Keeping in touch with your clients and prospect customers is amazingly important. You’ll end up growing important metrics: brand awareness, loyalty, up-selling, business development etc.
For an ecommerce business, there are, of course, various communication channels and methods to pick from. But email marketing proved itself to remain the most efficient way for sending commercial communication.
View email marketing success infographic.
Some emailing statistics that will blow you away:
- In the whole world, there are around 3.6 billion active email accounts.
- Email users are also a bit of email addicts. There are several figures from different research studies, but all state that the habit among most people who have an email account is to check it daily (or every 5 to 20 minutes in the more severe cases)
- More than 70% of worldwide consumers prefer to receive commercial communication via email
- And 66% of consumers were convinced though a commercial email message to make an actual purchase
What do we learn from this?
Well, it’s a huge opportunity! An old marketing cliché tells companies that they have to be where their target consumers are. And nowadays, target consumers are on their laptops, smartphones and tablets, frenetically checking their email. Mobile email marketing will have a dedicated article, so subscribe below.
How can one perform well in email marketing?
Even though email marketing and its high success rate is no striking news, many ecommerce companies are still doing it wrong – bulk emails, without addressing their customers’ needs in a segmented way, unsolicited emails and so on.
We propose here that you, the one reading this article, should do a different kind of email marketing. Treating ecommerce marketing in a professional way will bring you higher incomes, better retention rates and better customer satisfaction.
We have a plan for you. It is based on our experience with other clients, who saw an increase of at least 15% on their email marketing results thanks to applying the following 7 magical steps:
1. Set email marketing goals
If you have already taken a few steps with email marketing, evaluate the results you had so far. In order to do that, you need to have some email marketing KPIs which are relevant for your business. Compare these results with other marketing campaigns you have taken. See what is efficient and what is not. And why.
Then, for your next emailing campaign, set your goals in terms of KIPs and, with that in mind, go through the next steps.
Example:
- increase emailing conversion rate by 20%;
- decrease inactive subscribers by 50%
2. Create an emailing plan
Based on your goals, plan how email can help you reach these goals. You should look at the calendar and at the most important events in the next period and try scheduling your emailing campaigns.
Then look in-depth to your “consumer’s schedule” and try to understand how email could be useful for communicating with your clients when they make a purchase or are interested in your products or services.
Examples:
- Special discounts by email before Holidays
- Campaigns for Valentine’s Day, Women International Day, Christmas
- Birthday offers for all customers
Here is our email marketing infographic with resolutions for 2014.
3. Subscribers list building and renewing
In the first place, it is mandatory to use subscription forms in order to build an email database, with the consent of your subscribers.
Then avoid spamming your subscribers with uninteresting content! But also avoid forgetting about this gold mine which is your emailing database. Instead, build action plans in order to reengage your users and to attract even more subscribers.
4. Users’ segmentation
As an ecommerce business, you have the tools to know a whole lot about your customers. So use this knowledge and segment your emailing subscribers: by profile, interests, shopping history, customer lifecycle etc.
Don’t stop at users’ segmentation, use it wisely:
- analyse behavior, conversion rate, and revenue per each segment;
- create campaigns and watch how they react to various triggers;
5. Email Content Personalization
The ideal goal you should reach is providing not only interesting, but also personalized content. Email personalization can reach until the maximum level, of sending a unique email to each of your customers or subscribers. This will give you maximum conversion rate!
- Always have personalized product recommendations inside emails;
- Watch user affinity for brands/colors and implement it into the templates;
6. Automate email marketing. Manual sending is gone!
Implement email marketing automation! Ecommerce is the perfect business where you can use marketing automation for developing:
- triggered emails
- recurring campaigns
- lifecycle strategies
Conversion rate for triggered emails is 4 to 5 times bigger than normal email marketing!
7. Track and improve email marketing metrics
It is always the same recipe: track, analyze and improve. Drop all data you obtain from email marketing in your analytics and…as said before: track, analyze and improve!
Which of these ecommerce email marketing steps have you already implemented in your company? If you want more details on each of these steps, sign up below!
