The Automation of Dropshipping: A Complete Guide to Boosting Efficiency and Profits

There are many systems that can be utilized to help automate your dropshipping business and free up your time. Utilizing automation to outsource repetitive tasks will free your schedule for more important work that will further expand your dropshipping business.

There is always something that can be made more efficient in the dropshipping business, and there is always something more important that you could be working on! Automation helps to free up more of your valuable hours while ensuring that important, but simple, tasks can be completed without your constant oversight.

There isn't a single system solution for everything; instead, there are a variety of services and applications that can work together to create powerful automation. When you learn which pieces of software to use and when you will be amazed at the results you can get without much work at all!

Visitor Engagement Automation

One of the most difficult and expensive requirements for keeping a dropshipping store fully operational is the task of acquiring traffic. There are many ways you might need to spend money in order to have visitors come to your website, but often they are not successfully converted to customers, and if you aren't able to learn why you can't really progress much.

Automation comes in with the win here, and one of the most powerful tools is automated email capture. By setting up a pop-up system for capturing email, you will be able to gather an email list and communicate with your visitors directly. You can then use this medium to update them on any sales or stories that would be of interest to them.

This is one of the most effective and powerful marketing channels, allowing you to collect all kinds of data by testing different layouts and subject lines to experiment with what is attractive to your audience. Not convinced? As an industry, the return on investment, or ROI average of an email campaign is 3800%. Pretty significant!

If you use large content management platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify, there are several popular applications to get started. Privy is a great example, with plenty of good reviews on Shopify, they even offer a no-cost plan to get you going.

Using tools like Privy you can set up email collectors as well as banners, spin-to-win discounts, and all types of other useful setups. Plus, once the system is in place, it runs completely hands-off; automation takes over and all you have to do is try different strategies to see what works!

Abandoned Cart Recovery Automation

Another easy and important aspect of your site to automate is abandoned cart recovery. This becomes even easier with captured emails, and it is very valuable when you consider that 70% of users who put items in their cart will end up abandoning the cart before they ever checkout. This is certainly aggravating for store owners who are then stuck watching a huge percentage of their potential sales just disappear.

Enter abandoned cart recovery and the ability to automatically email the potential customers who have since abandoned their carts. Using these services, you'll provide a gentle nudge towards the items they left in their cart and remind them to commit to the purchase.

The three easiest ways to get started with abandoned cart recovery are:

Option A: Shopify has a built-in cart recovery feature. While some find it limited, it would provide a quick and easy way to get started. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks. For instance, Shopify only allows you to send one email regarding a user's cart, per cart, whereas other platforms like BigCommerce allow you to send more.

Option B: You can set up a workflow through whichever software you are using for email marketing. For instance, using Omnisend or Klaviyo, you can integrate directly and send personalized messages to remind customers about their abandoned carts.

Option C: You can find an app that serves another primary purpose but also allows for handling email marketing. There are several examples of this, such as One+ Pop Ups & Email Marketing, or the popular tool previously mentioned: Privy. Both of these applications offer email marketing in addition to other on-site engagement methods.

Any of the above options can work just fine – you just want to make sure that you can recover as many potential sales as possible, and abandoned cart recovery can be very handy for this.

Order Processing Automatically

Another very valuable way that you can automate dropshipping is with order processing automation. Every time you, as a dropshipper, receive an order, you would then have to order the desired products from your suppliers. We call this order processing, but some services allow for this to be done automatically.

For instance, companies like AutoDS or Spocket will set you up so that orders are automatically processed as soon as they arrive, saving you a lot of time and freeing up your resources to focus on other demanding tasks.

There are several companies that offer this service so you can shop around and find whichever one fits your needs. Make sure you look for one that will integrate smoothly with your current platform, as well as any other additional applications you may be utilizing. When everything works together smoothly, things can be a whole lot easier for you!

Social Media Automation

Some direct-to-consumer dropshippers are heavily involved with their social media accounts and this can be extremely time-consuming. If you aren't yet heavily involved with social media, you could be leaving a lot of potential customers behind! Even if the market feels flooded with social media influencers selling products, it may just be an essential part of the business at this point.

While it can be time-consuming, it can also have several benefits. When you integrate automation, you can seamlessly automate posts to popular platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn – freeing up even more of your time.

Instead of tailoring each individual post when it is time for it to be released, you can produce a batch of content which then gets released automatically over time, thanks to the automation tools you implement. There are several apps such as Later and Hootsuite that do a great job of getting this integration started smoothly, and your customers will never know the difference!

Social Proof Automation

These days there are more brands than ever, and without social proof, you are not likely to succeed in a competitive market. Positive reviews and sales counters, along with a recent sales catalog help to influence new customers that you are a trusted and verified brand.

Trust is important when buying from somebody who you don't know, or only know from their online presence. By giving this social proof to your customers upfront, it is a lot easier to convince them to purchase products from you and not somebody else.

Luckily, this too can be automated! You can, for instance, utilize Review Apps to automatically reach out to customers who made a purchase via email or text and ask them for feedback on their purchase. Using these options, your customers can also include a video or photo with the review, lending them more credibility. Once it is sent, the app can automatically post any positive responses to your website for all of your new customers to see.

Then there are Sales Pop-Up Apps, which allow for a small pop-up in the corner of the customer's screen that will show any recent purchases to customers that are looking to buy. This helps provide credibility to the product and the service they are considering purchasing and generates more trust overall with new customers.

Retargeting and Lead Generation Automation

If you've considered running pay-per-click ads for your website or for your products, you should definitely consider retargeting ads. These can be used through Google and Facebook or other large ad platforms, and they allow you to target very specific groups of potential customers based on actions they have taken recently.

For instance, you could create a retargeting ad through Facebook to target people who have recently been to your shop online, or for people who have previously made a purchase from you or a similar site. There are many possibilities!

Based on industry stats, retargeting ads can be 10x more effective with their resulting click-through rates on average. Despite the fact that they are a bit more complicated than your typical ads, you can certainly be repaid for the initial complexity with active sales!

In Conclusion

While dropshipping isn't exactly easy, automation can be a critical tool to help you manage time and efficiency, and time is money! By setting up the right tools and applications you will be able to free up more time for executive tasks and branding, making sure your sales are concrete while expanding your business consistently. Just remember that the setup now is worth the rewards that can later be delivered with an increased base of satisfied, loyal customers!