If you’ve decided to join the eCommerce revolution and set up your very own eCommerce store, here comes the hard, but fun, part: you need to make sure your e-store stands apart from the competition and continues making sales throughout the whole year, not just during the major holidays.
Promoting and growing your eCommerce website can be a laborious task, especially if you don’t know where to start.
But this article will show you that it’s not that hard. There’s a number of tried and tested eCommerce marketing strategies that you can apply to your own business.
We’re sharing 16 email marketing tips that will help you optimize your eCommerce campaigns for higher clicks, opens, and engagement. Let’s get started.
Why Email Marketing?
Of course, email marketing is not the only way to approach eCommerce customers. You can also consider other options like social media, content marketing, SEO, SEM, or affiliate marketing. They are all effective, but if you had to choose only one marketing channel, we suggest email marketing.
Why? Because of the high ROI. According to the Data & Marketing Association, email generates nearly $40 in return for every one dollar spent. In addition, email continues to rank as the top digital marketing channel in terms of effectiveness. And the best part? It’s low cost. Once you’ve got permission from your contacts, you can continue running email campaigns without worrying about huge money investments.
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Use ecommerce email marketing to facilitate the customers’ journey
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it works great across the entire customer lifecycle, from acquiring leads to converting them into customers, and even turning them into brand advocates!
How to Use Email Marketing for Customer Acquisition
If you want your eCommerce business to survive, you’ll need to find a way to continue attracting new customers.
Probably the best option is to use landing pages and email signup forms that ask your website visitors to join your email list. Once you have their email address, you can stay in touch by sending them updates about special promotions or offers. To convince prospects to sign up, offer something in return like a discount code, free delivery, receiving exclusive offers, etc.
Another option to consider is cold email outreach.
Despite what some of you might be thinking, cold emailing is still alive and kicking. Depending on the industry, average email open rates vary from about 15% to nearly 30%.
However, in order for cold emailing to be successful, it needs to be executed the right way. Getting people to open your cold emails isn’t easy – they don’t know your company or what it does, so why should they open your email? Using a powerful email outreach tools can be of great help, but you still need to write a perfect copy and make an irresistible offer in order to convince your leads to open and read your mail.
Here are a few tips that will help you pull it off:
- Let people know who you are. An email signature is a great way to introduce your brand and products in a non-intrusive way.
- Master your subject lines. 35% of recipients said they open emails based on the subject line alone.
- Test. A/B testing your subject line can boost open rates by nearly 50%.
- Make your cold emails personal. Including the recipient’s name in the subject line can increase your open rate by more than 20%.
- Keep it short. Nobody wants to spend their precious time reading a lengthy and detailed email from an unknown person or business.
How to Use Email Marketing for Conversion
Running promotional campaigns or blowout sales will only work for people who are ready to buy your products. As for the prospects that aren’t ready to give you their money yet, you can run lead nurturing campaigns.
Lead nurturing campaign is a series of emails that are sent on the basis of a lead’s behavior, with an aim to turn that lead into a buying customer. The goal of these campaigns is to build a relationship between your brand and your prospects by offering additional value.
Commonly, lead nurturing is used for:
- Customer onboarding campaigns, i.e. campaigns used to turn prospects into buyers;
- Re-engagement campaigns that aim to win-back leads who have made a purchase in the past or showed an intent to do so;
- Top of mind campaigns, i.e campaigns that aim to make your brand the first choice for people who are interested in your products but still aren’t ready to make a purchase.
If you’re planning to run lead nurturing campaigns, consider using a marketing automation tool to make the process much simpler and faster. A marketing automation tool will make it easy to send the right content, to the right contacts, at the right time.
How to Use Email Marketing for Retention
Repeat sales that lead to high CLV (customer lifetime value) and email campaigns are a great way to ensure you get these sales. That’s because email campaigns can be used in a number of ways to build brand loyalty and boost customer engagement.
You can use emails to retain your eCommerce customers in multiple ways. Some of the best examples include:
- Cart abandonment emails, which you can also use to ask potential customers for feedback on your site or the reason why they abandoned their cart.
- Post-purchase follow-up campaigns that are also great for strengthening customer loyalty, increasing product reviews, and offering best-selling products.
- Loyalty campaigns in which you will offer discounts for new products to existing customers.
