15 Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

Running an online store is exciting but also requires constant work. As your business grows, managing repetitive tasks like sending emails, fulfilling orders, and engaging with customers can take up a lot of your time.

That‘s why implementing marketing and order automation in WooCommerce is so important. Automating your store‘s mundane processes will save you time and effort while also boosting sales.

In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore 15 of the best WooCommerce automations to increase revenue, recover abandoned carts, retain customers, and streamline operations.

Why Automate Your WooCommerce Store?

Automation is one of the most effective ways to scale and grow your eCommerce business. Here are some of the key benefits of using WooCommerce automation:

  • Save time: Automate repetitive tasks like sending emails and order notifications so you can focus on important business growth activities.

  • Reduce errors: Automation minimizes human errors that occur with manual order processing and customer communications.

  • Improve efficiency: Automated workflows streamline operations, reduce delays, and make order fulfillment smoother.

  • Enhance customer experience: Customers receive faster service and more relevant, personalized interactions through automation.

  • Increase sales: Automated upsells, cross-sells, coupons, and reviews encourage more customers to buy and spend more per order.

  • Gain insights: Detailed analytics from automation tools provide data to optimize your sales processes over time.

Now let‘s look at 15 of the top WooCommerce automations you should use right away to boost revenue.

1. Automate Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing automation is an excellent way to engage customers, promote products, recover abandoned carts, and increase repeat sales.

Instead of manually sending one-off emails, you can create sequences like:

  • Welcome series when a customer signs up
  • Abandoned cart recovery emails
  • Retargeting emails if a customer doesn‘t complete a purchase
  • Cross-sell or upsell offers after a purchase
  • Loyalty rewards for repeat customers

Tools like Omnisend and Klaviyo integrate with WooCommerce to track activity like sign-ups, purchases, and cart abandonment. You can then set up conditional automations to trigger relevant emails.

For example, if a customer abandons their cart, you can send an automated coupon code valid for 2 days to encourage them to complete the purchase.

Email automation keeps your brand top of mind and leads to higher customer lifetime value.

2. Automate Social Media Marketing

Your social media channels are another excellent marketing avenue. Automating social posts can help you:

  • Promote new products and blog content
  • Engage followers with polls, quizzes, and other interactive content
  • Showcase user-generated content and reviews
  • Run contests, giveaways, and other promotions

Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social can schedule and publish posts for you across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

You can connect them to your WooCommerce store and WordPress blog so that any new product listings or blog posts get automatically shared on social media. This keeps your channels updated without any manual work.

Making your marketing social extends your brand reach and keeps customers engaged across multiple channels.

3. Offer Automated Incentives to Customers

Providing the right incentives and offers at optimal times increases conversions and customer lifetime value.

You can leverage automation to:

  • Send coupon codes to customers who abandon carts to complete the purchase
  • Offer exclusive discounts to loyal or first-time customers
  • Cross-sell related products using pop-ups and emails after a purchase
  • Highlight best-selling products to new subscribers

Tools like Privy and OptinMonster help you create pop-ups, announcement bars, wheel spins, and other gamified campaigns that can be triggered automatically.

For example, you can configure Privy to show a pop-up with a coupon code to customers who have products in their cart but haven‘t started checkout after 5 minutes.

Timing your offers correctly and showing them to highly-targeted segments gives you an advantage over broad discounts.

4. Streamline Order Management

Order management includes crucial post-purchase processes like order confirmation, shipping, status updates, returns, and more.

Automating parts of your order workflows helps improve fulfillment efficiency. You can leverage tools like:

  • ShipStation to automate shipping label generation, rate comparison, tracking info, and status updates.

  • Return Magic to handle return requests, generate return labels, and refund customers automatically.

  • Zapier to connect your WooCommerce store with fulfillment apps and automatically update order information across systems.

Automated order processing reduces the burden of manual data entry and eliminates shipping or fulfillment errors. Customers also appreciate getting faster shipping confirmation and return handling.

This improves the post-purchase experience and leads to higher customer satisfaction.

5. Automate Customer Reviews Collection

Product reviews and testimonials build credibility for your store. But getting customers to leave reviews can be difficult.

Automated review collection tools like Judge.me and Stamped.io solve this by making it easy for customers.

They can:

  • Send review request emails to customers after delivery
  • Show review modals during checkout or in pop-ups
  • Provide quick star ratings forms without comments
  • Offer incentives for leaving reviews

Collecting reviews automatically eliminates the need to manually email customers asking for reviews. It also leads to a higher conversion rate by catching customers when they‘re most willing to engage.

Displaying authentic reviews builds trust and peer proof that convinces more visitors to purchase.

6. Automate Reporting and Analytics

To maximize the impact of your marketing and sales processes, you need in-depth data and analytics.

Automated reporting tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics can track key eCommerce metrics like:

  • Traffic sources
  • Top converting keywords
  • Abandonment rates
  • Conversion rates
  • Revenue and sales
  • Customer lifetime value
  • And more

You‘ll get custom reports sent right to your inbox on a set schedule. Automated analytics eliminate the need for manual data crunching. With detailed insights, you can fine-tune your promotions, high-value customer segments, product pricing, and overall marketing strategy.

Over time, the compound effect of small optimizations suggested by analytics data leads to big revenue growth.

7. Automate SMS & Push Notifications

Order updates via SMS and push notifications provide a more streamlined customer experience.

