Email marketing is the backbone of eCommerce, it serves as your marketing central communication structure.
Despite predictions that it would be displaced by the huge waves that came with social media marketing, email marketing has continued to stand the test of time as one of the most profitable marketing tools to hold and retain e-commerce business customers.
If you’re running an e-commerce store, email marketing is your sure bet to get messages conveyed to your brand`s target in a personalized fashion which is an incredibly effective way to excite your customers and get them to act.
Drive your business with smarter targeting using the best email marketing strategies provided in this guide.
What Is eCommerce Email Marketing?
E-commerce email marketing is a strategy that uses email as a tool to send transactional or promotional messages to customers.
Why E-Commerce Businesses Should Do Email Marketing?
Never before has it been so crucial for e-commerce businesses to connect and engage with current and potential customers, especially online.
Having a digital presence for your business is vital to its success as online Stores need a digital presence to bridge the gap between the brand and its consumers.
This is where email marketing comes in handy as the best tool to generate sales, enhance customer engagement, acquire customers, and create brand awareness through highly personalized email messages.
In eCommerce email marketing, communicating with your customers using emails can be an excellent marketing strategy.
Do you need more convincing to believe this?
Then read on.
Email marketing gives the highest ROI than other marketing channels. For example, for every one dollar spent, email marketing makes a return of over $40.
If that has not displaced your skepticism about email marketing then still read on.
Compared to other channels of marketing approaches, email is both cost-effective and straightforward. You don’t need to break the bank to get your message across.
Email marketing creates brand loyalty & Connection plus it blends with Other Marketing platforms squarely.
How to Do Email Marketing
With marketers harvesting millions of dollars from email marketing every year, you need to learn the best practices that rake in these millions for other brands.
Using emails in your E-commerce marketing could make a substantial difference in your company’s ROI.
Every business can benefit from an effective email campaign, but few business owners are equipped to make the most of this channel.
Read on for some essential tips and strategies to help get you started.
#1. Choose an email marketing service provider
Getting started with an ESP is the first step in your email marketing journey.
Getting a Service Provider can be very inexpensive or even free, so there aren’t any disadvantages to using one. There are many benefits, including email deliver-ability and regulation compliance.
#2. Gather contacts for your email marketing list
The contact list is the backbone of Ecommerce marketing. The results of your online marketing campaigns to a large extent depend on the quality of your email lists.
That’s why you should build solid foundations for your online marketing success to sit on by creating your contact list the right way.
#3. Set up your welcome email
When a prospect becomes a buyer, you should roll out the red carpet for them using a welcome email, this strategy work works wonders.
Best eCommerce Email Marketing Strategies
Like most things, email marketing seems overwhelming until you give it a try. And to make your e-commerce email marketing less overwhelming, I have outlined the best strategies to follow and achieve robust marketing campaigns.
#1. Start With a Welcome Email Series
16 out of 20 customers expect to receive welcome emails after they sign up for a mailing list.
If you are not sending your new subscriber welcome emails, I tell you, that’s a huge untapped opportunity to approach your new subscribers who’ve just confirmed that they are into you.
We recommend that your welcome email series have at least two emails. An initial welcome email and an invitation to connect further where you get the chance to highlight your products.
The purpose of the first email is to reaffirm to your contact that they’ve made a great decision to join your email list with a message like “Thank you for joining your email list”.
The second email should furnish them with the information they need about your social channels, your product, or your services.
Send this email about two days after they’ve received the first welcome email with a message like “We’re on Twitter! Connect with us so you can be among the first to hear about new updates”
And then very important too, your welcome email should be automated. An automated welcome email series allows you to set the stage for your new contacts even while you sleep.
The best part is that you set up your welcome email once, and it works for you forever.
#2. Be Sure to Include a Clear Call to Action
The essence of any marketing message is to get a response and to get a response, you need to inspire the response through a call to action.
CTAs are eye-catching and clean, making them a simple way to improve conversions.
Consider this a leak. your CTA should create a sense of urgency, keep it short, try using a personal perspective in your call and your call button text should be large and legible.
#3. Use Personalization to Segment Your List
Segmenting email marketing lists can improve open and click-through rates for your E-commerce marketing.
In fact, according to MailChimp’s latest segmented-list user data, open rates were a solid 14.31 percent higher and clicks were a whopping 100.95 percent higher than non-segmented campaigns.
What makes email marketing so powerful?
Some say that the secret lies in list segmentation—the practice of dividing your email list into groups based on characteristics like interests and demographics.
Segmenting your email list helps you speak more intelligently and directly with your customers, giving them information that they want at the right time. And when you do it right, the payoff can be huge.
If you’re willing to put some effort into the planning process, then here we go
#1. Use data that’s tied to an email address
An email address works as a link between a person`s online identity and identity offline.
#2. An Email-sending Tool
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding. Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program
#3. Practice email hygiene
Commit time to periodically clean your email list; remove suppressed subscribers from your segments; use folders to keep your lists and segments organized.
#4. Use Email to Encourage Engagement
People are more likely to follow brands that interact with them. Increase engagement by encouraging people to post and interact with you online. To achieve this, follow these tips
#1. Start with the subject line
To be successful, start by thinking about the subject lines that made you open an email in your inbox. Best practices include asking a question, being specific, creating a sense of urgency, and keeping subject lines short.
#2. Include Social Sharing Options
This method is effective in driving sales. Even if your readers are not interested in the offers you’ve included, they might forward the message to a friend or colleague who may be interested.