11 Reasons why email marketing is important for ecommerce growth
Email marketing is not just a strategy, it can be a game-changer for your ecommerce business. This digital marketing strategy can be effectively used by online retailers to transcend mere sales figures and foster long-term growth.
Take an in-depth look at why email marketing for ecommerce should be used for amplifying your business.
1. Much More Personal and Customizable
Email marketing serves the most important aspect of your ecommerce branding, i.e. to offer personalized solutions to its customers. In fact, through these emails, your customers get a personalized touch of your brand and it also helps them stay connected by offering them valuable and informative content.
According to SmarterHQ, almost 72% of the customers are likely to engage with only those brand messages that are personalized. At any stage of the buyer’s journey, if they feel that the personalization is lacking, they might switch to your competitor’s brand.
Often brands personalize their promotional emails by including the customer’s name in it, but there are other ways as well that will help personalize your emails.
- By analyzing your customer’s past purchases and showing them some similar items that they would love to purchase
- By sending them hyper-targeted emails on multivariable segments about your brand or company that they will find interesting to read about.
- Adding a personalized CTA to your emails as per your potential customer’s buying journey stage.
As personalizing emails is a time-consuming task, you can use email marketing automation tools to give your emails a personalized touch. While doing so, ensure that your emails target specific buying behaviours of your audience and perfectly resonate with them.
2. Quite Effective for Reaching a Broad Audience
According to a report by Statista, every couple of hours almost 52% of people check their email inbox. This is the reason why ecommerce businesses should opt for email marketing!
With an average opening rate of around 30%, email makes it easier to promote your marketing messages across a wider audience. What makes email marketing for e-commerce even more effective is how competently it covers the complete customer journey.
Brands can effectively use personalized emails like welcome emails to attract them with killer discounts and offers. Once the customer gets enticed and takes some action, you can send them transactional emails. You can notify them via sending shipping updates, order confirmations, etc.
Through email marketing, you can also send bulk emails to your subscriber list at a go. This includes weekly newsletters and announcements related to new products or seasonal sales.
3. Offers Advanced Audience Segmentation
With email marketing, you can build your email list and segment them based on different metrics. You can segment your audience on the basis of their user behaviour like purchase history, browsing patterns, email engagement, etc.
Marketers can also segment audiences depending on their demographic information. This includes their gender, location, age, etc. Segmenting your subscriber list will help you tailor your messages accordingly, and this will facilitate more targeted communication.
By utilizing this advanced segmentation data, marketers can easily personalize their email content. This also allows them to personalize the frequency and timing of their emails.
4. Extremely Measurable and Real-Time Trackable
An additional factor that makes it effective for marketers to utilize email marketing for ecommerce is that it’s quite easy to measure. Perhaps, when it comes to tracking the success and effectiveness of marketing campaigns, email marketing ranks at the top.
It provides you with different statistics that will help you track your audience’s behaviour and other engagements. Here are some key email marketing metrics on the basis of which you measure email marketing campaigns:
- Open rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate – Help you analyze your email copy and design’s effectiveness. It also indicates whether your audience likes your offers or not.
- Spam complaint rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate – Provides a clear window of how robust your subscriber list is. In case your customers are not liking your messages, then they will either mark them as spam or unsubscribe them.
- List growth rate, and email sharing rate – Indicates whether your messages have gained popularity among new customers. It also helps you track whether your messages are able to drive your audience’s attention or not.
Measuring this vast data is a treasure trove for ecommerce businesses as it assists them with figuring out which brand message connects well with their target audience.
5. Augments Brand Awareness
For ecommerce marketing, marketers usually make use of social media but emails also operate well. With the help of this email toolbox, marketers target your potential customers to the ecommerce service page and turn them into your lifetime fans.
The best ecommerce email marketing campaign has the ability to reach the private inbox of your customers. The professionals focus on creating a community by using a well-designed email campaign.
These personalized email messages not only form a connection between your customers and the brand but also make them realize that they are a part of the family. By sending personalized emails to your customers regarding the news and updates about the company, the awareness about the brand is increased.
6. Act as a Lead Generating Tool
Email marketing for ecommerce can be considered as a part of an effective lead generation mechanism. Through targeted marketing, it attracts the attention of your customers who persist in the different stages of your buying cycle. These emails try to compel the audiences by displaying their products from time to time. In this way, these brands indulge in cross-selling through emails with the aim of selling more items.
