero slider frequently Photographs are a powerful tool to attract customers. Therefore, remember to take good care of your theme and visualization. 3. Personalized recommendations Recommendation technology, grounded in data, is getting more advanced these days. Smart product recommendations are tailored to each individual in real-time. Over time, personalization has made it more perfect. Personalized online merchandising can increase AOV, accelerate upsell & cross-sell while helping customers find what they need. Products are displayed automatically based on user activity, preferences, and current sales trends. This data can be gathered using cookies, session recording apps, and heatmap plugins as well as analytics tools like Google Analytics. You can also use targeted Google and Facebook ads to navigate customers to a specific page designed distinctively for them. If you are on BigCommerce, don’t miss out on the Product Recommendation app. It can assist you in upselling and cross-selling with flexible rules. Discover more features here: 4. Highlight user-generated content These days, approximately 70% of customers consider user-generated content (UGC) before making a decision. UGC can help you raise brand awareness and gain trust for free. Don’t miss out on any chance to showcase compliments from your previous customers. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great platforms to foster user engagement. You can consider repost user-generated pictures and stories as a part of your online merchandising strategies. You should also link your website with social media accounts and review platforms to boost SEO ranking. 5. Use merchandising automation Software as a Service (SaaS), specifically automation platform, is extraordinarily beneficial for small and medium businesses in monitoring their store at the minimal operational cost. You should update every product at the right time in the right place. However, keeping an eye on merchandising all the time can be tedious and fatiguing. That’s why automation software is essential for your business. The app can help you arrange product listing dynamically (based on the number of views or purchases, ratings, comments, etc), feature promoted products, manipulate product availability (purchasable, pre-order), dynamically publish & switch banner ads, and many more. For example, you can set up the following workflow for Christmas eve. Condition: Having your product and design ready in the store Trigger: At 12am Christmas day Action: Auto-publish Christmas special offer Delay: Then wait for 2 days until the holiday ends Action: Auto-unpublish the offer Then there’s no need to stay up until midnight to update the item manually anymore. If you’re opening a store on BigCommerce, Atom8 is a great ultimate automation tool that helps your business achieve significant growth! Explore here: Atom8 automates all your repetitive store management tasks to save hours of working. CONCLUSION The key to effective online merchandising is to present the product in front of your customer at the right time. It’s not easy but you can drive sales by a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, latest technology, and up-to-date online merchandising strategies. In the end, gift your customers with a desirable shopping experience and they’d definitely come back to you.
5 Must-Know Workflow Automation Examples to Increase Productivity
Companies everywhere are embracing automation technology to transform their tedious manual tasks into streamlined procedures that are executed when needed. This is because eCommerce workflow automation has been extremely effective for businesses of all sizes. Its benefits include reduced operational cost, increased productivity, limited human error, and time-saving. Automated workflows are in fact a chain of If-then order: If the customer places an order, assign them to this group If the remaining stock reaches a certain number, send an alert to staff about the out-of-stock item Each company has different business goals, thereby has different ways of utilizing eCommerce workflow automation. However, there are 5 must-know examples of workflow automation that every business should take into account if you want to bring your productivity to another level. 1. Customer segmentation based on location Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing your audience into subgroups based on particular criteria. For example, a customer who purchases more than 10 times on your store can be considered a loyal customer and should be treated with special promotion programs. Having clear and coherent workflow automation of customer segmentation helps minimize human error and possess more accurate categorization. It also allows for tailored campaigns with a personal target. If you’re operating in more than one location, it is imperative to segment your customer relative to their shipping address. This type of information will help you understand their needs and deliver area-specific ads. It is also useful when targeting a broad area as it enables you to customize the message according to regional differences in languages, norms, interests, the amount of money they’re willing to spend, etc. TRIGGER: When an order is created CONDITION: If the billing address includes New York ACTION: Tag this customer as “New York customer” 2. Sending a welcome letter A welcome email is the first mutual interaction a customer has with your brand after showing interest in your product. With the customer’s information attached in the letter, the open rate can reach 84.22%, without providing any irrelevant information other than a confirmation of their subscription. The email should be sent out immediately after the visitor submits a signup form for your newsletter. Usually, retailers use an automated workflow that integrates your store with email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Klaviyo to make sure they don’t miss out on any chance to say thank you and generate a good impression. CONDITION: When a new customer is created TRIGGER: If they complete signing up for the subscription form ACTION: Then tag the customer as “new customer” and send a welcome letter via MailChimp DELAY: Wait for 30 days Action: Then untag this customer as “new customer” 3. Abandoned cart reminder The global figure for abandoned shopping carts was almost 70% in 2020. People may leave your store