An Email Marketing Guide: From Building a List to Lifecycle Automation
Did you know that the number of email users is expected to increase to 4.3 billion by the end of 2023? That’s more than half of the world’s total population. That proves how awfully you’ll miss out on a great opportunity if you ignore email marketing. You may think email marketing has become outdated due to the rapid growth of other digital marketing channels. But the truth is it is consistently performing well to maintain the healthy growth of your business. All you need to know is how to email marketing campaigns, implementing the right strategies.
What Actually Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing refers to the process of sending emails to prospective customers and existing customers to inform them about your products and offers, persuade them to buy from you, and build strong relationships with the customers. Well-crafted marketing emails can turn prospects into new customers and first-time buyers into loyal customers. And what’s the fun part of this digital marketing strategy? You can design the perfect marketing email and integrate an automation process to do the rest for you flawlessly. From list building to lifecycle automation, in this article, I’ve made everything easier for you.
What is Lifecycle Email Marketing?
Customers go through a journey when visiting an ecommerce website or buying from it. Different customers experience different courses on this journey. The following possible cases will help you understand how many ways online shoppers can interact with your website.
- A customer visits your shop for the first time
- Browses through the website and leaves
- Comes back for a second time
- Adds products to the cart but leaves without buying
- Completes their first order
- Comes back to the site after a few months to buy again
- Turns into a repeat customer
There are more lifecycle stages customers may experience. Lifecycle email marketing addresses these various lifecycle stages and sends customized emails to prospective customers according to their user behaviors and shopping experiences. For example, people who leave a cart midway without completing a purchase get cart abandonment emails from online stores. This practice of distinguished email marketing is called lifecycle email marketing. The good news is that, with the advancement of technology, now you can run a hassle-free marketing campaign by automating these lifecycle emails.
A Definitive Guide on Learning Email Marketing
Most online businesses are concerned about having a positive ROI. Email marketing is worth your investment since the average return on investment for every USD spent is 42 USD. There are several other benefits of using email marketing as a sales funnel, but this capability of ensuring higher ROIs is something remarkable. You should learn email marketing and implement that knowledge into your business to increase traffic and conversions.
Build Your Email List
Sending cold emails is a bad practice. You need to take permission from the sendee before sending them follow-up emails. There are many ways to collect subscribers, but subscribers need to willingly opt-in to receive emails from you. All you need to do is adopt techniques that will induce prospective customers to do so. For example, introduce landing pages equipped with artistic designs and well-written copies to attract leads. Gather valid email addresses from customer accounts. Keep opt-in input fields throughout the websites to encourage visitors to fill out the fields. Or you can employ other lead magnets to generate valuable email addresses.
Choose an Automation Tool
Most email campaigns require users to send hundreds of emails at the same time. This is a tedious task if someone intends to do it manually. Thanks to email service providers, these mundane tasks have become very straightforward with competent email marketing tools. Brainstorm well enough to come with well-optimized emails capable of generating more sales. Enter the email list into your automation application, and program the schedule as per your convenience. Now take a seat and enjoy the show. Email service providers will do the rest for you. You can get the best results by associating these automated tools with enterprise-level ecommerce platforms.
Abide by the Laws
Whatever you do should comply with regional rules and regulations. Email promotion is often termed permission marketing because of its nature. People can opt-in to receive your emails and unsubscribe from your email campaign at any time. Moreover, most developed countries have laws regarding personal data protection, SPAM messages, and other privacy breaches. Keep your marketing activities in alignment with the laws.
Send The Right Types of Emails
This step is very critical to the success of email marketing. You need to segment your email addresses into many different lists and send relevant and targeted emails to respective recipients. The chances are high that you will get substantial sales by sending the right type of emails to the right leads. A few types of emails are as such:
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails have the highest open rate of 47.1% compared to the average open rate of 21.6% open rate for other emails. This is because customers wait eagerly to receive such emails, whereas other emails usually annoy them. Order confirmation emails, receipts, shipping information, check-in emails, up-selling, and cross-selling emails are a few examples of transactional emails.
Promotional Emails
Whenever you introduce a new product, the best practice is to inform your subscribers about that. Even you can tailor personalized emails targeting specific segments of prospective customers. Offer them time-sensitive discounts and coupons. Send them special emails comprising exclusive offers during festive seasons. And, don’t forget the old-school method of sending regular newsletters. Make the best use of your content marketing via emails to increase traffic and sales.
Lifecycle Emails
We’ve already discussed lifecycle email marketing in one of the above sections. Lifecycle emails work the best as personalized emails. They target only a small segment of the customers; thus, they bring out the best results. Welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, first-order emails, win-back campaigns, loyalty programs, etc., are a few effective examples of lifecycle email marketing. These emails have the potential to lure prospective customers into buying something and increase conversions eventually.
Keep Track of the Metrics
Measure your success regularly to figure out how successful or failure your email marketing is. You should analyze meaningful data like open rate, click rate, and ROI from email campaigns. Anything over a 20% open rate is considered enough, and a 5% click-through rate is statistically significant. Most ecommerce websites generate about 20-30% of their yearly revenue from email marketing. If your emails are performing poorly compared to these metrics, we think you should rethink your strategy and make necessary changes to reap the benefits of email marketing.
Adopt Lifecycle Automation Technology
You need to take account of RFM, a database marketing term that stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value. Recency tells about the last purchase of a customer. Frequency implies how many times a customer buys something and monetary value refers to the accumulated value of all the buyer's orders to date. You can identify the lifecycle stages of any customer by utilizing these metrics. Define several customers such as new subscribers, one-time buyers, VIP customers, defecting customers, and cart abandoners. Integrate these segments into your email marketing tools and enable the automation process to target each segment precisely.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is including too much promotional content in emails. Don’t promote your products blatantly without providing any helpful and informative content. Keep the language and tone of your emails relevant to the customer segments you’re targeting. Build a list of quality leads and integrate advanced lifecycle automation to generate more sales and achieve your business goals.
Okommerce, an enterprise ecommerce platform that is designed to serve the needs of large-scale enterprises. If you are looking for a reliable, secure, and budget-friendly ecommerce platform, get Okommerce today.
