Marketing automation is an increasingly important factor for success in ecommerce, but also for modern marketing. With marketing automation, you can address your customers in an even more targeted manner, optimize your ads and personalized content, and, thus, boost your sales. There are many tools that can help you automate your marketing processes. Two of them are Shopstory and Zapier. In this article, we want to compare these two solutions and find out what functionality and benefits they offer for performance marketing and ecommerce.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is a web service that allows you to automate actions between different tools. For example, you can send data from one tool to another, send emails or text messages, share content, or create tasks. Zapier now supports more than 4,000 tools and is therefore particularly impressive in that the most common tools can be linked together.

Zapier is a fantastic tool and in many cases is mainly used for lead management and simple forwarding. For example, you can automatically transfer leads from a form to your CRM, send a welcome email to new subscribers, or send an invoice to a new customer. Zapier is easy to use and requires no programming knowledge. You can choose from ready-made templates or create your own zaps.

What is Shopstory?

Shopstory is a marketing software with AI features for online shops. It is aimed at freelancers, marketing agencies and store owners who want to optimize their ads or attract more visitors to their website. The software helps you to automate repetitive tasks in marketing and ecommerce, freeing up time for more strategic issues.

Shopstory is specially designed for performance marketing and ecommerce businesses, providing you with reusable flows that are specifically geared towards SEA, SEO, social media and ecommerce. For example, you can label and optimize entire product feeds, get suggestions for content based on conversions in your campaigns, or run ads based on the current weather.

Comparison of the two solutions

Zapier and Shopstory are both useful tools for marketing automation, but they honestly have very different focuses and features. Here are a few aspects you should consider when choosing the right solution for your business:

• Target group: Zapier is a universal tool that is suitable for various industries and use cases. Shopstory, on the other hand, was developed with marketers and ecommerce companies in mind.
• Integrations: Zapier offers a wide range of apps that you can connect with each other. Shopstory is focused on the most important e-commerce and advertising platforms (e.g. Shopify, Google Ads & Meta).
• Range of functions: Zapier allows you to automate simple actions between apps, such as transferring data or sending notifications. Shopstory also offers you intelligent functions based on artificial intelligence. For example, use our connection to ChatGPT to optimize ad texts, create ads, adapt and optimize product feeds of entire online shops.
• Personalization: Zapier allows you to customize your zaps using filters, formatter, or delays, for example. Shopstory also allows you to customize your flows and comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop Flow Builder.
• Optimization: Zapier relies on your settings and logic to run your zaps. You have to decide for yourself which apps you connect and which actions you trigger. Shopstory, on the other hand, learns from your data and continuously improves your results based on the thresholds you set.

Both platforms undeniably have their strengths. While Zapier shines above all with its versatility and large number of integrations, Shopstory empowers marketers & ecommerce owners by automating significant portions of their workload. As a result, marketers and online shop become more efficient and perform better. As a result, marketers and online shops can achieve greater efficiency, improve performance, and thus, boost their conversions.

Why is marketing automation so important for performance marketing and ecommerce?

Performance marketing and ecommerce are two areas that can benefit greatly from marketing automation. This is because they are confronted with many repetitive and time-consuming tasks that are difficult to manage manually, especially in large numbers. For example:

• Feed management: If you run an online store, you have to constantly update your product information and adapt it to different platforms. This can be extremely tedious with hundreds or thousands of items. With marketing automation, you can automatically optimize your product feeds, for example by adjusting the titles, descriptions or images to increase visibility and relevance.
• Campaign optimization: If you are running performance marketing, you need to constantly monitor and improve your ads to achieve the best possible results. This requires a lot of analysis and experimentation, which often limits your capacity for strategic or creative tasks. With marketing automation, you can optimize your campaigns automatically, for example by adjusting and optimizing bids, keywords or target groups, to reduce costs and increase conversions.

Marketing automation therefore helps you to increase your efficiency and effectiveness by freeing you from routine tasks and allowing you to concentrate on the important aspects of your business.

What are the challenges of automating marketing and ecommerce?

Marketing and ecommerce automation isn't always easy and often requires a lot of planning and customization. One of the most common challenges is that many popular tools used for automation do not work across platforms and therefore still require many manual intervention within workflows. For example:

• Script: Many online stores and marketers use scripts to automate certain tasks, such as creating product descriptions or adjusting prices. These scripts are often only suitable for a specific store system or advertising platform and have to be rewritten or adapted for each change or extension. This requires coding or programming knowledge.‍
• Tools: Many performance marketers use countless tools to automate their ads. This includes the creation of ad texts or the optimization of bids. These tools are often only suitable for a specific ad platform or network and need to be reconfigured or integrated for each new campaign or target. It is difficult to link these tools together (even with Zapier).

While these stand-alone solutions can make some tasks easier, they are often unable to automate a complete work process without manual steps in between. This can lead to inconsistencies, errors or delays that can affect your results.

How can Shopstory solve these challenges?

Shopstory isn't just an isolated solution; it's a comprehensive marketing software that empowers you to automate entire work processes in marketing and ecommerce.  This can be achieved entirely without code, utilizing user-friendly flows that eliminate the need for constant and manual intervention. For example:

• Feed management: Shopstory can automatically extract, analyze and optimize your product information from your store system. You don't need to write or customize scripts to create or update your product feeds. Shopstory can also automatically adapt your product feeds to different platforms, such as Google Shopping, Facebook or Instagram.
• Campaign optimization: Shopstory can automatically create, test and optimize your ads from your product information. You don't need to configure or integrate any tools to create or improve your ads. Shopstory can also automatically adapt your ads to different networks, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads or Facebook Ads.

In short, Shopstory is a marketing software that gives you full control over your marketing and ecommerce processes without having to worry about the technical details or breaking scripts. You can get back to focusing on strategic or creative tasks while Shopstory takes care of other tasks for you.

Conclusion

Zapier and Shopstory are both powerful marketing automation tools that can help you scale your business. Zapier is a good choice if you want to connect a large number of tools and automate simple actions. Shopstory is a better option if you run an online store or want to automate your performance marketing & ecommerce tasks, for example. Both solutions have their pros and cons, which you should weigh up depending on your goals and needs.

Interested in marketing automation and would like to find out more about our Shopstory software? Then perhaps you'd like to read our white paper "The Future of Automation in Ecommerce & Marketing" or follow the link below to learn more about our software:

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