Table of Contents :
-
Why does email marketing matter for eCommerce businesses?
-
Create great ROI
In essence, the primary purpose of any business is to maximize profits for its owners. With a well-planned strategy and a little bit of grit, it's not difficult for you to develop an email campaign that drives sales.
Email marketing is on the top of strategies that have the highest return on investment, standing 4300%. It means that for each dollar you invest in email marketing, your company gets back $43.
There are 4 main reasons behind this impressive figure:
- With email marketing, you can send email targeting to a particular segment on your email list. Your messages will be sent to the right audience, hence increasing the effectiveness of email marketing compared to other kinds of strategy
- Create an authentic connection between your business and your target audience. With the right personalization, you can easily build a 1 vs 1 conversation with the recipients using video, surveys, etc.
- The email content can be changed to aim at different customer segments as well as server specific marketing purpose (launch new products, send company updates' raise brand awareness, and so forth).
- Merchants can use trigger-based marketing to activate the automation of sending your customers messages when they abandon their carts or inactive for a while. This convenience creates an instant response to any customers' activities on your website.
-
Extremely measureable
The truth is email marketing is one of the most extraordinary measurable forms of marketing. All the stats like open rate, click-through rate, to bounce rate give a clear view of your email.
campaign performance.
Furthermore, with the support of advanced analytics, you can even check:
- Metrics for all created campaigns across your subscriber lists
- Metrics for specific campaigns
- Metrics for specific subscriber segments
With this data, eCommerce businesses can identify the most and least engaged subscribers as well as which campaigns are well-performing and which are not. Then, pinpoint areas that require improvement to deliver better results.
Moreover, these metrics illustrate valuable insights into your subscribers' behaviors and interests when applied to particular segments. You can define the kinds of content that groups respond best to, then use them to steer your marketing efforts.
-
Adequate to multiple marketing purposes
-
Reduce their cart abandonment rate
Even the most well-known brands have to deal with cart abandonment rates. To someone, it seems not a big problem; however, an increasing number of customers abandoning their carts can be a massive loss to businesses.
In fact, approximately 75.6% of carts are abandoned , according to SaleCycle. One of the most effective ways used by most marketers to regain that loss is sending emails. Why? Look at these statistics below:
- Over 40% of cart abandonment emails are opened
- 21% of the opened emails received click-throughs
- 50% of recipients who clicked on that emails complete their purchases
-
Reactivate inactive customers via mailings
-
Reward loyal customers
Needless to say, a business without its customers' support is nothing!
One problem that happens to most brands is building up a successful relationship that repeatedly brings those individuals back.
Email is probably the most suitable channel for a business to launch their loyalty program because of its personalization. You can reward customers who have reached a particular milestone, for instance, sending more than $100.
Unlike the experience when shopping offline, sending appreciation emails to your beloved customers gives them a sense of reassurance while still showing your brand's human face.
Considering using some tactics below to pack real value into your reward emails:
- Give visibility to your rewards programs by displaying point balance and VIP tier in all sent emails
- Maximize your referrals by including referral codes to customers with multiple purchases. This action can entice the brand's loyal customers to easily share the link with their friends, creating a win-win relationship between e-store and purchasers
- Motivate repeat customers to redeem their rewards by reminding how much points they need to get rewards as well as upgrade their accounts to a higher tier
- Send your VIP customer a value-packed email to thank them for the time and effort they put into reaching the top tier in your loyalty system. Some of the best ways to reward your loyal customers are sending bonus points or free products, offering an exclusive early access sale or limited discounts for any products in the store, etc.
Look at how Scout & Co sends regular reminders to their members about how close they are to the next reward.
-
Ask for user-generated content through emails
User-generated content has always been a highly-concerned topic for digital marketers over the past few years. Especially when it comes to the eCommerce industry, the influence of this kind of content is far more significant than physical stores.
This is understandable as for online shopping; purchasers have no choice but to assess a product's quality via its comments and feedback. In fact, according to Podium.com , up to 93% of customers admit that their purchase decisions are affected by online reviews.
Other significant advantages of user-generated content:
- Improve your organic presence
- Understand your customers and better improve their shopping experience for the next time purchasing
- Obtain customers' feedback, testimonials, referrals
- One of the most cost-effective way to engage with audience members
The most widely used tactic to get these kinds of reviews, feedback from customers is via email. And the best time for this action is after someone experiences your products.