Unbreakable resolutions for Ecommerce Email Marketing in 2014
There is no doubt email sells. Here are some UNBREAKABLE ecommerce email marketing resolutions for 2014. We’ve related in a previous post what you should do with your email marketing to convert better. This time YOU set your resolutions: [view infographic]
1. Making emails responsive
You were already been told, 50% opens now come from a mobile device. There’s no question IF you should do this, it’s a matter of start as soon as possible. What you need here:
- Mobile friendly ecommerce website, including checkout process;
- Responsive email templates (you can easily contact us for some);
2. Test email campaigns more with A/B testing
Nobody knows everything perfectly. Even if you would, your subscribers are changing and you need to always apply the best strategies to increase conversions. This is what I recommend you to test:
- Email subjects
- From name and email address
- Email content (personalizaton, dynamic content)
- List segmentation (see below)
- Time and day of sending
For a full list of possible optimizations, please subscribe to our newsletter.
3. Dynamic content into emails
Hello [First Name] sounds familiar to you? This is cool but it’s too old for your great ecommerce business. It started 20 years ago, so you should get to the next level. By dynamic content I mean dynamic content blocks. For example you have to wake-up your dormant subscribers and you send them content based on last purchase. Something like:
- How is your washing machine after 2 years? Get 5% off to renew it;
- How is your television set? Don’t you want a SmartTV?
You got the idea. Instead of making N campaigns, you only have one with dynamic content inside. (that changes programatically for every segment)
4. Behaviour triggered emails
This is the must do. I should have started with it. Follow Amazon in it’s email marketing strategy. Zero newsletters, only smart emails when they feel you are almost to buy:
- Visited a special category? “We saw you are interested in our home appliances: here are our recommendations”
- Focused a lot on digital cameras product pages? “What do you think about Nikon [whatever]” here is our special price along other recommended products
- Searched a specific keyword? “Are you looking for money making machine”. Our experts recommend this one
This is usual purchase behaviour (yes, you have it as well) when looking to buy something. So instead of mass-emailing to all your customers, target the ones who are in the buying process. Two advantages: lower costs on emailing and happy customers.
5. Post purchase and loyalty programme
Not doing it already? According to Paretto principle, 20% of your customers will generate 80% revenue. On short time definitely this is not true. But depending on your industry, shoppers will buy again same things over a certain period (product life-cycle). Why spending dollars acquiring new customers, when you have your gold-mine inside? Create loyalty programs and turn your customers into brand-advocates.
6. Preference centre for your customers
You only have the unsubscribe buttons at the bottom, right? You’re like 99% others. Will never stand out that way. Because you don’t ask your customers what they really want. When. How. Why they want. So go ahead and create a preference centre. Ask how often they want to receive newsletters, what products are they interested in, what’s their mother name. Everything that really cares for your business.
7. Email personalization (product recommendations)
This is closely related to emailing dynamic content. But much more directed to each individual. What email personalization is: “adding relevant products for each of your subscribers in order to increase chances of click and buy”. There are a few good tools on the market providing email personalization a.k.a product recommendations in emails.
8. Email marketing automation
Automation. In the US marketing automation is a huge trend with billion dollars spent to acquire companies. Email marketing automation takes the pain from the ecommerce marketer to constantly produce content and to create campaigns. It simply allows setting rules and campaigns at the beginning (including design, what content and when should fit it) and starting the engine that will continuously run and bring revenue. See how Amazon is doing it.
9. Social sharing and follows
If your email reader is not interested in your newsletter you still have a chance for a secondary call-to-action: social media links. So go now and add buttons to your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or whatever social media profile you’re using inside your email template. Get a follower at least, and you still get a chance of converting her later.
10. Emailing list segmentation
Definitely not the last on this list. Emailing list segmentation helps you understand better your customers and to get a better ROI for your campaigns. Some basic examples of segmentation can be based on demographic criteria (gender, revenue), interests (categories, brands). Do you think I missed anything? Please leave a comment below with your suggestions:
