Ecommerce has seen unprecedented growth in the last year or two. Around $861.12 billion was spent online in the US in 2020, a massive 44% rise on the previous year. Of course, creating the ideal ecommerce website is a big part of building your brand, but you also have to market your brand well, and one main way of doing that is by email.
Sending and receiving emails is something most of us do on a regular basis. Over 300 billion emails are sent and received each day, and email penetration in the US is at 90.3%, so emails represent a great way for businesses to reach out to customers.
But with 59% of people saying that most email marketing they receive is not relevant to them, is it worth doing? Well, with an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent, and 27% of people visiting a company’s website after receiving an email, the answer would seem to be yes. But what practices should you follow to make your ecommerce email marketing a success?
Benefits of Email Marketing
In the age of social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, is there still a place for old-fashioned email marketing? The answer to that is most definitely yes. 77% of marketers are still using email to send personalized content to their customers.
But is the only benefit of email marketing those much-treasured conversions? While they remain our primary target, there are multiple benefits to be reaped from a sound email marketing strategy:
- Ability to connect with an ever-growing audience of potential leads.
- Quick and easy promotion of content and products and improving your SEO.
- Easy to automate processes that allow your marketing team to focus elsewhere.
- Cost effective when compared to paid advertising.
- Data collection by including email surveys and polls in your mails.
- Ability to collect reviews, feedback, and other UGC.
- Lets you nurture leads and reduce your churn rate.
- Quick start process even for a new business.
- You decide who your audience is.
- Ability to segment and personalize.
- Refine open rates With A/B testing.
To get all of those benefits, you need to do email marketing right. Hire an email marketing consultant if you have to, or equip yourself with email marketing know-how. Here are seven best practices in ecommerce email marketing ot help you on your way:
Frequency
If you bombard your target demographics with emails every single day, they will very likely end up in the trash folder and eventually they may even block your mails.
You need to find that sweet spot between sending too many and sending so few that you see no results from them. And with opt-out ability. Too many could lead to you losing that customer altogether.
While, beginning with an email your main motive should be capturing an email recipient’s attention for that you need a great salutation and opening sentence. That may also contain a survey or poll that can help define preferences for future mails. In all of your email marketing campaigns, it’s also important to check DMARC statistics, be aware of any malicious attacks that can happen so that you can keep your recipients safe.
You also want to save as much time as possible by sending multiple emails at once. While this may seem like you’re sacrificing personalizing your emails this doesn’t have to be the case. You can learn to send personalized mass emails with just a little practice and reap the benefits that come with it.
When you run a special campaign, you can increase frequency a little to highlight any offers. And if you use newsletters/bulletins, they should usually be from monthly to quarterly. Finding that balance may take a little time.
Welcome Email
You can easily. generate, deploy and send a welcome email with the help of Easysendy autoresponder.
As mentioned, it’s good to send a welcome mail when embarking on a ‘new relationship’ with a customer (or potential customer). Personalizing that email adds a nice extra touch the customer appreciates, but rather than a hard sell, that first mail should inform them of why they’re receiving it, what you do, and what they should expect as far as emails are concerned.
It’s best to send a welcome email as soon as possible after they have signed up or opted-in to receiving mails, so they remember. Set the tone you will use in all future emails and try to engage them at the same time (something informative like a blog link is a good touch). Also let them know the likely frequency of emails and you can include a light call to action if you want.
User-Generated Content
UGC has been one of the biggest buzzwords of recent years. 39% of internet users in the US have shared content from other people or organizations. With that in mind, integrating UGC into your marketing emails is a great idea. People like to see reviews and feedback from real customers rather than something made up by a member of your marketing team.
One of the primary advantages of UGC is that it can help to develop and build trust in your brand. It’s also a fantastic way of engaging people in the early stages of this new marketing relationship (but also in maintaining that relationship). And with a lot of UGC content being posted on social media, it is a good opportunity to get the customer to link there too.
Visually Engaging
If you send a purely text-based email, chances are it won’t engage the reader very much. This doesn’t mean that every email you send should include images of some sort, but they should be well-designed, engaging, and responsive.
You should also consider how your organization is branded in the email to make them instantly recognizable and appealing.
People like to see things. From only using audio calls, many of us have moved to teleconferencing meaning we can choose to see the people we talk to. So make your emails visually appealing and easy to understand.
And ensure any visual content is optimized for mobile use, too. Most of all, have your emails capture the reader’s attention at all times.
Analytics
In March 2020, 88.05% of ecommerce carts worldwide were abandoned. But well-crafted (and personalized) emails can help reduce the impact of cart abandonment.
Even if you’ve started your online store recently, setting up analytics is super imortant. Good analytics can track every aspect of your email marketing, from cart abandonment follow ups to special promotions. They are the best way of gaining insights into how different tactics work and should be used to determine future strategy as you see what has worked in the past and what has utterly failed.
Reviewing every part of your campaigns using analytics is essential.
Subject Line
A compelling subject line is as important as good content. A personalized subject line can mean around a 50% higher opening rate than a non-personalized line. Think of your subject line as the bait, the incentive to drive the customer to open – and then read – your email. You want it to grab the consumer’s attention and to make them want to know more.
There are various tactics you can use in addition to personalization. Ask them a pertinent question, highlight a benefit, or even provoke some sort of reaction.
If people aren’t attracted by that subject line, then they will likely delete your email. Remember, marketing by email is very different to marketing by telephony; with email you have that one brief chance to engage the customer.
A/B Testing
While your analytics will inform you of the success of campaigns and strategies, A/B testing looks closer at those campaigns to see which emails worked better than others. Just as you would test different pages on your website, you do this by constructing different variations of your emails, with differing subject lines, content, images, calls to action, etc.
By sending these variations to different groups on your email list, you can gauge how well each variation works. Success can be based on your CTR (click through rate), conversions, etc. However, success can also be influenced by the health and cleanliness of your email list.
While this is very much a trial and error process, it can help you identify which combinations of factors work best in any eCommerce email campaign and can guide you for future strategies.
The Takeaway
Having a great online store is only part of the solution. How you communicate – with customers and with other businesses – is also important, and more and more businesses use SIP trunks to do this. But at the heart of driving new customers to your website, and retaining the ones you already have, is a good, solid marketing strategy.
Ideally, you want to have a foundation of private cloud hosting for your communications platform. That platform should also allow for integration of good email marketing tools that make implementing good practices easy and straightforward.
If you are new to eCommerce email marketing, do not expect instant success. Finding the right path can take some time.
But we see that email marketing still works and that it offers a great ROI. And while it can be frustrating finding that perfect formula, when you do find it, it can pay big dividends. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and imagine what would make you want to open a marketing email and then follow any call to action.
