Email marketing is still a significant contributor to digital commerce strategies.
According to research by Salecycle, around 50% of consumers make a purchase triggered by an email campaign each month. A report from Constant Contact confirmed that 60% of respondents admitted an email had influenced a purchase decision.
The ability to send speculative emails to millions of prospective customers at once, for almost no outlay per individual email, makes this a very desirable high-volume strategy. B2C Click-through rates, although low (around 2.1%), can translate to thousands of sales when tools and techniques such as automation and personalization ensure that the right messages hit the right inboxes at the right time.
Let’s explore how you can optimize your email marketing strategy to improve customer engagement, retention, and revenue.
Understanding Your Target Market/Audience
The first step to any successful email marketing campaign is understanding who you’re talking to. To do that, you first must create a “buyer persona.” This is a compactly written portrait of the typical consumer of your products or services. Going through this process helps you to decide how to segment your email recipients to target those most likely to make a purchase.
By segmenting your audience based on demographics, purchase history, and behaviors, aligned with your buyer personas, you can create messages that address their unique needs and interests. Personalization is key: making your audience feel that you truly know them and are offering something relevant that they cannot easily dismiss.
Personalization is more than selecting the right salutation. It’s about delivering content that resonates with each recipient, at a time when it’s most relevant. Typically, you’ll create several different email scripts, each tailored to a different market segment, especially if you have a product which appeals to a wide audience.
Your email automation platform should enable you to select an audience segment and direct a perfectly tailored email their way, including a personalized salutation, sign-off and CTA.
Building Your Email List
Email lists are the backbone of successful email marketing. There are a range of ways to build such a list. Most obviously, past customers provide their email addresses at checkout, and they will specify whether they want to receive future marketing emails. In this way, you can generate a pre-qualified list of email recipients who have already purchased.
You can also obtain email addresses from enquiry emails, special offers, downloadable documents (a common B2B strategy), or free trials. Lastly, there are various third-party email lists available to buy. A word of warning however: although legal in the US, the quality of such lists is highly variable and personalization will be especially challenging since you’ll know little about the owners of the addresses you’re targeting.
In short, it’s always better to generate a mailing list organically, from actions taken by your prospective customers, whether it’s joining a mailing list, making an enquiry, or taking advantage of an exclusive offer.
Build your list with tactics like offering incentives for sign-ups, using popups on your website, and including sign-up options during checkout or on your social media platforms.
The goal is to not only grow your list but to ensure that it’s filled with engaged individuals genuinely interested in your brand.
Crafting an Email
The anatomy of a compelling email has several key elements:
Subject Line: Your first impression. Keep it short, sweet, and intriguing enough to prompt opens.
Body Content: Once opened, your email needs to hold attention. Stay relevant, engaging, and concise. Personalization helps make the recipient feel understood and valued.
Visual Elements: Images and designs can enhance the appeal of your email, making it more likely to be read and acted upon.
Call-to-Action (CTA): Every email should have a purpose, whether it’s driving traffic to your latest sale, encouraging sign-ups for a loyalty program, or promoting content. Your CTA should be clear, compelling, and easy to find.
Make sure all four elements are present and correct, and you’ve maximized your chances of connecting with your reader.
Types of Ecommerce Emails
In 2024, people are willing to buy more goods and services online than ever before. This means that ecommerce emails must adopt a variety of strategies, depending on the sector in question.
However, some universal categories apply across all sectors. Ecommerce emails tend to fall into the following formats:
Welcome Emails: Make a good first impression by ensuring your tone and content match the preferences of your buyer persona and audience segment.
Promotional Emails: Special offers, discounts, and sales can drive sales. These can be tied to seasonal or holiday promotions or one-off commercial events such as Black Friday. Promotional codes can also help encourage click-through.
Abandoned Cart Emails: These remind customers what they’re missing and nudge them towards completion. They have a high conversion rate too: over 54% according to SaleCycle.
Transactional Emails: Order confirmations, shipping updates, and other post-purchase communications. These improve your reputation for trustworthiness, encouraging future purchases.
Loyalty Programs: Reward your most dedicated customers to encourage repeat business. You can offer discount codes, exclusive product offers, and other incentives to build loyalty.
Support Emails: Don’t neglect your support team either. A well-worded support response can create significant goodwill, improving the customer experience overall.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Many businesses send short “how did we do?” emails which, while providing useful performance data, can also generate goodwill, particularly when paired with an incentive such as a discount code.
Email Automation
Automating your email communications saves time and ensures messages are sent at the right moment.
This may often seem like an arcane art, but oftentimes email automation platforms do the heavy lifting for you since they are already armed with the statistical information you need. Furthermore, such platforms will refine future performance based on past results, ensuring you’re up to date with optimal send times.
Set up triggered emails based on specific customer actions, like signing up or abandoning a cart. Here’s an example of a typical automation flow:
1. Customer signs up to mailing list > send welcome email with special offer link.
2. Customer clicks offer link and browses but does not buy > send promo code email.
3. Customer uses promo code but abandons shopping cart > send abandoned cart email.
4. Customer returns to cart and finalizes purchase > send confirmation and thanks email.
Ensure automated emails are personalized and have eye-catching subject headers. While automation can increase efficiency, it’s important to monitor these communications to ensure they remain personal and relevant.
Testing and Optimization
Analyzing your email performance is critical. Look at open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not.
A/B testing different elements of your emails can provide valuable insights, allowing you to refine and improve your strategy continuously. This involves running parallel, but subtly different, versions of your email campaigns on demographically similar customer cohorts. When A/B or multiple split testing, don’t change too many parameters in your comparison emails, otherwise it will be harder to know which change prompted a difference in response rate.
When designing email campaigns, it’s vital to ensure there’s a good flow between subsequent emails, particularly if you’re adopting a “drip campaign” approach. The last thing you want is for potential customers to resent your emails arriving, and designate them as spam, therefore tread carefully, even with automated follow-ups.
Fortunately, modern email automation tools can provide a suite of metrics and data analytics to help you find out what strategies are working and why. They can also help you problem solve, so you’ll have a better idea of why certain strategies fail.
Integrating with Other Marketing Channels
Email should not be your only channel to customers. Instead, it should be part of a unified marketing communication strategy. You should ensure that key elements of your offer translate across channels, and that tone of voice and design elements remain aligned.
That said, the sort of language you’d use in an Instagram post might be quite different than the wording of an email, especially if you’re targeting different customer segments. Look at what your chief successful competitors are doing and if there’s a common thread, follow suit.
Integrate your email marketing efforts with your social media, content marketing, and other digital marketing strategies for a comprehensive approach. Make sure your brand message is consistent across all platforms, increasing marketing effectiveness.
Trends in Ecommerce Emails
Following the latest trends is important, so your email strategy doesn’t feel dated.
Interactive emails, advanced personalization, integration with AI technologies for better segmentation and personalization, and sustainability-focused messaging are some of the trends currently influencing the design of ecommerce emails.
AI is revolutionizing personalization and even content generation. It becomes possible, at the touch of a button, or the tweak of a few parameters, to generate convincing, grammatical, and accurate emails in a variety of styles and formats.
A word of caution, however, AI-generated content can sound identikit and will tend to follow generic structures. If you have the kind of brand that needs to stand out, always opt for a creative copywriter. They’ll give you something out of the blue, which an AI can seldom do.
Don’t Neglect Email: It’s Here to Stay
By focusing on these key areas, ecommerce businesses can leverage email marketing to build deeper relationships with their customers, drive engagement, and increase sales.
Good ecommerce communication is about delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and email marketing, when done correctly, does just that.
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