Marketers analyze the buyer personas and then based on that create a targeted email list. The personalized emails sent to their inbox contain contents considering every stage of the buyer’s journey- starting from research to read-to-buy.
These emails can be customized as per your business needs and can easily reach a million inboxes. This is probably one of the biggest advantages that email marketing holds. The more targeted and personalized your emails will be, the more effective it will be for your ecommerce business and brand.
7. Its Cost-Effective
It is an undeniable fact that emails are considered to be the most affordable marketing channels among all others. With every penny spent on email marketing, you ensure to get good returns. This involves various reasons.
While scrolling social media channels, your audience might get easily distracted and might miss your promotional messages. On the other hand, if your email campaign is solid and to the point, chances are high that your audience will go through it.
Another reason that proves why email marketing for ecommerce is the most cost-effective solution is that your customers agree to receive your emails and newsletters in their inboxes. These emails can also help your business recover the potentially lost sales by targeting those customers who have abandoned your cart.
8. Integrates Well with Other Marketing Channels
What makes email marketing much more helpful for brands and businesses is its omnichannel integration. Email marketing integrates extensively well with blogs and other social media channels to create a marketing ecosystem that is a cohesive one.
To power these integrations reliably, many ecommerce businesses rely on email API services that offer robust APIs for seamless connectivity with CRMs, marketing platforms, and custom applications.
This unified approach of cross-promoting your brand across all marketing channels improves your overall marketing efforts. In fact, email marketing also offers retargeting opportunities to those customers who have previously interacted with any of your marketing channels. Thus, in a way, it blocks the loop of your marketing efforts.
9. Free from All Algorithm Changes
Another thing that makes email marketing for ecommerce the best option is that email platforms are independent of any changes in the algorithms.
Unlike email marketing, search engine marketing and social media marketing are deeply affected by algorithm changes. Thus, promoting your brand on these platforms might drastically affect your reach. However, email marketing offers a direct line to their customers.
Social media algorithms are quite unpredictable; however, you get complete control over your email platforms. You can schedule the timing of your emails and gain complete authority over what content you are sharing with your target customers.
10. Maximizes Conversions
The number of customers who get converted and the income generated determines the efficacy of the marketing channel. According to Monetate, among all marketing channels, email marketing generates more sales.
This depicts that emails are proven to be the most effective way to communicate with customers in an e-commerce company. With email marketing, you can establish a firm bond with your customers and secure their confidence.
According to the research, it has been found that over 66% of online buyers make their purchasing decision depending upon a brand which they are already familiar with. Thus, in this way, email marketing plays a crucial role in increasing your conversions.
11. Helps in Making Data-Driven Decisions
From open rates to click-through rates, email marketing involves creating campaigns that focus on generating valuable data. These emails track your customer’s behaviour and preferences, allowing you for more enhanced marketing efforts.
Tracking your customer’s behaviour from time to time provides an in-depth insight into your customer’s preferences. Accordingly, you can refine your marketing strategies. This also allows you to experiment with different elements of email like content, design, and subject lines. This helps you understand what works better for your customers and leads to more effective email campaigns.
These customer insights help a professional or ecommerce email marketing agency in making data-driven decisions.
5 ecommerce email campaigns you must try
The following 5 eCommerce email campaigns will help you strengthen the relationship with your customers and boost your sales.
1. Welcome Email
After people showed interest in your offer and joined your email list, it’s time to send them a kick-ass welcome email. Welcome emails usually have open rates between 50% and 60%, which makes them extremely important. A well-designed welcome mail will get people to visit your website and reinforce your brand, so make sure it delights your newly-acquired leads and turn them into customers ASAP.
2. Onboarding Campaign
Onboarding emails come soon after the welcome email. Their goal is to familiarize new recipients with your brand and the products you’re offering. The series of emails don’t need to be too long; they can contain 2-3 emails discussing the most important elements of your offer, like best-selling products or terms of delivery and returns.
3. Product Recommendation Email
You can send product recommendation emails to both email recipients who have already bought from you as well as to those who haven’t. In either case, the goal is to persuade them to take action. If they have already made a purchase, just recommend them the best products based on past searches and buying history. If they haven’t bought from you yet, recommend best-selling or best-rated products.
Product recommendation emails are very relevant which is what makes them successful.
4. Flash Sale Campaign
The goal of flash sale campaigns is to create a sense of urgency, make customers act, and generate revenue quickly.
