Marketing teams in retail are busier than ever, juggling customer engagement, managing multi-channel campaigns, analyzing performance, and personalizing interactions across countless touchpoints.
That’s a lot.
Doing all of this manually isn’t simply practical; it is virtually impossible to scale.
That’s where they need the power of retail marketing automation.
Retail marketing automation empowers brands to streamline repetitive tasks and deliver personalized experiences effortlessly. With automation, retailers can:
- Enhance customer experiences
- Boost operational efficiency
- Increase conversions
The result? Happier customers, smoother operations, and increased sales.
In this guide, we’ll cover the essential retail marketing automation tools, showcase examples, best practices, and how you can get the most out of Insider.
Whether you’re just starting to automate marketing or looking to scale your strategy, this article will help you build smarter, more efficient retail marketing workflows that keep your marketing engine running smoothly.
What is retail marketing automation and how does it work?
Retail marketing automation is all about using the power of automation to streamline and automate repetitive marketing tasks. That is, things like email campaigns, SMS messaging, social media outreach, and customer segmentation.
Essentially, it helps retail brands send the right message to the right customer, exactly when they need it most.
With automation, retailers can create hyper-personalized customer experiences without the manual hassle. Here’s how it works –
- Personalized customer journeys. Automation platforms leverage AI to deliver tailored product recommendations and targeted content. This makes customers feel seen and valued.
- Campaign management. Retailers can automate critical marketing workflows – welcoming new customers, re-engaging inactive ones, or nudging loyal customers toward an upsell.
- Data-driven insights. Automation software collects and analyzes data in real-time. This provides actionable insights that marketers can use to fine-tune campaigns and boost customer satisfaction.
The result is a unified brand voice and consistent messaging, no matter where your customers choose to engage.
For example, retail marketing automation can trigger timely reminders about items left in a cart or send personalized offers based on previous purchases.
These are great ways to boost conversions and strengthen customer relationships, without extra manual effort.
To help you find the right solution for your business, we’ve compiled the top 5 marketing automation platforms. Let’s take a look at them:
1. Insider
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization and automation capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, push notifications, and WhatsApp.
Our platform has been ranked among the top solutions in various categories, including –
- Marketing automation platforms.
- Mobile marketing software.
- Personalization software.
- Customer data platforms.
- And more.
Thanks to the wide range of capabilities and native channels, over 1200 brands like Adidas, Vodafone, and Lexus use Insider for various use cases like:
- Automating flows and campaigns across all customer touchpoints from a single place using Architect, our cross-channel customer journey builder.
- Maximizing their marketing efforts and budget by consolidating their stack. Instead of using a bunch of different automation and personalization tools for each channel.
- Increasing engagement, conversions, and revenue by automatically personalizing every customer touchpoint. Including their websites, mobile apps, email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
- Getting an accurate 360-degree view of all their customers’ interactions, behaviors, and preferences by consolidating their data into our Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP).
2. Braze
Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform. It supports a range of channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications. It offers basic on-site and in-app personalization features.
Braze is used by many retail brands, from Glossier to Vivid Seats and SoulCycle, for customer engagement and marketing automation.
In terms of retail automation, Braze has a tool called Canvas Flow that comes with many features for building and automating cross-channel campaigns.
3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Many large retailers use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to unify customer data, personalize messaging, and increase conversion rates.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud combines various products for:
- Customer data aggregation (CDP).
- Cross-channel campaign orchestration.
- Data visualization and reporting.
- Marketing and sales automation.
- Content management.
- Loyalty management.
- Account engagement (powered by Pardot).
- And more.
These tools can be used to automate routine tasks and campaigns across channels like email, SMS, social media, and push notifications.
4. Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe Experience Cloud brings together a set of tools for use cases like automation, personalization, content management, journey orchestration, and more. When it comes to automation, the most important products in this stack are:
- Marketo Engage helps B2C and B2B marketing and sales teams automate various tasks, nurture leads, build audience segments with the help of AI, and personalize their communications.
- Adobe Campaign helps marketers create and manage cross-channel campaigns.
- Adobe Target is an A/B testing, personalization, and automation solution.
Retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walgreens, and Coles use Adobe Experience Cloud to understand customer journeys and personalize engagement in real time. This further boosts loyalty and sales.
5. HubSpot Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub is HubSpot’s main offering for marketing teams. While it’s not built specifically for retail brands, its complete automation capabilities are worth exploring. As a marketing automation solution, Marketing Hub offers:
- A visual board for creating conditional workflows.
- Various email, live chat, and on-site automation features.
- Workflow automation capabilities via integrations with their internal sales tools (like their CRM) and third-party solutions.
5 examples of retail marketing automation
Before we dive in, note that you can build all of these workflows with Insider, #1 AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform. Our solution offers:
- A flexible marketing automation tool for 12+ channels. You can use it to build automated workflows with a simple drag-and-drop editor across your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
- AI-powered features that save you time and optimize your workflows. These include send-time optimization, next-best channel selection, A/B test winner auto-selection, and more.
- A plethora of workflow templates for tons of use cases and industries. Each template can be easily customized to your needs without any coding.
Now, let’s explore the retail marketing automation examples:
1. Recovering abandoned carts
Cart abandonment remains one of the biggest problems in the world of ecommerce. Any marketing team that’s looking to maximize its budget and revenue should constantly be looking for ways to get cart abandoners to complete their purchase.
Insider helps you do this by automatically creating segments of cart abandoners. And letting you easily add cart items to your emails, push notifications, and messaging channel communications.
