Having your own email list is one of the key advantages of operating an eCommerce site. This exclusive data sets you apart from others and gives you an advantage by enabling you to cultivate relationships and keep customers involved. As online stores become more prevalent, your eCommerce email marketing strategy becomes crucial in growing your business.
According to industry statistics, the open rate benchmark is 21%, and out of those, 2.56% actually click on the website. Something that is quite fascinating and holds great importance in eCommerce marketing is the fact that 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices. This highlights the significance of mobile responsiveness as a major factor in determining the success of email campaigns.
Given that fact, you are not limited to merely accepting the benchmark. Isn’t it? Therefore, we present to you a comprehensive guide for eCommerce email marketing to ensure fruitful outcomes.
What is eCommerce email marketing?
Email marketing is a significantly valuable tool for eCommerce businesses today because it enables personalized customer connections at a reduced expense.
eCommerce marketing, as implied by its name, utilizes emails as a powerful strategy for promoting products and services offered by an online store to both potential and current customers. Due to the widespread popularity of emails as a means of online communication, this marketing approach is known for its effectiveness, efficiency, affordability, and profitability.
Email marketing for eCommerce can be simple, like sending an email to a customer who abandoned their shopping cart, or it can be complex, involving multiple campaigns to boost sales. How you use email marketing depends on your business goals, marketing objectives, audience, and business growth. Ultimately, the main goal is to build trust and strong, enduring relationships with customers, and email marketing is incredibly effective in achieving this.
Your brand’s reputation is impacted by the emails you send to your customers, whether they are shopping online or offline. Therefore, it is crucial to implement an effective email marketing strategy in order to engage your customers and maintain their interest. Failure to do so may result in losing customers to your competitors, especially with the overwhelming number of emails being sent out by various businesses on a daily basis.
The key metrics that should be monitored for eCommerce email marketing campaigns include, but are not restricted to:
- Delivery rate
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Subscribe rate
- Unsubscribe rate
To achieve growth in an eCommerce business, it is crucial to organize cohesive email marketing campaigns that are in line with the goals, KPIs, and performance metrics. While social media assets are also necessary for expanding your business, email marketing is indisputably the most effective tool in digital marketing for attracting new customers.
How to do email marketing
Although the main focus of this article will revolve around email marketing strategies for active marketers, we acknowledge that not every e-commerce business has yet established a system for email marketing.
If that’s you and you have no prior experience with email marketing, here are the initial steps you should follow.
- Set realistic and sustainable goals to grow your business, such as building an email list or improving customer retention by X percent.
- Select an email marketing software like MailChimp or Constant Contact.
- Map out your initial campaigns (e.g., welcome series, abandoned cart series, or new product launches.)
- Decide how you’ll collect email addresses. Many e-commerce companies offer a small coupon in exchange for email addresses.
- Set up landing pages as needed for campaigns.
- Set up campaign tracking with your chosen analytics provider.
By taking the time to establish a solid foundation, you will have a better start than even numerous experienced e-commerce businesses.
Start With a Welcome Series
Creating a welcome email series is essential for making a positive impact on new subscribers. This allows you to share your brand’s narrative, showcase your top-notch merchandise, and even provide a discount in order to boost sales.
A welcome series plays a significant role in generating strong engagement. It boasts an average open rate of 68.59 percent and an average click-through rate of 16.05 percent, making it an important component of your broader email marketing strategy.
Why is it important to think step by step when rephrasing a text without adding or removing information? When rephrasing a text step by step without adding or removing information, it is important because this ensures that the original meaning and essence of the text are preserved. By proceeding methodically, one can carefully consider each part of the text and make necessary changes while keeping the content intact. This approach helps maintain accuracy and prevents any unintentional distortion or misinterpretation of the original information.
Firstly, it is important to note that a welcome series consists of multiple emails. The ideal number of emails in this series is two or three, as anything more than that can be perceived as “spammy” and might intimidate new subscribers.
If you send two emails, you have the opportunity to greet the customer and request their connection. If you send three emails, not only can you perform the previous two actions, but you also have the opportunity to establish a more personal relationship with the customer.
Be Sure to Include a Clear Call to Action
What actions would you like your subscribers to take?
Your customers should have a clear understanding of your desires, whether it be reading your most recent blog post, watching a promotional video, or purchasing your latest product.
A call to action (CTA) is a prompt typically presented to users in a newsletter, website, or video, usually in the form of a button or hyperlink. Its purpose is to assist users in accomplishing their goal.
Unbounce states that the inclusion of a single clear call-to-action in emails increases clicks by 371 percent and sales by 1617 percent.
When it comes to effective CTAs, it is best to be clear and concise.
By following a step-by-step approach, you can generate a persuasive call-to-action for your email marketing campaigns.
- Knowing the end goal.
- Using action-oriented words.
- Addressing your audience in the first person.
- Keeping your messaging short and snappy.
- Adopting a conversational tone.
Regularly perform A/B tests on your calls to action to ensure they are effective.
To systematically evaluate which elements your users respond to best, you should test different variations of your most frequently used calls to action. This encompasses experimenting with verbs, button shape and color, length, and word order.
Use Personalization to Segment Your List
When was the most recent occasion you received an email that was customized exclusively for you?
If you’re similar to most individuals, there was a higher probability that the email would motivate you to take action.
The fact is, non-personalized emails have transaction rates and revenue six times lower than personalized promotional emails.
There are three categories of personalized marketing: contextual, demographic, and behavioral.
- Contextual personalization utilizes where a customer is in their journey. For example, just beginning to research the topic or being ready to make a buying decision.
- Demographic personalization utilizes demographic information such as age, gender, location, and household income level to inform recommendations.
- Behavioral personalization is the use of past purchases or website behavior (e.g., abandoned carts). Consider this email from Etsy that advertises products based on past purchases:
By combining past purchases with new location-based recommendations, you can create intersections depending on the size of your email list.
As you narrow down your segmentation, the marketing campaigns are likely to become more tailored and consequently, more successful.
