TL;DR
As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, you surely know that acquiring new customers is only half the battle. Keeping them for the long term is where your ecommerce growth really happens. Yet, retention has always been one of the biggest challenges for ecommerce businesses – and that’s where customer journey automation can make a difference.
When done right, automating the customer journey helps you deliver timely, contextual, highly personalized experiences that keep your customers engaged long after their first interaction with your brand. In this blog, we’ll explore why customer journey automation is essential for retention and how Maropost Marketing Cloud empowers you to make that happen – strategically and effectively.
Customer journey automation is the process of using technology to automatically guide your customers from initial contact to long-term loyalty through a series of personalized, timely interactions – all without manual effort. These interactions are triggered by real-time customer behavior and aligned with each customer’s lifecycle stage, intent, and channel preferences.
So, instead of relying on manual follow-ups and one-size-fits-all messages, automated journeys deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. Ultimately, it helps you improve customer experience, drive repeat purchases, reduce churn, and maintain loyalty.
Here’s what it might look like an ecommerce brand:
1. Personalized welcome and onboarding flow
Trigger: A new customer signs up or makes their first purchase.
What happens automatically:
2. Abandoned cart recovery flow
Trigger: A customer adds items to their shopping cart but doesn’t finalize the purchase.
What happens automatically:
3. Post-purchase follow-up flow
Trigger: A customer places an order.
What happens automatically:
4. Personalized product recommendations
Trigger: Customer behavior/ purchase patterns
What happens automatically:
5. Re-engagement flow for inactive customers
Trigger: Customer is inactive for a certain period
What happens automatically:
You can get these messages delivered across multiple channels – emails, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, or social retargeting campaigns. The goal is to keep each customer engaged at every stage of their journey, encourage repeat purchases, and build lasting loyalty.
Recommended: 5 email automation sequences that drive ecommerce success
We’ve all heard the classic saying: it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. But how does retention really impact your revenue? Here are some compelling stats from Smile.io that show why engaging and nurturing your existing customers pays off far beyond operational savings:
Customer journey automation is actually one of the most effective marketing strategies for improving customer retention because it shifts the relationship from reactive to proactive and from generic to hyper-personalized. Here’s how exactly customer journey automation drives retention:
Here’s what Maropost Marketing Cloud offers to help you build automated customer journeys and engage your customers at every stage of their lifecycle with highly relevant and timely messages across channels:
With Maropost’s Journey Builder, you can visually design automated workflows using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface – no coding required. You simply drag "Widgets" onto a canvas to define the flow. These widgets include Triggers (entry points), Actions (e.g., Send email, Send SMS), Filters (for segmentation/branching logic, including A/B splits), and Delays, enabling you to easily map out complex cross-channel sequences.
Maropost automatically triggers journeys based on real customer behavior like website visits, purchases, form submissions, tag changes, inactivity periods, etc. Combined with advanced segmentation and built-in customer intelligence (e.g., eRFM and engagement scoring), the system can identify high-value or at-risk customers and send targeted flows that boost engagement, conversions, and retention.
With pre-built journey templates, you can quickly set up automated campaigns using industry best practices, reducing setup time and improving performance. No need to build journeys from scratch. Available template types include Welcome, Abandoned Cart, Nurture, Advocacy, Email Re-Engagement, and Lapsed Buyer.
With Maropost, you can deliver personalized email experiences within a single campaign template. Using Dynamic Tags and Liquid Scripting, you can define "Dynamic Areas" within your email. Based on defined audience segments, contact attributes, or tracked behavior, the system will automatically display different content blocks, dynamic images, or text to each recipient.
Product recommendations help you create emails that feel more personal and relevant. Instead of manually choosing products for each campaign, the system automatically pulls real-time product suggestions based on what each customer cares about. This helps increase average order value (AOV) and encourage cross-sell or upsell.
Maropost makes it easy to A/B test your campaigns and automated journeys so you can quickly see which subject lines, layouts, or calls-to-action actually resonate. And with real-time reporting and analytics, you can fine-tune every workflow based on what’s working, turning data into smarter, higher-performing customer experiences.
Book a demo now to see Maropost Marketing Cloud in action and learn how it can help you automate customer journeys effectively and effortlessly.
Customer journey mapping and customer journey automation are related but serve different purposes. Customer journey mapping is a strategic planning process of visualizing every step a customer takes – from first awareness to repeat purchase and loyalty. Journey mapping simply shows what the ideal customer experience should look like.
Customer journey automation is the execution layer that brings your customer journey map to life. It uses technology to automatically deliver personalized, timely messages or actions based on customer behavior, lifecycle stage, and preferences.
The five universally recognized stages of the customer journey are Awareness (when customers first discover your brand), Consideration (when they compare options and research solutions), Purchase (when they commit to a purchase), Retention (when they use the product and find value), and Advocacy (when they recommend the brand to others). These stages act as a blueprint, helping marketers automate communications that build lasting loyalty.
That largely depends on your business size, industry, budget, and automation needs. Some of the best customer journey automation tools include HubSpot, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Customer.io, and Maropost Marketing Cloud. These platforms offer user-friendly journey builders, advanced segmentation, behavior-based triggers, cross-channel campaign management, and analytics that help brands deliver personalized, automated experiences at scale.