Without eCommerce email marketing, it becomes challenging and costly for any eCommerce brand to establish meaningful connections with its customers, which are crucial for the growth of a successful online store.
It is interesting to note that, despite the rapid expansion of social media, studies reveal that email marketing is 40 times more successful in attracting new customers compared to popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Even though it is one of the original methods of ecommerce marketing, ecommerce email marketing continues to provide the highest return on investment for online store owners who implement it correctly.
Today’s post will reveal ecommerce email marketing strategies, demonstrating how it’s done, enabling you to reap all the benefits.
eCommerce email marketing strategies
1. Create a Welcome Email Series
Creating a positive initial impression is vital when a customer signs up for your ecommerce email marketing in order to convert them into loyal patrons. Consequently, a single welcome email is insufficient as it tends to overwhelm new subscribers with excessive information.
An effective method for introducing your eCommerce brand, managing customer expectations, and highlighting your unique features is through a welcome email series. By repeatedly exposing your ecommerce brand to new subscribers, this approach enables you to establish multiple positive interactions and consequently build trust.
2. Practice ecommerce email segmentation
Ecommerce email segmentation is a marketing tactic that entails categorizing your subscribers into distinct groups according to specific characteristics.
By thinking step by step, you can rephrase the given text as follows: By employing this approach, you can create highly personalized email messages that cater to specific groups. Consequently, your email engagement rates will rise, leading to increased sales revenue. This is because the more individuals you are able to attract to read your emails, the greater the chances of converting them into customers.
To ensure the effectiveness of ecommerce email segmentation, it is important to consider not only demographics (such as age, marital status, and location) but also psychographics (including lifestyle, behavior, and interests) of your ecommerce email marketing subscribers.
3. Reward loyal customers
Acquiring new customers is beneficial for your ecommerce brand, and it is important to continuously do so. Nevertheless, online store owners are aware that without repeat customers, it is challenging to thrive. Studies reveal that returning customers tend to spend more than newly acquired ones, with over a 65% increase. Therefore, it is unsurprising that they anticipate receiving special treatment.
If you are unable to develop a comprehensive customer reward program, you can still cultivate loyalty via ecommerce email marketing. This can be achieved by sending discounts for their preferred products, providing exclusive previews of new products, acknowledging their birthdates and join-dates, among other strategies.
4. Use a well-designed and responsive email
In the present global scenario, ensuring proper display of your ecommerce emails on mobile devices has become imperative. It becomes even more advantageous if you can implement a mobile-first design.
Imagine the significant decrease in your sales if a considerable portion of the nearly 50% of emails opened on mobile devices promptly delete your email due to its complex interface or lengthy loading time. Preventing this outcome is certainly desirable.
In order to enhance your ecommerce email deliverability and sales conversion rate, it is important to regularly evaluate your customer’s inbox experience.
5. Split test your ecommerce email campaigns
Split testing in ecommerce email involves sending different versions of an email to two separate groups of subscribers to determine the most effective one. The success of each version can be measured by factors like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.
When conducting split testing for ecommerce emails, some of the elements to test include subject lines, email length, visuals, and call-to-actions.
6. Send back-in-stock alert emails
Rather than concealing the product page as some online store owners do when a product is out of stock, it is advisable to inform customers regarding its unavailability and offer them the opportunity to provide their email address for future notifications on its availability.
Once you obtain their emails, make sure to send them regular updates in order to keep them informed. This way, you will manage to retain certain shoppers who may have otherwise switched to your competitors’ website.
7. Send an abandoned cart email series
The ecommerce industry loses around $18 billion annually due to abandoned carts, but by using an abandoned cart email series, you can encourage your shoppers to come back to your ecommerce store and finalize their purchase.
In addition to potentially recovering lost revenue, a well-executed abandoned cart email series can also enhance the customer experience.
8. Take advantage of seasonal promotions
Ecommerce sales vary across the months of the year, and significant increases in revenue can occur during festive seasons and holidays, provided you have effective ecommerce email marketing strategies in place to capitalize on these opportunities.
Keep an eye on the calendar when developing your ecommerce email marketing plan, as the last two months of the year, which are festive periods, are known to generate 30% more revenue compared to other months.
9. Track your results
In order to achieve the optimal return on your investment of time, effort, and money, it is essential to carefully monitor various aspects of ecommerce email marketing. These include important metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate.
If you do not keep track, you will not be aware of the specific area of your email campaign that requires improvement, which could lead to a significantly reduced return on investment. It is essential to identify your current status in order to make any improvements.
