f you're thinking about starting a dropshipping business, then you should know that there are systems you can put in place to keep your business running smoothly, automatically. As a small business owner, you'll find that there is no shortage of things to spend your time on. There's always something else to improve or optimize. By choosing to automate your dropshipping business, you can get better results with limited resources.
And, while there is no one system that can completely automate your dropshipping business, there are many apps and services that can automate certain aspects of it. When you put them together, your business can achieve great results without great amounts of work or a big team.
In this article, we'll be going over 7 different strategies you can use to get better results in your dropshipping store with less effort!
Let's dive in.
#1: Automate Your Visitor Engagement
Acquiring traffic is likely going to be one of your biggest expenses as a dropshipping store owner. And it can also be one of your biggest frustrations.
Spending money to have visitors come and go without converting is annoying, especially if you aren't able to learn anything from it. Luckily, there are already plenty of tools that help you overcome this through email capture pop-ups.
One of the easiest ways to automate your dropshipping business is by engaging your visitors with automated email capture.
Setting up an email capture pop-up system will accomplish two main benefits:
#1 — It will allow you to communicate directly with your visitors, which are the people that were drawn to your brand. You can inform them about a current sale, your story, or anything else. Without a pop-up, you won't be sure what your customers are reading. There's no guarantee that the pop-up will convert, but you can at least split test it to determine what produces the best results.
#2 — Capturing an email provides you access to one of the more powerful and effective marketing channels. You can collect data a lot of data by testing subject lines, layouts, lengths, sequences, and more. Furthermore, as an industry, the average return on investment of an email marketing campaign is 3800% ($38 generated for $1 spent). Huge!
Setting up an email capture is super simple when your store is built on content management systems like Shopify or BigCommerce. Privy is one of the most popular apps with nearly 25,000 reviews on Shopify, and there's even a free plan available. You can set up banners, email collectors, spin-to-win discounts, and more.
Best of all, once you put a system in place, it will continue to run automatically. Your job becomes to try out different messages, designs, and offers. Simple, right?
#2: Automate Abandoned Cart Recovery
The second thing you can easily automate on your dropshipping business is abandoned cart recovery. Now that you are capturing emails from new visitors, this will become even easier.
On average, 70% of users that put an item in their shopping cart will ultimately abandon it before checkout. This can be extremely frustrating for store owners, as they are stuck watching 70% of their potential sales walk out the door.
One of the ways to combat this is by automatically emailing visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts. This act reminds them of the items they were looking at, and nudges them in the right direction.
The main ways to implement this are:
- By using Shopify's built-in abandoned cart recovery feature. While limited, this will provide you with a fairly easy way of getting started. The downside with this option is that Shopify only allows you to send one email per recovery sequence, whereas platforms like BigCommerce allow you to send up to 3.
- By setting up a workflow through your email marketing software. If you are using something like Klaviyo or Omnisend, you can integrate it directly with your store and send personalized emails or sequences to recover abandoned carts.
- By using an app that serves another primary purpose, but also handles email marketing. This would include apps like Privy and One+ Pop Ups & Email Marketing, which both offer email marketing in addition to on-site engagement.
Regardless of what you choose, make sure that you are using one of these systems to recover your abandoned carts. Otherwise, you'll be leaving a significant portion of your conversion rate and revenue on the table.
#3: Automate Your Dropshipping Business's Order Processing
The third way you can automate your dropshipping business, and one that we can help with, is your order processing.
As a dropshipper, every time you receive an order, you need to then order the products from your supplier. This is referred to as order processing, and some dropshipping applications like ours allow you to do it automatically.
As a Pro DropCommerce subscriber, you can set up your orders to be processed automatically once they arrive. This can save you tons of time that you can use for more important things, like marketing and plotting world domination.
If you want to learn more about how it works, then check out our help article on it. And you can sign up for an account through our sign-up page. It's free to get started!