#3. Segment Lists and Target Messages
Once the list is segmented and you know who you are sending emails to, the next level is to consider what content they are looking for and use it for the offer.
If the offer speaks to the recipient’s needs, it’s a no-brainer that the email will receive more clicks.
#4. Find the Best Frequency and Timing
Find out when a person is most likely to open their email by tracking previous opens, segmenting those opens, and applying geographical location data.
#5. Offer Exclusive Experiences and Rewards to Loyal Subscribers
To connect with customers and turn them into influencers who organically spread the word about your business, consider incorporating these experiential rewards examples into your loyalty program.
To get your customers returning to you always, consider incorporating one or some of these best practices into your company’s loyalty program.
#1. Get a personalized item (e.g. mug or throw pillow) to use when you visit
#2. Attend an exclusive VIP event
#3. Get first access to new products or items
#6. Send Promotional Sales Emails for All Subscribers
Promo emails build trust with your customers by offering value through discount sales, free information, and others.
This makes promotional emails a great tool for converting browsers into customers who will trust you and purchase your product.
Promotional emails build engagement by giving people an incentive to engage with your content.
Qualities that Promotional Emails should Have
#1. Should establish positive relationships
Promotional emails achieve so much because they use a subscriber`s name and other particulars like the name of the company and job position.
Including these personal particulars add a personal touch to your emails.
#2. Promotional emails should offer Something of value
Offering your audience something that will catch and retain your customer`s attention. It also encourages them to purchase/interact with your products, services, or website.
Promotional emails should capture the audience’s attention within the first seven seconds.
#7. Test Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Testing your emails allows you to check how your sent-out emails are faring on the errand you sent them.
This strategy helps you to quickly identify which is the most engaging format to adopt in your E-commerce email marketing campaign.
#1. Test different types of offers in your message: Whether you’re testing two e-books against each other, or webinars to an e-book, this test is bound to get you better results overall.
The reason this is particularly important is, that while you may think your offer is the best in the market, you may also be wrong.
#2. Leverage audience segmentation tests: Start with what you know about your customer. If you do not have robust segmentation, create some simple segments leveraging what you know and have access to.
For example, in your segmented folder, you have high-value customers, high-value seasonal customers, customers who have made a purchase, the products you are trying to push, top-selling products, etc.
Once you have figured this out, you are now on the path to sending e-commerce email marketing emails that would be relevant to the recipients.
#3. Create a test list: Now that you have figured out to who you are sending your message, the next step is what are you going to send.
#4. Testing execution: Once you have your list ready, you can go ahead with the execution.
#5Analyze your email campaign tests: This is the final stage of testing your emails.
Here, you test for delivery rates. This metric is the main starting point of your e-commerce email marketing and is a great metric to monitor the strength of your email list.
Also in your analysis, check for Open rates, test for click-through rates, check for bounce rate on campaign landing pages, and lastly, test for revenue per email and conversion rate.
#8. Send newsletters at different times and frequencies
Having an understanding of your audience, and who you are dealing with gives you a fair idea of when you should be pushing out emails to them.
With your competitors shooting for the same subscribers as you do, You need to know when there`s reduced or no noise in the subscriber’s inbox so that you can shoot your shot and get it in the face of your subscriber.
To succeed, you have to nail three aspects: relevance, timing, and frequency of sending email newsletters.
When knowing about who you are dealing with, the next consideration will be understanding your goals. knowing the goal helps you remain on track.
#9. Check sender reputation
A better Sender Reputation means a better probability to reach the inbox of the recipient. Different Internet Service Providers (ISPs), tracking services, and Email Service Providers (ESPs) partner to share and rate your sender behavior.
That’s how they come up with assigning you a reputation score. However, common mistakes can hurt your email sender’s reputation.
If you receive too many spam complaints, your reputation goes down. If you send unsolicited E-commerce emails after buying an email list, your reputation goes down. If you fall into a spam trap or honeypot scam, your reputation goes down.
Here are a few basics on how to improve your email sender reputation
#1. Quantity of Spam Flags: To keep a good reputation, avoid getting your messages flagged or at least minimize the number.
#2. Quality of Email Lists: As a marketer, if you send an email to any of these email addresses flagged as spam traps or honeypot scams, you risk being placed on a public blacklist for email marketing.
#3. Opt-Out Forms: avoid sending emails to people that your subscribers. If you do, they may mark your message as spam and that would throw your sender’s reputation into the mud.
#10. Grow Your Email List
When it comes to running an E-commerce marketing, an email list stands tall as the backbone of the marketing campaign. E-commerce email marketing cannot breathe without an email list.
So there is every need to build a list if your eCommerce email marketing effort would count for anything. You can grow your email list in a short period and increase your earnings following these strategies below
#1. Encourage subscribers to share and forward emails:
#2. Promote a contest on social media.
#3. Add a call to action on your social media platforms.
#4. Collect emails at checkout.
Conclusion
Let’s face it, as marketers, we have no shortage of data, but we might lack a strategy to leverage that data.
This article has carefully satisfied that lack through a detailed walk-through of effective strategies to be used in E-commerce email marketing.
With technology advancing every day, you can expect that more brands will continue to move from offline to take their marketing space online. However, taking a business online is not enough.
Adopting the best marketing channels and strategies is.
One of the major benefits of running an E-Commerce email marketing is that it allows the use of email which is an effective tool that drives massive sales and conversions.
With the rise in online stores, every E-commerce email marketer must brace for the best strategies in the industry to stay afloat and ahead of their competition.
