Email Marketing is indubitably the best conversion marketing channel for ecommerce. Hopefully you are planning to improve it this year.
From an ecommerce expert point of view we believe that email marketing will become better. For both businesses (increased conversion rate) and also consumers (less spam and more valuable emails).
- Certainly, more emails will be sent this year;
- Behavior triggered emails will rule the growth rate trend. Read more here
- Personalized content will appear often into the emails.
- Cart abandonment emails will become a must have this year. View some links
- Category and interests based email retargeting will replace standard newsletters
- Responsive/mobile format as mobile open rate increased over 40%
- List segmentation based on activity and profile
Shortly, ecommerce email marketing should be a discipline in your company. Is the cheapest way for a one to one communication with your consumers. Boring newsletters with lots of products are only disappointing your shoppers and should decrease in usage this year.
Behavioral triggered emails
A triggered email is one generated by a change or an activity in a customer behaviour or profile. They enabling you to send messages that are relevant, timely and personalised. Types of triggered emails with examples:
- Returning customer without purchasing
- Back in stock email
- Shopping cart abandonment
- Personal, like birthday reminder
- Interests based on onsite activity
- Newsletter subscription
- Specific category visit
- After adding to wishlist
Cart abandonment emails
Probably the most important triggered email campaign ever! You should start do it immediately if you are not using this tactic. Cart abandonment emails have on average x6 conversion rate than standard emails.
Responsive emails
About 50% of emails are now opened on mobile (study by Litmus) and also our own statistics. Essentially, responsive emailing represents a set of techniques and principles applied to email design to be easily readable on both mobile devices and desktops. This includes media queries, fluid layouts and adaptable images.
List segmentation
Email list segmentation is important to improve email conversion rate. You should be able to segment your subscribers list. If your system doesn’t currently allow this, please check our email marketing for ecommerce solution.
- Age, gender, location
- Customer value (Life-Time-Value)
- Email activity (it doesn’t make sense to continue sending emails if last open was a year ago)
- Customer relationship (it’s your biggest ambassador? send a small gift)
This was just a short overview on email marketing for ecommerce in 2014. Below is what we achieved for our clients in 2013, for the ecommerce email marketing side of Vibetrace:
- over 35 millions emails were sent (thank you Mandrill)
- average conversion rate for newsletters was 1.33%
- average conversion rate for transactional emails was 6.73%
What about your ecommerce email marketing? What are your plans for this year? Please comment below if you see some other trends.
