How it Works, What Makes it Effective, and Doing it Right With 7 Strategies.
In eCommerce, email marketing is a strategy using email for product or service promotion by online stores. The marketing strategy focuses on bringing potential customers to engage with a brand and eventually buy the ticket.
With $42 earned per $1 spent on email marketing today, it continues to become one of the most sought-after strategies. And with the prediction of 4.3 billion users in 2023, emails will remain as one of the most utilized forms of digital communication that businesses will have to leverage.
Email marketing can contribute to increased engagement, customer loyalty, information dissemination, virality, conversions, and revenue.
Why is Email Marketing Vital for eCommerce?
Email marketing presents crucial contributions to the achievement of business success. They can pack immense benefits when you implement them correctly.
Email marketing is an awareness enabler for developing brands. They can help build credibility as you can use them to establish trustworthy relationships with your audience.
Additionally, you can effectively use email marketing to generate leads, boost your site traffic, and increase conversions and sales.
Here are 7 Email Marketing Strategies That Can Help Boost Your Sales.
- List Segmentation & Email Customization
- Address Capturing
- Lead Nurturing
- User Onboarding
- Re-engaging Passive Users
- Retrieving Abandoned Carts
- Cross-Selling & Upselling
Strategy No. 1: List Segmentation & Email Customization
First of all, you have to prepare for all kinds of people that you will engage in your business emails. Remember that not everyone is on the same level of relationship with you.
Some consumers are those that you just met, some who regularly shop with you, some that are losing interest, and others. Remember that you cannot say the same thing to each of them – you have to personalize and say the right message to the right person.
Studies have found that emails having personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates than those that don’t.
Personalized emails mean that you are calling the recipient by their name in a newsletter or mentioning a person’s company during onboarding and other business-to-client engagements.
Of course, you wouldn’t have the time to name and label your emails one by one. Luckily, there are tools you can use to automate personalized emails.
Here are 7 tools you can use to personalize your emails:
- Omnisend (www.omnisend.com)
- Drip (www.drip.com)
- Mailchimp (www.mailchimp.com)
- Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
- Infusionsoft (www.infusionsoft.com)
- Mailjet (www.mailjet.com)
- ConvertKit (www.convertkit.com)
These platforms do more than just automation.
When you maximize your use of these tools, you can use them to run your email campaigns seamlessly. However, you would need to take a significant amount of time and effort to perfect your use of them.
Also, these tools will not generate the stems of your copy – you will have to write a set of emails for each segment of your mailing list. For example, for newsletters, you might have to write 50-100 emails of 300-500 words each – that’s just for one of the subgroups.
As a business owner, you might be stretched across many different crucial parts of your operation. You probably manage human resources, production quality, product development, expansion, and more.
Also, you most probably are more of a product expert than an email marketer.
If so, it would be best to outsource your email marketing to an expert team like the Kas Andz Marketing Group.
Doing so will help you save money by avoiding trial and error misjudgments.
Imagine running an erratic email campaign and having hundreds of your target audience losing trust in you because they found your mails spammy. Worse to win them back and redeem your reputation, you will have to pay for more customer acquisition costs. The costs can be severe.
Do your email marketing the smart way.
Strategy No. 2: Address Capturing
After determining the different people and levels of engagement you will have to target with your emails, you will have to get suitable email addresses. After all, who will you send the emails to if you don’t have recipients?
Here are 7 tips you can use to capture email addresses:
- Contests will help you get leads – tell winners to share their email addresses to receive prizes.
- Complaint forms will let cart abandoners tell you their problems and send you their email addresses.
- Use exit pop-ups to stop bouncing users by offering discount codes they will receive by inputting their email addresses.
- Offer discounts or freebies like an eBook or recipe on your pages that users will receive by sending you their email address.
- Bait addresses with free exclusive subscriptions – this will give you a list of people who are interested in potentially upgrading their relationship with you.
- Do not dismiss the “sign-up for newsletters” forms because they will show you who actually wants your newsletters – they are higher-up leads.
- Offer free trials that will require their email address.