#4: Automate Social Media Posting
If you own a direct-to-consumer e-commerce store, then there's a good chance you're using social media to connect with your audience. If you aren't, you're probably leaving a lot of money on the table. Even if you think the market is saturated, the data shows that over 1.3 million people joined a social media platform every day in 2020.
Social media is very beneficial, but it can also be time-consuming. Fortunately, you can automate your posts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even Tik Tok, through various third-party applications.
This way, rather than posting your content one by one, you can produce your content in batches and automatically release them over time.
There are several apps that can do this for you such as Later, Hootsuite, and Canva. You might need to upgrade to a paid plan depending on your needs but Later does have a free option that can cover the basics while you get started.
#5: Automate Your Dropshipping Business's Social Proof
Nowadays, there are more brands than ever before, and social proof is incredibly important. Displaying positive reviews, a counter for past customers, or recent sales can all be highly influential in demonstrating to your customers that your brand delivers on its promises.
People want to know that they can trust you, and giving them proof that other people love your brand will reassure them that buying from you is the right decision.
The fifth thing that you can automate is your collection of reviews, testimonials, and social proof.
There are a couple of ways to go about this:
#1 — Review Apps: A review app can automatically ask your recent customers for a review by email or text message. These apps can even allow your customers to include a photo or video alongside the review, making them even more influential. Once sent, the app can automatically post the review to your website for all to see.
#2 — Sales Pop Up Apps: A sales pop-up app is a little pop-up in the corner of your screen that shows recent purchases by other customers. Seeing that other people have recently purchased from your store can enable you to build trust with your other visitors.
And trust must always precede a sale.
You could also hypothetically set up a workflow through your email marketing service that would automatically ask recent customers for a review, but this would be a bit more complicated and manual.
Regardless of what you choose, social proof is very useful in influencing behavior, and creating a system to automate it will help you make the most out of your traffic and marketing efforts.
#6: Retargeting Customers & Leads
If you're interested in running pay-per-click advertising for your store or your products, then you should look into retargeting ads. These ads can be implemented through Facebook, Google, or most other big ad platforms.
Retargeting ads are ads that are only shown to specific groups of people based on actions that they've recently taken.
For example, you could set up a retargeting ad on Facebook to be shown to people that have recently visited your site. Or, you could set up a retargeting ad for people that have purchased from you in the last week. The possibilities are endless.
According to industry statistics, retargeting ads are 10x more effective in terms of click-through rate, on average. While they are a bit more complicated than normal ads, you will likely get repaid for the complexity tenfold.
#7: Affiliate Network Management
If you aren't too familiar with affiliate marketing, it's basically a way to get strangers to send your business customers in exchange for a cut of the sales they bring in.
The affiliate, which is likely an authority figure or influencer in the industry, tells their audience to visit your store through their special affiliate link. This link keeps track of which customers came from where, so you know how much to pay each of your affiliates in commissions.
The best way to manage your affiliate network is through an affiliate marketing platform or application. These apps come with features that make the entire process easier.
The apps can help you find affiliates, keep track of their sales, and can even pay them out automatically. It's a very straightforward process, and once things are set up, you can make more sales without any extra effort. The entire process can be automated!
Wrapping Up
Dropshipping is no easy task, but, hopefully, the strategies we outlined in this article will help you run your business without too many headaches. Automations make it easy to sell a dropshipping business, or keep it running with minimal effort.
If you're looking to start dropshipping, but you can't figure out how to make it work with products from China, then make sure to check out DropCommerce!
DropCommerce is a marketplace for dropshippers to find awesome products from North American suppliers. We currently have over 23,000 products and counting, and we're onboarding new suppliers every single week.
Want to get started? Create a free account here!
Best of luck!
If you enjoyed this article on how to automate your dropshipping business, then make sure to check out:
The Best Free Shopify Apps Of 2021
Basic Shopify SEO - How To Get Traffic From Google
The Best Shopify Affiliate Marketing Apps For Explosive Growth
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