It is easy to be enticed by all the latest digital marketing trends and undervalue the role that email marketing still plays. In the absence of physical stores, email marketing is essential in the ecommerce world.
It’s not enough to just send prospective and current customers emails – you have to have a solid strategy in place. Approaching your email marketing by using the following tips will help you to increase the impact of your campaigns.
1. Get personal
The most successful emails feel personal. Of course, you can’t manually personalize all the emails you send out. It may seem ironic but automation is necessary if you want to treat each customer in a personal way that elicits a response.
You have to know what customers want, what makes them tick and how they behave. You also need a way to collect data about them if you want to send highly targeted emails.
Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system provides you with data you can use such as the date a customer signed up, a phone number, a conversion event, and more.
By segmenting your leads into distinct groups based on customer behavior, interests, etc. you can create more personal emails. For example, if you know a customer’s brand preferences, you can notify him or her by email when those brands have new items available for purchase.
A company called Doggyloot uses ‘doggy data’ they gather to personalize their emails. A section in their customer accounts is called “My Dogs,” and users fill in their dog’s name, size, breed etc. They even offered dog owners a $5 credit to get them to share their pet’s birthday.
A report by Experian Marketing Services shows that personalized product recommendations can generate a 20% increase in revenues.
2. Focus on the entire customer journey
You must remember that your emails are less about making a sale and more about establishing a trusting relationship. By offering useful information and incentives, you can create loyal customers and this eventually leads to sales.
Your emails are part of a series of interactions with your brand. You don’t want to invest time on your emails and then send users to a generic home page when they click. Take them to a customized landing page instead with a video you want them to watch or the offer they’re interested in.
If you segment your list and send emails with content relevant to each stage of the customer journey, the chances of your email being ignored or marked as spam will drop.
A simple welcome email can be very effective when prospective customers are first showing an interest in your brand. You don’t want to put a prospective customer off by trying to make a sale at this stage.
For instance, if your customers are mainly young people, such as students, making them laugh, inspiring them and educating them will keep them coming back for more.
They will appreciate some Assignmentgeek quotes, funny images and short, clickable videos. If they can start identifying with your brand and your brand values, they are much more likely to become loyal customers.
3. Reward loyal customers
Establishing a loyalty program is a good way to cultivate relationships. A business does not survive without loyal customers. Giving customers points for future purchases is one way to do this.
Van Dal Shoes encourages onsite engagement by giving customers bonus points for every action they take, such as reviewing a product or signing up for the newsletter.
You could segment customers who spent above a certain amount at your store, and drive them back with exclusive offers such as early access to sales, discounts or special product bundles.
Seasonal sales, ‘buy one get one free’, 50% off and other traditional promotional methods all work well online too.
You can also offer incentives on special occasions such as birthday emails and/or on the one year anniversary of shopping at your store.
Attract new, high-quality customers by doing everything in your power to leverage your current customer network. Giving a discount to customers who refer other customers incentivizes referrals but also encourages those referring customers to make a purchase with the discount.
You can even go as far as giving discounts to the sender and recipient of the referral, giving new visitors extra incentive to make that first purchase.
4. Target dormant customers
If a customer has not made a purchase in a while, an email with an incentive to purchase could be a gold mine. You need to remind customers who haven’t been active that you’re still around. Send them a gift card in an email and it will encourage them to visit your store again.
A Howard’s Storage World case study by Experian found that by providing gift card incentives via email, revenue increased by $108,000.
5. Use Social Proof
The power of social proof is huge. There’s no way around the fact that people trust other people. Think about linking to some user-generated reviews or a video testimonial in your emails.
If you tell a prospect that 20,000 people have already bought a discounted item and there are only a few days left until the discount ends, it tends to trigger a fear of missing out. You can increase sales significantly by showing how many people have used your products or services.
6. Increase average order value
If you can get your customers to spend more money when they make a purchase, you can easily generate more revenue. The average order value (AOV) is a metric that tells you the average value of the transactions in your ecommerce store.
Fiverr offers special discounts to selected customers who spend above a certain amount on their site. This tends to increase the average order value.
7. Don’t ignore abandoned carts
Customers often abandon carts because they get distracted. Set up an automatic email when a cart is abandoned to ask the customer why they did not proceed with the order.
Make sure to ask if they encountered a problem. In this, way you can collect any objections which you can address. You can also offer some kind of incentive in your email to encourage customers to complete the transaction.
ModCloth, a company that sells vintage-inspired women’s clothing, uses abandoned cart emails in a creative way. The emails are also persuasive as they will tell the customer that the item they’ve added to the cart is nearly out of stock.
Another great example of a cart abandonment email comes from Chubbies Shorts using fun language users can relate to such as an offer to teleport users back to the cart free of charge.
Running cart abandonment email campaigns should happen on a consistent basis as part of your email marketing strategy.
Final thoughts
These email marketing tips can help you to get the most out of your customer relationships. Always keep your customer front and center. Personalize your emails, keep the customer journey in mind, offer rewards to loyal customers and give them incentives to keep buying.
The more value your emails provide to your customers, the better your relationship with them will be – and creating loyal customers is the secret recipe to supercharging your sales.
About the Author
Cathy Baylis is a freelance content writer specializing in personal growth, career development, and leadership. She offers dissertation writing help to students as a writer for the best assignment writing service. She loves sharing her interests with readers, and she has something to say, for sure.
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