without completing an order for multiple reasons such as complicated payment processes, low loading speed, unsatisfied choice, etc. While it is highly crucial that you fix all the technical issues in the first place, a good abandoned cart program will keep the customer engaged and save a decent amount of order. A reminder email should be sent approximately one hour after the visitor leaves your site. You can also identify if this is an existing customer or a first comer to your website to tailor information accordingly. Examples of eCommerce workflow automation to remind of abandoned cart should be: CONDITION: When an order is fulfilled TRIGGER: If the payment status is pending DELAY: Wait for 1 hour ACTION: Then send the customer a reminder 4. Automatically publish a product Holidays and other special occasion is always great opportunity to boost your revenue. The American household spending during the Christmas holiday season 2019 peaked at $1,496. All of those purchases totaled more than $1.1 trillion, deemed as one of the biggest shopping periods ever recorded It is likely that you’ll have to update your special offer for holidays and notify your customers about it. Though highly potential, it is frustrating having to pay attention to launching every item at a time. To get rid of this, you can set up workflow automation that publishes products when the day comes and unpublish them once the holiday season is over. You can save time using similar workflow automation examples on any occasion other than just holiday seasons. CONDITION: When a new product is created in the store DELAY: Wait for 24 hours (for the holiday to start) ACTION: Publish the product DELAY: Wait for 2 days (for the holiday to end) ACTION: Unpublish the product 5. Low stock alert One of the worst scenarios of being a merchant is being unable to provide the customer with the desired products. You might risk not only losing tons of orders but also long-term consequences. Customers will turn to another store and continue choosing it if they have a satisfying experience. To save yourself from encountering this issue, you can set up an automated workflow as examples below that sends your team a notification when the stock reaches a certain level. This way, you have time to reorder items in time. Some advanced applications even manage to deliver a notification letter to the customer when the stock is refilled. CONDITION: When there is a product update TRIGGER: If the total inventory is less than or equal than 10 ACTION: Then send an email to internal staff warning about a low-stock item As a retailer, you have a lot of competition. The more choices customers have, the more likely they are to leave you if the shopping experience is not up to their expectations. To seize your position in the market, you must get your business process to run smoothly. That’s why workflow automation is something you can’t afford to miss. Apart from these 5 must-know workflow automation examples, there are many others you can use to reduce tedious manual tasks. The key is to take time to evaluate your business and figure out which repetitive tasks need altering for better productivity.
How to Increase Engagement with Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is one of the most commonly-used and effective marketing channels these days. For every $1 spend, you can expect a return on investment of up to $51. This would be an ideal ROI for small businesses knowing that every dollar spent on marketing effort is worth it. At a time when there are 293 billion emails sent daily, email marketing automation is needed your optimize your performance. With automation tools, you can reach out to the right people at the right moment without doing the work every time. Interestingly, even though 58% of marketers regard increasing the customer engagement rate as the top goal when running email campaigns, 46% see it as the #1 challenge. In this case, a proper email strategy would help achieve the extraordinary results of this channel. In this post, we’ll guide you through 4 ways that automated email campaigns can enhance your results. 1. Personalise your email By personalizing your email, we mean using customer data to personalize your message. This will prevent the impression that you’re sending out an automatic campaign without considering its relevance to the receivers. For example, you can start the email with “Dear Laura” instead of “Dear customer”. Or “You might like these (based on customer on-site behavior)” instead of “You might like these (randomly generated)”. This way it can help your business generate a $20 return on every $1 spend. What is more intriguing is that email whose subject lines are personalized with customers’ name often increases the open rate by 16%. Given that 47% of the open rate depends on the subject line alone, it is a sure way to get in touch with your customers. Ask for the right information upfront Great personalization starts when the customer fills out the form. Without information such as name, gender, email address, you would be very limited in your personalized communication. Remember to only ask for the information you need. Otherwise, your customers might feel intrusive and hold a negative impression of your brand. Use a real reply-to email address with a real signature A real reply email increases your credibility and keeps your readers engaged with your message. Likewise, a real signature offers a way in which your customer can keep in touch with you if needed. This is highly important to be personal and build a strong relationship with them. Set up a workflow to save time You can always use email marketing automation to sync your online retail store with external tools. Then you can tell the system to automatically assign customers to a group based on their behaviour and send the message accordingly. This integration, which works in multiple cases, would save you a lot of time and resources. 