Strategy No. 3: Lead Nurturing
You can nurture your generated leads into loyal clients by providing them with valuable content that will entirely engage them into conversion.
One part of lead nurturing is sending them high-value newsletters.
Your newsletters must show them that you care about them – share tips that they can practically use. And do not make your newsletters sound corporate – tell a story instead.
Keep things exciting and engaging and sandwich the valuable educational content within the copy.
For example, if you are a hot sauce company, you can send a newsletter that talks about the holidays and how the family gathers around a lovely meal. Then, teach them a familiar recipe with a few twists while subtly using your product.
Simply link your online shopping menu to one of the instances that you mention your brand name.
The more your leads spend time reading your newsletters and trusting them as valuable sources of information that interests them, the easier it is for you to convert them entirely.
Strategy No. 4: User Onboarding
Onboarding emails are sent to those who just bought the ticket. These are introductory emails that you send to those who recently became your clients.
Firstly, you will have to send a welcome email. Make sure that you make them feel welcome and comfortable and that you create a positive first impression.
Remember that a welcome email has an 82% chance of getting opened. You don’t want to leave a bad impression.
Make sure you give something of value like a discount or a free knowledge resource.
You can continue engaging these customers after two to three onboarding mails. What you can send are stories or expert tips that will fortify their trust in your expertise as a brand.
Strategy No. 5: Re-engaging Passive Users
Use this email marketing strategy to win back customers or users who start losing interest in your brand, services, or products.
Draw their attention and invite them back to your website by using one of the underlying principles of an exit pop-up – make them an offer that they can not refuse.
The trick here is all in the quality of the copy. You have to be significantly emphatic and convincing, stirring their emotions and gaining back their interest.
Also, the timing will do some convincing. See if you can get the message through on a holiday, payday, or birthday.
Strategy No. 6: Retrieving Abandoned Carts
The average rate for cart abandonment for all businesses is 69.57%. Hence, you shouldn’t be afraid if you’re experiencing a similar rate, but you should always find a way to reduce the numbers.
Emails are your best way to retrieve abandoned carts because you can deeply engage people.
What you need to do is to remind them of the value of the items that they added to the cart. Also, you could give them an incentive in the form of, for example, a 20% discount when they checkout within one hour and 10% within 24 hours.
Strategy No. 7: Cross-selling & Upselling
For cross-selling or motivating visitors to buy more, you can offer products in your emails that will complement the customer’s order. You can provide items that match perfectly with the products that a shopper selected or bought.
On the other hand, you can upsell via emails.
Send more options and different models of a product to clients who have made an order or purchase.
Highlight the value that the customer will get after buying your more expensive products.
You Need Email Marketing
If you have not yet, you need to integrate email marketing into your business. Doing so promises a 4200% ROI that you will enjoy and love – a significant help when pushing for commerce expansion.
All it takes is the right personnel with excellent expertise and experience.
Get a free primary consultation!
FAQs
Why should I personalise my email newsletters?
People no longer respond to robotic emails. They already consider them spammy and robotic.
Personalised emails stand out as extremely relevant, tailor-made content.
Emails that are personalised are more likely to be opened and clicked on. And by sending the correct content to the right people at the right time, personalized emails improve customer experiences.
Is email marketing enough to boost my sales?
Email marketing can help you save lost customers, funnel in new ones, and get a significant increase in sales when done right.
But of course, you will also need to make sure that your eCommerce website is a pleasure to use. So you will need conversion rate optimization.
Also, you need to make sure that people searching on Google who type in keywords related to your product will find your content. So you will need search engine optimization.
Also, there are other marketing methods that should supplement your email campaigns. For example, PPC or advertising which you can use to bring people directly to your website or build an email list.
Why should I hire an email marketing agency?
Email marketing entails many aspects and work, including highly technical requisites. For example, you have market research, A/B testing, personalization, content creation, writing, automation, and more.
If you are an eCommerce business owner who is already busy doing operations, HR, production, expansion and other vital aspects of your company, you will need someone else to focus on emails.
If you get KAMG, you have a team of senior email experts doing your campaigns, ensuring that you maximise your marketing ROI.