10. Everyone stops at basic segmentation. Go deeper. Get more personal.
If your email marketing is not achieving the desired conversions, the next step is for your email marketing team to try running multiple iterations of copy and design. However, the outcome remains relatively unchanged, with conversions still remaining low.
You are considering segmenting your recipient list, however, your team has conducted this based on surface-level data. The resulting personalization from this data does not have the capability to captivate your subscribers’ attention.
When considering this process, the main objective is to incorporate personalization in a way that connects with your subscribers. For example, if you operate an online food delivery company, sending relevant offers during lunchtime will increase the likelihood of your subscribers taking action.
By thinking in a step-by-step manner, you can rephrase the text as follows: The act of thinking in a systematic way will assist in keeping your emails relevant and, most importantly, prevent them from being sent to the spam folder. Additionally, this approach will result in a notable increase in click-through rates, open rates, and conversions. Incorporating a touch of personalization into your segmentation efforts can further enhance their effectiveness.
a) Getting the right product to the right customer
If a male athlete buys a pressure swimsuit from your eCommerce website that sells products for athletes, it would be logical to send them marketing emails containing earplugs or swim paddles. However, if you send them an email promoting the same product but in a different color, they will permanently designate your emails as spam.
The importance lies in good segmentation. Assess the roster and segment recipients according to their past purchases and potential additional needs derived from them.
b) Segment based on data (nail your target personas)
By thinking step by step, rephrase the following text while preserving the original meaning: “Utilizing data-driven segmentation can assist in developing more precise target personas, thereby enabling improved customization of emails for a more personalized user experience.”
Assuming you establish a persona named Corporate-Cindy, who is a woman working in a corporate job from 9 to 5 and has a fascination with fragrances, it can be presumed that she will most likely search for perfumes once her work is done due to her work schedule.
To confirm the validity of this persona, you can assess the number of subscribers who open your email offers after work. Using this data, you can send tailored emails to this particular list during the evening. Additionally, it would be beneficial to personalize the content within the emails for improved outcomes. This is necessary because strategies that succeed with a different list during various times may not be effective with this particular list during this specific time.
11. Be more human in your emails
Maintaining a friendly tone is considered one of the best email marketing ideas that rarely fails, as it is easier to interact with and gain the trust of friends rather than unfamiliar individuals.
When considering the tone of your email, also evaluate the return on investment for your email marketing campaign. Through split testing, assess the effectiveness of two different tones in terms of increasing engagement. Here are three suggestions to ensure that your tone sounds authentic rather than robotic.
a) Be creative with words
The manner in which you communicate with your subscribers is vital in inspiring them to open your emails. The words utilized prompt your subscribers to act. A pleasant-sounding headline has a higher likelihood of resonating with the subscriber compared to one that sounds impersonal.
To effectively engage your readers and subscribers, it is important to ensure that your emails and calls-to-action resonate with them on a personal level. Utilize segmentation strategically to cater to the diverse range of subscribers you have.
b) Send personalized offers
Elevate customer relations by offering personalized deals to targeted groups of subscribers. This approach will boost trust and loyalty towards your eCommerce brand. A prime instance of employing this strategy is by providing individualized birthday offers. Receiving a heartfelt birthday greeting along with an exclusive offer from the brand creates a sense of appreciation for the customer.
You have the ability to create offers specifically for customers who have been loyal to your platform for X number of years. It is more cost-effective and simpler to keep a previous customer rather than acquiring new ones.
While it is great to have revenue, it is important to also focus on your high-level goals, such as brand value and customer engagement. You must ensure that the revenue brings engagement, aids in brand building, and allows you to connect with your customers.
c) Staying true to your brand
Following data trails may sometimes detract from the human element, causing your email marketing campaign ideas to come across as salesy. It is important to ensure that your emails consistently align with your long-term brand objectives.
12. Revisit your email list every month (don’t stay stagnant)
It is beneficial to have a large number of subscribers, but it is important to remember to optimize it in order to increase conversions. If you do not regularly update your email list, you may miss out on improving conversions.
The logical course of action in this situation is to assess whether your team can achieve conversion goals through your email marketing strategies. If this is not possible, it is necessary to unsubscribe inactive subscribers, remove invalid email addresses, and eliminate email boxes that consistently classify your emails as spam.
In order to ensure the best condition of your mailing list, it is necessary to:
- Clean it up at least once a year. Think of this exercise as spring cleaning. You do it every year in your house and cleaning up the email subscribers list is kind of the same.
- Get rid of inactive subscribers. Make sure that the email addresses that your team is reaching out to are actually active. This can be done by checking how often they are being opened.
- Enable uniformity by using segmentation of your email list. This can also help you validate your list for a certain group of subscribers.