2. Segment your audience before sending When you segment your database, you are more likely to hit the audience who are really interested in your brand. Say you want to hold a discount event for female customers on Women Day. The best way to do this is to separate your female from male customers, segment them based on their location and language and send them an invitation letter. This can be perfectly done by setting up email marketing automation. Automated segmentation helps increase your performance. Specifically, the open rate is witnessed to have accelerated by 39%, whereas for revenue, sales leads, and deliverability, the number is 24%. That’s amazing, isn’t it? But so far only 9 out of 10 markets don’t segment their database. Therefore, mastering this tactic would bring you a competitive advantage in the competition. There are several ways to segment your audience: Location Where is your customer based? Where do they want to have their package delivered? Knowing where your customer locates is powerful data as of finding tune to your targeting effort. Instead of sending an email for all, sending emails to people in the right region would prevent unsubscription and enhance attention. Age Would you send the latest cat meme to a middle-aged lady in the countryside? Likewise, would you send a nineteen-year-old buddy a 60-page long industry report? Some might be interested in it, but segmenting by age would help identify your most suitable audience. Customers who spend more money on your brand are more loyal than others. Use the data about their transaction to keep them engaged by sending them personalized messages and exclusive promotions. Behaviour Do customers visit your website on a daily visit? Do they leave their shopping cart abandoned? If you can get notice of the page they visit and the action they take on your website, you can send targeted emails based on these behaviours. 3. Try out multiple versions of your email Testing your homepage, landing page, and email templates helps you sort out the most practical decision to improve your performance. Email marketing is no different. Most of the marketers have A/B testing in their campaigns, especially with the subject line, message, call to action, and design. Having multiple versions means a lot of work to be done. That’s why you should have an email marketing automation tool ready to assist. Remember, before distributing your A/B testing, you should beware of which metrics you want to examine. For example, if you want to increase the click-through rate, you should consider the image vs no image version or the color of the CTA button. Meanwhile, for the open rate, the subject line and the capitalized words are more important. Apart from these factors, you can also test: Sender address In fact, the sender’s name is one of the reasons making the audience open an email. One way to test your From address is by sending your campaigns from a person’s name, person, and the company or from your CEO. Long vs short emails It depends on you to keep short and sweet or long detailed. While the former includes more detailed copy, shorter emails will send the reader directly to a targeted landing page. Try it out to see which is more
Create & utilize automated workflows on Atom8
The quicker you can set up automated workflows on Atom8, the sooner you can hit the ground & running. So, what is an automated workflow and how to effectively build & apply an effective one? We have all the answers for you hereunder. What is an automated workflow? In its purest, simplest form, Atom8’s automation happens through the automated workflow of Trigger – Condition – Action. And here’s how it works: You are the owner of a groceries store and there is an upcoming sales program. Let’s say you want to offer a 50% discount to each customer who has spent over $500 in their order. The workflow would be: Trigger: WHEN an order is placed by the customer Condition: IF the customer’s order value include tax is greater than $500 Action: THEN segment the customer into “VIP group” AND auto-send a “Thank-you” email with the 50% discount code. Once you’ve finished setting up the workflow, you can sit back and let automation do the hard work. Creating workflows on Atom8 You can decide to do it from scratch, or choose the option where the most heavy lifting is already done for you (from a template). From scratch with step-by-step guidance Customize every aspect of the workflow operation for your unique use case. You’ll need to set up triggers, conditions and follow-up actions to get finished workflows. It’s up to you to decide and organize the flow. However, learning new concepts, coming up with new ideas & creating workflows on your own might not always be easy as it sounds. We feel you! Therefore, we got you covered with the in-app interactive guide – Released in our latest product update. For this guide, you’ll be going through an “educational” tour that talks in detail about each and every step when creating workflows on Atom8. Apply Atom8 to learn more! From a template There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if workflow templates are built for your use case. Atom8 offers 80+ templates in the app’s library. Read more about free pokies more chilli. This can help you start automating more quickly and experiment with workflows of different areas in your business. All you need to do is pick the template, customize the content, texts and options so they fit your case. And, voilà – your workflow is ready to go. Creating workflows on Atom8 Found a template that looks promising for your use case? You can pick it and apply immediately after several simple manipulations. Select any template from Atom8’s workflow template library Preview in the “Workflow” section Once you think this template is right for you after previewing, click “Create workflow from template” Most popular templates Customer segmentation: Merchants can assign customers to specific groups or to add custom attributes to segment customers. For example, in “Segment customers based on order amount” template, based on your specific business case, you can change the amount value and name your own customer groups. Product Management: Merchants can schedule product publications and categorize products automatically. For example, “Categorize products based on inventory level” template is displayed as follows: You can add products that inventory level reaches low-stock threshold to category “Last Chance” to promote on the storefront and remove it when it is out of stock. Campaign management: Helps merchants set up sales campaigns, product release, restock updates in which merchants can schedule product visibility, themes, discounts and more. For example, “Schedule a promotion campaign” template works by setting the time to publish/unpublish category pages and apply discounts on products.