Tools like MessengerPeople and PushEngage integrate with WooCommerce to:

  • Send order confirmations via SMS
  • Notify customers when orders ship
  • Provide mobile tracking updates
  • Recover abandoned carts using personalized push notifications

Because SMS and push messages have high open and click-through rates, automating them for order updates is very effective. Customers appreciate the convenience, and you avoid missed communications.

8. Automate Upsells & Cross-Sells

Upselling and cross-selling help increase order value. But presenting offers manually on your site is difficult and inconsistent.

Automated tools like Upsellplugin and FunnelKit allow you to easily create targeted pop-up offers.

For example, once a customer adds a product to their cart, you can show a popup with a logical upsell or cross-sell offer and incentive to add the extra item.

You can customize offers based on:

  • Order value
  • Product categories
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Subscription status
  • And more

Well-timed automated offers increase conversion rates as customers are more likely to buy when already in a buying mindset. The incremental revenue from upsells and cross-sells adds up over time.

9. Automate Customer Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs help drive repeat purchases. But running them manually requires keeping track of points, tiers, and rewards.

With automation, you can easily:

  • Award points for specific customer actions like signing up, reviewing products, referring friends, etc.
  • Automatically notify customers when they reach new reward tiers
  • Provide exclusive discount codes based on loyalty status
  • Offer free shipping, gifts, early access to sales, and other rewards consistently

Tools like Smile Rewards and Pointsify track activity from integrations with WooCommerce, email, Messenger, and more.

Your most valuable customers will engage more when they feel appreciated through your automated loyalty program.

10. Automate Customer Service

Providing quick and consistent customer service is vital for any eCommerce store. While chatbots won‘t completely replace human reps, automating simple responses frees up your team.

With a tool like Botwhat, you can build conversational chatbots to handle common questions like:

  • Order status inquiries
  • Shipping and delivery estimates
  • Returns and refunds policies
  • Site navigation assistance

You can define specific trigger phrases and map them to relevant responses. For complex issues that need human assistance, BOTWHAT can automatically escalate chats.

Automating simple customer service tasks improves response times and satisfaction. It also reduces labor costs associated with basic customer inquiries.

11. Automate Inventory Management

Keeping track of inventory and stock levels across warehouses, retail stores, and online listings is challenging without automation.

Tools like TradeGecko integrate with WooCommerce to automatically:

  • Keep inventory synchronized across selling channels
  • Place bulk orders with suppliers when stock runs low
  • Update product listings when items sell out
  • Provide warehouse staff with task lists for fulfilling orders
  • Alert you when top products need to be restocked

Automated inventory management ensures you avoid overselling products. And you can optimize decisions on manufacturing, wholesale purchasing, and stock allocation between sales channels.

12. Automate Accounting and Tax Compliance

Managing accounts payable, accounts receivable, bookkeeping, invoicing, and taxes for an eCommerce business can get complex quickly.

Automated accounting software like Xero can take care of repetitive finance tasks. You can:

  • Send automatic payment reminders and reconcile accounts
  • Track income, expenses, account balances, and other transactions
  • Automate invoicing and billing cycles
  • Generate financial statements and reports
  • File and pay sales tax, VAT, and GST appropriately

Integrations with payment gateways and accounting software eliminate time wasted on manual data entry. And automated tax compliance prevents penalties caused by errors.

13. Use AI Assistants to Automate Repetitive Work

AI assistants like Zia allow you to automate repetitive digital tasks without complex setup:

  • Data entry
  • Market research
  • Competitor monitoring
  • Keyword research
  • Ad management
  • And more

For example, you can ask Zia to pull data from Google Analytics, summarize insights, and create graphs for a monthly report.

Or have Zia monitor your high-value competitors and send you updates whenever they launch a promotion.

AI assistants understand natural language and can complete tasks independently after some initial training. They allow you to automate internal marketing and operations work that doesn‘t require deep critical thinking.

14. Automate Lead Generation

Growing your email subscriber list and leads database is important for sales. But constantly generating new leads manually is difficult.

You can automate lead gen using pop-ups, giveaways and landing pages. For example, KingSumo offers templates for:

  • Giveaways and contests to collect emails in exchange for free products
  • Lead magnet landing pages to provide valuable content in return for contact information
  • Wheel of fortune pop-ups that get visitors engaged to capture their data

Integrations with email and CRM tools will help you automatically organize new leads for future targeted campaigns.

Automated lead generation works continuously in the background to grow your audience. It saves you time spent manually promoting your brand for lead growth.

15. Automate Social Media Lead Generation

Your brand‘s social media presence represents a great opportunity to convert followers into leads and customers.

You can automatically capture leads from social using tools like Shortstack which let you create simple quizzes, surveys, sweepstakes and other interactive social posts.

For example, you can post a competition on Facebook for fans to guess the number of products in a photo. Entrants submit their email and guess to enter the contest.

This captures leads automatically from social media that you can follow up with directly later. No more manual posting and hoping for conversions.

Get Started With Automating Your Store Today

Implementing even a few of these top WooCommerce automations can save you hours of manual work each week. More importantly, they‘ll grow your sales and revenue by enhancing customer experience.

Start small by picking automations that provide the most impact based on your current eCommerce bottlenecks. Over time, expand the number of workflows you automate for greater efficiency.

Many automation apps offer free trials, so you can test them risk-free to determine effectiveness for your store.

Remember that the key is tracking results and continuously optimizing your automations. Treat it as an ongoing process, not a one-time initiative.

We hope this guide gives you ideas on how to increase profits and grow your business exponentially using smart WooCommerce automation!

Written by Jason Striegel

C/C++, Java, Python, Linux developer for 18 years, A-Tech enthusiast love to share some useful tech hacks.