15 Email Marketing Tips for a Successful Ecommerce Business
Digital marketing has surely added a new dimension to the ecommerce industry, but email marketing is still one of the best ROI-driven marketing strategies out there. Social media marketing paid ads, organic traffic, and other marketing channels come with promising outcomes. Email marketing has been there from the beginning of ecommerce for its excellent efficacy. A well-designed email marketing campaign can earn an impressive ROI of up to 4200%. It would help if you learned the right tactics to reap such benefits of ecommerce email marketing.
How Important Is Email Marketing for Ecommerce?
Ecommerce email marketing emphasizes reaching out to prospective customers by offering them promotional deals, discounts, newsletters, and other info about your business based on their user behaviors. Interestingly, email marketing contributes to almost 23% of the total sales of an ecommerce business. 79% of web users have social media accounts, whereas 92% have at least one email address. Email related to transactions has an amazing open rate of 85%, which is very high compared to the average open rate (15-25%) of marketing emails. All these numbers speak in favor of ecommerce email marketing. That's the reason why you should run an email marketing campaign to strengthen your sales funnel.
Email Marketing Tactics to Generate More Sales
Email marketing is important to increase your sales and build a strong relationship with your customers. It plays a vital role in helping ecommerce business owners achieve their growth goals. The following steps will help you start a successful ecommerce email marketing campaign.
1. Start with a Plan
When you have well-defined goals, it becomes easier to attain them. Nothing in life works well without prior planning. The same thing goes for email marketing. Search for a few factors before starting an email marketing campaign. Who are your target email receivers? What outcomes do you expect, and how to get that? How can you successfully increase conversions with email marketing? Do you have enough resources to automate this ecommerce email marketing process? Start your journey once you know the answers to all these questions.
2. Build an Email List
No matter how amazingly you craft an email, it won't serve your purpose without having a mailing list full of prospective customers. It would help if you employed multiple lead generation funnels to collect these email addresses. You have to entice customers with attractive copies to encourage them to use your lead magnet. With a well-targeted email campaign, customers will provide their email addresses willingly. Collect as many quality leads as possible and give your marketing campaign a leg-up to win the competition. A few lead magnet ideas are as follows.
- Landing Pages
- Email Subscription
- Log-in Details
- Checklists
- Ebooks & Guides
- Free Courses
- Video Content
- Free Trials
- Discounts & Coupons
- Templates & Examples
- Quizzes
- Webinars
- Giveaways & Contest
3.Create Several Segments
Primary email lists consist of email addresses encompassing all kinds of customers. You need to carefully divide them into several segments regarding the customer’s demographics, loyalty, user behavior, shopping habits, and other considerations. Try to delve into the psychographics of your customers and create personalized segments targeting prospective buyers from different groups. You shouldn't send the same email to a new customer and a loyal customer. Segment your email lists keeping the age, income level, marital status, gender, personality, attitude, interests, and lifestyle of the customers in mind.
4. Employ a Welcome Email Series
When someone signs up for your newsletter, they actually want to hear from you right away. So it’s a good practice to hook them up with your business as soon as possible. The welcome email open rate is 86% higher than that of typical marketing emails. That's why we suggest you send welcome emails to new subscribers and let them expect more shortly.
5. Send Personalized Emails
This step is closely connected to email segmentation. Everyone doesn't react the same way when exposed to the same things. Therefore, it's critical in ecommerce to determine user personas correctly. Analyze your target audience and craft emails targeting them precisely. Tailored emails keep customers happy and make them feel special. For example, you can offer exclusive discounts for your returning customers and send promotional emails to all subscribers. You can also segment your recipients based on the number of orders they placed, such as customers with no order, one order, multiple orders, and cart abandoners. This sort of personalization increases customer engagement, loyalty, traffic, and sales.
6. Craft Responsive & Easy-to-read Emails
A large number of customers check emails on their cell phones. So, it would help if you considered mobile responsiveness as your top priority while designing your email layout. Make sure users find the emails easy to read and fitted to the screen sizes of their devices. Keep the fonts and spaces clutter-free, and implement visually appealing designs to increase the readability.
