Email marketing is one of the best strategies to get more new customers for your business. Looking beyond website traffic, email marketing campaigns:
- Help you get closure on abandoned sales
- Help drive repeat sales
- Keep your brand in the mind space of the reader
- Nurture long-lasting relationships with audiences
- Create mechanisms of getting feedback
- Give you marketing leverage over competitors
I’ll help you with 5 actionable, inexpensive, and proven effective strategies.
Don’t Lose Your Sales to Abandoned Carts – Use Abandoned Cart Reminder Emails
A Baymard Institute research suggests that more than 67% of ecommerce shopping cart transactions are abandoned. The bad news – possibly, two-thirds of your e-commerce sales potential is never realized! The good news, however, is that you can nudge a lot of these abandoned sales to completion by:
- Throwing in a discount coupon
- Offering free shipping and adopting an e-commerce solution that serves your business.
- Checking with customers as to what exactly went wrong!
For these three, and any other abandoned cart redemption strategies, you need emails to do the job for you.
Most e-commerce store creation platforms offer abandoned cart reminder email functionalities; get an add-on if needed. Plus, there are 3rd party services that you can integrate with your e-store – for instance, there’s Abandon Aid.
Adopt a KPI Centered Approach Towards Email Marketing
You could be sending out kick-ass emails to a large audience twice a day that don’t succeed! Here the importance of analytics and KPI centered email marketing management comes to the fore. To get started, consider reading the Shopify guide to email marketing. Here are some of the key email marketing KPIs.
- Total Sales
- Click Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Bounces
- Unsubscribe Rate
- Site Traffic
Look for an email marketing analytics add-on for your e-store, which you can use to automate your email marketing over time. Identify the most important KPIs, focus on tactics and strategies to improve your scores on those, and then move to the next.
Use a ‘Genuine’ Email Address
The silliest mistakes several businesses are committing is that they’re using emails such as noreply@brand.com. There are two problems with this:
The email address, in itself, does not inspire any confidence. On the other hand, an email ID such as HelperHenry@brand.com (note the use of a real name) evokes confidence.
Instead of expecting audiences to search for a functional email ID (where they can actually contact you) from your website’s ‘contact us’ page, motivate people to actually get in touch with you, right from your staple email ID.
You might want to consider different functional email IDs for different campaigns (cart abandonment reminders, up-sell and cross-sell, replenishment purchase reminder, feedback seeking, etc). This helps you organize your analytics effort as well.
Seize Attention in Less Than 4 Seconds With Subject Lines
David Ogilvy, an advertising expert and educator, suggests that for every single person that reads your email’s body, there are 5 people who’d have read your email’s subject line. This means that out of every dollar you spend on an email, 80 cents are worth investing in getting the subject line right.
An email marketing tool called Litmus crunched numbers and concluded that you have 4 or lesser seconds to capture a person’s attention to your emails. No wonder, subject lines become the deal makers or breakers for any email marketing campaign.
The basic best practices to remember are:
- Keep it short
- Don’t use frequently used sales terms
- Personalize to the geography, or the username
- Mix it up; don’t re-use subject lines, and keep on experimenting and measuring.
- Use one of the many subject line evaluation services such as SubjectLine.com
- Work on Mobile Readiness of Your Emails
CTAs, personalization, HTML content, interactive buttons – the modern digital marketer’s email is anything but plain text with colors! Sophisticated emails are great, provided they load well on all kind of mobile devices. That’s because:
- More than 50% emails are opened on mobile phones, and the numbers are only going to increase.
- Emails with responsive design lead to 63% higher click-through rates, and 18% more transaction rates.
Thankfully, there are online services that help you preview your emails in different rendering scenarios before you send them out. For instance, there’s EmailOnAcid, and there’s Litmus, to help you out.
Final Thoughts
Trust these 5 e-commerce email marketing strategies to help your business connect with a larger audience base, drive more sales, improve brand awareness, and in general, grow your pool of subscribers.
