If email marketing is not part of your marketing strategy for your eCommerce business, it should be. Email marketing is an invaluable tool that helps you connect your brand with your customers. While the use of social media has exploded, studies show that most people still have an active email address and are checking their email account regularly. In fact, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new buyers than social network giants frequented often, like Facebook and Twitter. Without a doubt, email marketing still delivers the highest return on investment for eCommerce businesses.
So, if email marketing is new to you, here is a 10-step guide to email marketing strategies that will grow your eCommerce business.
- Choose an Email Marketing Service
- Create an Opt-In Form
- Design Templates and Email Sequences
- Segment Your Audience/Automate Your Email
- Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
- Promote Sales, Discounts and seasonal Promotions
- Have a Clear Call to Action
- Optimize for Mobile Use
- Split Test Your Email Campaigns
- Focus on Growing Your Email List
Step #1. Choose an Email Marketing Service
The first thing you have to do is choose an email marketing service for your email campaigns. There are many to choose from. Some of the most common are Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact. Your email marketing service manages your contact lists, provides templates and designs for your campaigns, tracks your progress, and more. So, the service you choose should be one that best represents the goals for your eCommerce business.
Step #2. Create an Opt-In Form
Most email marketing services will allow you to create an email sign-up form. If your service does not allow this, find another service. The sign-up form is your way to capture the relevant contact information you need to send the email to your audience. It should be customized to
reflect your branding. Once you have the form, strategically place it throughout your eCommerce site, like your homepage, the sidebar, the footer, as a pop-up on certain pages, etc.
Step #3: Design Templates and Email Sequences
Pre-design your templates so you can use them when you need to. When you’re ready to start your email campaigns, your designs are ready to go.
You also want to create email sequences that will be needed for subscribers. Some of the most common email sequences to have ready to go are:
- Welcome emails: This should be a series of emails that thanks subscribers for signing up. Use the series of emails to not give them too much about your brand at one time.
- Abandoned cart emails: A total of $14 billion a year is lost in the eCommerce industry to abandoned carts. With an email series dedicated to abandoned carts, you can give shoppers the nudge they need to go back to your store and complete their purchase.
- Order confirmation/thank you email: Make sure that with every sale, you have an order confirmation/thank you for your order email ready to go. Never leave your customer wondering if you received their order.
Step #4: Segment Your Audience/Automate Your Email
Email segmentation allows you to separate your subscribers based on their response behavior and preferences. Emails are personalized based on the defined qualities of the subscriber, so they’re well-tailored to fit that group of subscribers. With segmentation, each email the subscriber receives gets them closer to taking action with your eCommerce business. You can automate these emails so that certain behaviors send a triggered automated response which frees up your time for other eCommerce functions.
Step #5: Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
Entice your buyers to buy more. Use upsell emails to invite a buyer to buy a more expensive item, and use cross-sell emails to recommend a related or complementary product.
Step #6: Promote Sales, Discounts and seasonal Promotions
Make sure to let your subscribers know when you have sales, discounts, seasonal promotions, and other promotions to prompt them to buy.
Step #7: Have a Clear Call to Action
Your email should have a clear call to action (CTA) for the reader. The CTA can be placed throughout the email, but definitely at the end. If you don’t prompt them to take action (buy/purchase/download), with a clickable button to lead them to that action, they won’t.
Step #8: Optimize for Mobile
Mobile devices are responsible for up to 77% of opened emails. That means you need to ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices. That may involve doing the additional formatting needed to make it easy for your customers to shop using these devices.
Step #9: Split Test Your Email Campaigns
Test your emails by taking two different versions of the same email and sending them to subsets of your subscribers. The difference could be a single element. See which version gets the better response. You can measure this in terms of open rate, click-through rate, and conversation rate.
Step #10: Focus on Growing Your Email List
Use every opportunity to build your list. New customers are needed daily to grow your eCommerce business. That means you need leads every day. Email addresses equal to leads.