7. Engage Customers in Many Ways
Your campaign will be labeled as successful if customers react just the way you intended. So, guide them well in making a decision. If they already bought something from you, ask for feedback and reviews. Then, encourage them to take part in a referral program and get incentives in return.
You can track information when visitors end up selecting an out-of-stock product, add something to their wishlist, leave the cart without buying using a quality enterprise ecommerce platform. Then, use this data and send abandoned cart emails to customers who left the cart midway.
And notify customers about replenishment and wishlist items. You can also send them emails comprising recommended products that are related to a purchase they made before. Such cross-selling and upselling have the potential to increase revenue to a great extent.
8. Create Inducing Subject Lines
The subject line of an email is the first thing that can impress a receiver. You’ll get a higher open rate only if the subject lines look click-worthy. Create interesting subject lines that align with the needs and desires of your target audience. Make them feel that the email contains something valuable for them. People are more likely to open an email if they think it might be beneficial to them.
9. Have a Clear CTA
Don’t confuse customers with too many options to choose from. A clear call-to-action renders more user engagement than multiple CTAs. Your CTA doesn’t have to be totally sales-oriented. Focus on building long-term relationships. Guide users in such a way that if they don’t buy something from you right away, they’ll surely purchase soon.
10. Integrate Tools & Automation
You need to send emails to hundreds of customers when running an ecommerce email marketing campaign. So, you can't manage such campaigns smoothly without using any email marketing tool. These tools can effectively send emails to thousands of recipients simultaneously. Moreover, you can craft a scheduled email, input the email addresses in the specific field, and forget about the campaigns. Automation-enabled email marketing tools will send all your emails timely, making no mistake. Automation makes this painstaking process easier and allows users to run hassle-free email marketing campaigns.
11. Make Use of Multimedia Content
It’s getting tougher each day to draw users’ attention and hook them into the content. The average attention span of internet users is alarmingly low. Only text-based content is not enough to engage customers; You need to add interesting and eye-catchy visuals to your emails. Videos, GIFs, images, designed graphics, etc., are popular forms of multimedia content that can up your email marketing game.
12. Use a Friendly Tone in Language
The tone of your email body has the ability to connect the readers; at the same time, it can also make them feel alienated. So, it’s important to use proper language in emails in keeping with the age, sex, and persona of the target recipients. It would help if you weren’t talking to a 40 years old person the same way you talk to a teenager. Ensure the language of your mails reflects the demographics of your target market. Moreover, people don’t have time to read unnecessarily long emails. Keep your emails short, to the point, and engaging. Don’t sound boring or salesy. Every character counts, so add relevant information with a bit of humor to increase customer engagement.
13. Maintain Your Brand Consistency
Every brand has a logo, color palette, slogan, fonts, and language of its own. These elements help brands stand out from the crowd. Ensure that your brand has consistency across all marketing channels. Uphold your brand identity in every way possible. Engage your marketing and research team and ask them to align these branding elements for your online store, website, promotional materials, emails, social media, blogs, and more.
14. Stay Out of Spam Folders
The first challenge to having a successful email campaign is to stay out of spam folders. All your efforts and investment will go to waste if the sent emails don’t reach your inbox. In addition, customers will never open your emails if they never see them. So, avoiding the spam folder is a must to increase the open rate. Learn about how you can help your emails stay out of spam folders and reach the inboxes.
15. Measure Your Success & Test Your Marketing Campaigns
This step is equally important for every aspect of your marketing activities. Each campaign comes with a customer acquisition cost. After all the hard work and investment, it’s really upsetting to end up with a low email open rate. So, measure the success of your email marketing campaigns. If the result isn’t satisfactory, change the subject lines, designs, and email body content to increase open rate, traffic, and sales. You should conduct A/B testing on a few email formats to find out which version brings the most traffic and sales for your online store.
We have only shown you the path to success. Now that you know the way let’s work to reach your destination. Keep testing and tweaking your email components until you’re satisfied with the results. Once you get optimal outcomes, keep that campaign running and reap its benefits to the fullest. Ecommerce email marketing is a continuous process. I hope you can increase your traffic and sales by following these proven tactics.
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