For instance, you can do a blow-out sale campaign that lasts during the weekend or for 24 hours. Send a few reminders to the customers who haven’t opened the first email or those who engaged with the first email and visited your website but didn’t make a purchase.
However, you need to ensure you’re offering something truly valuable. Creating a fake sense of urgency can harm your brand’s image and cost you a lot of money in the long run.
5. Cart Abandonment Emails
We’ve already mentioned this type of emails but their importance should be stressed once more. Cart abandonment emails can have a big impact on your sales. The average open rate for cart abandonment emails is over 40%, with a CTR of nearly 30%.
They are sent to people who were very close to buying from you as a reminder, an incentive, or to be assured that your site is trustworthy and they’re getting a good deal.
8 Tips to Help You Create Great eCommerce Email Campaigns
1. Pay Attention to Your Content
How do you know what type of content will work best for your target audience? Do they prefer written content or videos? Maybe you should send user-generated content? The best way to figure this out is by testing different types of email content and analyzing your results but in general, people process visuals 60,000 faster than text.
If they’re given a choice, most of your customers would probably prefer watching to reading. This is especially true for eCommerce where your target is to make customers click through your website.
2. The Words You Use Can Make a Big Difference
Even though eCommerce email campaigns are usually focused on flashy design and high-quality images, the copy is no less important.
We’ve already mentioned that the subject line is a very important element, so you should pay special attention to it. You should also work on the preheader, header, and your CTAs. Use power words to urge people to take action, reinforce your message, and help you convert recipients into buying customers.
3. Segment Your Audience
Marketers should be aware that not all customers are the same. For instance, there can be high spenders, trendsetters, or customers with high average order value.
How you communicate in your email campaigns should be based on who you’re targeting. Which segment needs a discount code to be persuaded to buy your new product? For whom is it important to be among the first to get that new product? Ask yourself these questions before your next campaign.
4. Personalize Your Campaigns
Sending generic email campaigns that aren’t aimed at anyone specific isn’t going to do the trick. Email marketing statistics say that when both the subject and the message are personalized, emails have an average open rate of nearly 6% and a CTR of 2%. This means that you need to go beyond the subject line and ensure that the content and tone you use are relevant to your target audience.
5. Pay Attention to Mailing Frequency
When it comes to emailing frequency, be careful not to get tempted to send an extra email every now and then. It may seem harmless but sending emails too often can really annoy your audience. In fact, receiving too many emails is the number one reason why subscribers opt out of email campaigns. So, be sure to analyze the data carefully before you decide to increase the mailing frequency,
6. Use Social Proof
Why not turn customers into brand advocates? Customer testimonials, opinions, and reviews are some of the most valuable pieces of marketing you have. Think about it: you can have the best products on the market or outstanding customer service, but what’s it worth if you can’t prove it?
7. Focus on All Devices
When designing your landing pages, ad campaigns, and email campaigns, think about all the devices your customers may be using. Pay attention to different elements like image size, CTA buttons placement, the check out process, the appearance of product pages, etc.
You need to make sure that the experience is as smooth and as seamless as possible. If only one of these elements isn’t working properly on mobile devices, you might be wasting both your money and your customers’ interest.
8. Never Stop Optimizing
When it comes to what’s working best, your hunch may be right, but try to forget about your ego for a moment. Instead of going for things that you’re familiar with and comfortable with, rely on data to create A/B tests and optimize your email campaigns.
In addition, when optimizing your email campaigns, remember that your customers are the key element. Ask them for their feedback in order to learn more about what they want. Survey emails are a great way to get to know them better, overcome their fears, and improve your email campaigns. Show them that you genuinely care and value their opinions.
Final Thoughts
In the overall ecommerce toolkit, email marketing acts as a formidable tool, if implemented in the right way. It no longer remains a choice for ecommerce brands who want to elevate their business, but a cornerstone strategy to succeed in this online arena. This marketing tactic is capable of building brand loyalty, driving more sales and improving your customer experiences.
Hope by now you have realized how crucial email marketing is for ecommerce brands and owners. Unlike other marketing channels, it enables personalized communication with enhanced customer engagement.
Crafting successful email marketing for ecommerce requires creativity, so if you want it to work effectively then you need to invest more time and effort.
There you have it. This is all you need to know about getting started with ecommerce email marketing. Now, you only need to decide what your first step is going to be.