Below is an example of Chapelle Jewellery's review request email delivering great personalization using a signature message - a nice touch can increase conversion even better.
In other words, the action triggering the requested email should be purchasing your products. However, you should let your customers have time to actually use what you offer.
So the ideal time to send emails asking for feedback should be 3-7 days after customers received their parcels.
-
Support eCommerce sales
The functionality of email on a business's strategy doesn't stop at reminding customers about your brand. It's also a powerful tool you have as an eCommerce business to keep in touch with your customers about their orders.
Online merchants can use email to send track numbers, thanks notes, an order confirmation sales event announcement, and more. Emails can be used in different ways to strengthen the relationship between brands and customers.
Some kind of emails that mostly used to boost engagement with the brand's existing customers:
- Retention emails
- Mails aimed at improving customer satisfaction (feedback asking email, product's instructions mails, etc)
- Birthday, anniversary mailings
- Abandoned shopping cart emails
-
Do you need email marketing automation?
Navigation links are text links that show up for your product pages and categories across your website.
The truth is 61% of today's customers take email as their most preferred method of communication from the business. However, automation now becomes a trend that is widely used by digital marketers on email marketing because of its effectiveness and convenience.
6 mains reasons why email marketing automation is indispensable:
- Allows marketers to create highly segmented email lists that can be automatically updated based on the brand's user data
- Include advanced technology that helps e-stores easily convert prospects into actual purchasers
- Create several conditions to activate the auto-sending features on different events, which increases the efficiency of the email marketing strategy
- More easily engage with both potential and current customers by delivering them a more personalized and timely message
- Reduce the workload of marketers on managing and monitoring all email campaigns at the store's backend
- Provide valuable insight of customers via details reports of each email campaign, which helps you send triggered emails at the exact time your leads are most likely to convert
Not all brands are ready to incorporate automated email marketing into their marketing strategy to fear that their message will be less personalized or the email service can be wasteful spending.
However, with email automation software, marketers and merchants can get more effective ways to gather their subscribers' information. Furthermore, make your email strategy more personalized.
If you connect your store to Magento 2 Follow Up Email extension , you can own a powerful email creation system to create exact customer segments and make a chain of automated emails based on customers' activities.
Furthermore, it also comes with a powerful A/B testing feature and detailed reports to manage and monitor each email campaign with high effectiveness.
-
7 tips on increasing sales with email marketing?
So what can you do to leverage your email campaigns? Below are 7 tips you should know for more effective eCommerce email marketing campaigns:
- Never start an email campaign without customer segmentation. By identifying who your email's recipients are, you can offer your customer group the things they really wish to (a discount code, instruction of product usage, order confirmation, etc.)
- Choose the right time to schedule your emails. Through many data of old email campaigns, you can easily know which types of emails your customers are engaged with and which time they are most likely to convert
- Create personalized email lists for your campaigns. Personalize your emails by using relevant content or based on the audience segments to make your message more valuable and worth opening for the recipients
- Make sure your content is engaging, and keep optimizing it through different email campaigns. Analyze your email results and use these data to optimize the content of your email for each segment
- Take advantage of social proof for a higher engagement and get out the most of the word power for your emails
- Phone responsiveness. Whenever designing your email campaigns, you really need to focus on how it will display on all the devices, not just the desktop. With just a single element on your email doesn't work, your whole effort wastes
- Focus on your mailing frequency. A suitable sending frequency to keep your brand on top of customers' options, at the same time, doesn't create any unnecessary annoyance to the recipients
-
The bottom line!
When you read here, we believe that you have seen how vital email marketing is to your eCommerce business. It's time for you to jump into action and make it worth your while. Your job now is to map out some goals for your email strategy and create a campaign for each goal. Then, launch it with an automated email system that can help you scale your email campaigns.
Not only can emails regain customers who leave their carts, but they also remind those who go inactive for a while.
The purpose of sending reactivation emails is to remind customers about your brands. Even though they open the email without making any purchase, you still create some thoughts about your brand in customers' minds.
If sending reactivation emails doesn't work, you might consider removing inactive ones from your email lists in order to focus on genuinely potential customers.