Streamline your ecommerce: 5 productivity tips for owners and marketers

You are the owner of a relatively small ecommerce business with just a few employees or even doing it all by yourself. Productivity is probably one of your main issues. Nothing happens if you don’t take care of it.

But in order to be competitive, you need certain things done: good promotions in place, emails sent out, ads running effectively…Not to mention making business decisions based on current numbers like adding or dropping a product, ordering inventory, fixing marketing spend, working with influencers and so on.

To stay on top of things and stay sane (I know how it feels!), here’s a list of all the things you can streamline to increase your in-house productivity. Those are things small teams and one-man-shows should not waste time on – here’s how to get it done and focus on more important tasks.

1. Don’t waste time building reports

To make business decisions, you need accurate data. But the competition does not wait for you to pull this or that report from Google Analytics. And you probably don’t have a data guy (a reporting specialist or analyst as they call them at big corporations) to run the report for you. You probably don’t even have an intern, right? 🙂

That’s why you should not choose to work with any tool that requires your time to give you what you pay it for. If an analytics software needs you to create the reports yourself, it’s not worth it. Choose ecommerce analytics that gives you the data right away, in ready reports.

This will enable you to act immediately on what’s happening in your business:

• Fix your marketing spend up or down depending on results.
• Quickly decide which influencers to keep working with based on the revenue they bring you.

Related: How to measure the results from influencer marketing

• Project sales spikes and order inventory on time.
• Accurately plan your cash flow based on historical data.

2. Speed up product management

When you’re starting an ecommerce business and building your brand, product management is important. It creates the image of your ecommerce brand, sends certain signals to your customers and gives you a direction for expansion.

For example, if you’re starting out as a beauty brand, you might launch with one product only (like Native did), try different scent options to find what your customers like. Then, when you find your fit, expand into other categories like body lotion.

Customer feedback is essential here. Streamline your way of getting feedback and make sure you tie it to the products that prompted it. This way, you’ll be able to quickly make decisions which product stays and which one goes to move your brand forward.

Feedback tied to a product in Metrilo

3. Create offers fast

To stay competitive on the market, you should be able to respond to trends and events fast. Forgot it’s Women’s day tomorrow and need to push the ad asap? Your competitor just released a new product and you want to answer with a good promotion?

The easiest way to streamline your marketing is to reuse what has proved working in the past.

Your ecommerce analytics should be able to show you clearly which campaigns/ traffic sources/ types of emails/ referrals/ influencers work for you.

Campaign performance in Metrilo

Take that information and recreate the campaigns – it should take just a few minutes.

One super-fast promotion you can run is a product bundle. It drives average order value up and is not as bad as going into price wars. To run a bundle offer, all you need to do is look at your product performance report and see which products are frequently bought together. Then throw them in an email and voila!

Products frequently bought together in Metrilo

4. Use email automation based on metrics

You probably have abandoned cart emails and welcome series setup and running. But that’s not all email automation has to offer. You can optimize your email marketing efforts with many more campaigns running on autopilot.

You can make an email calendar based on your ecommerce metrics:

• Win-back emails after the average time between orders (TBO) has passed. This automation will be doing active customer retention for you.
• The right upsells – some of your products probably stimulate more customer loyalty than others (you can see that by comparing the retention rates between cohorts with different first product bought). If a customer gets the “wrong” one, you can automatically offer the “right” one as an upsell to improve their chances of becoming a loyal customer.
• Relevant emails – if you want to reach your customers when they are ready to shop, but don’t want to spam them until then, look at the behavior of similar cohorts and time your emails accordingly. For example, if you want to reengage holiday shoppers after the holidays, look at last year’s holiday cohort and see when they were active: 2 months after around Valentine’s, 3 months after around Women’s day? They bought gifts from you so it’s reasonable to expect them to come back for other occasions as well.
• Thank your VIPs – if you want to build a strong relationship with your customer, rewarding loyalty is a must. An auto campaign that thanks them after a certain number of orders/ above a value threshold can be doing that, without you even looking at your CRM every day.
• Want more conversions? Automated browse abandonment emails will work for you. You just turn them on in an email tool like Metrilo and customers who look at products but don’t buy, get an email.

Two success stories: Craft supplies shop case study and Coffee shop case study

Use email templates

As a side note, there’s nothing wrong with using email templates for your email marketing. You can edit them a bit with your branding and colors, but use them by all means. They save tons of time and – trust me, I’m a marketer – sanity. Just FYI, Metrilo offers 30+ awesome and versatile email templates our customers from all industries can use.

Email templates in Metrilo

5. Auto tag customers

Customer behavior is key to segmentation and marketing personalization. To make your life easier and not go over customer session records one by one (which you can do, if you want, of course), try automated tagging. Your ECRM should have this option.

Customer session in Metrilo

You set up the criteria for tagging – buys twice from Cat category, for example – and the software tags the customer automatically with tag “cat”. So next time you want to run a special campaign for cat owners, you have the list ready.

Other tags you can use:

• VIP – after 5 orders/ a certain customer lifetime value reached
• Blog reader – when a customer reads an article on your site
• Coupon user – if they apply a coupon at checkout
• Trouble maker – if a customer cancels an order
• Be careful – if a customer gets a refund

Related: How to tailor your emails without being creepy

These actions may not look like a lot, but try to stop doing them for a week and you’ll see a) how much you need them and b) how much time they take.

If you are a one-man-show or have a handful of employees doing everything, any streamlining of marketing activities is a plus. With these simple tips, you can boost your and your team’s productivity without sacrificing sales and customer care.