Email marketing for eCommerce is a powerful marketing tool that you can use to bring customers to your store. ECommerce email marketing is a sales and marketing strategy when a business sends promotional emails to its audience to encourage conversation, inspire, increase engagement, and keep its customers up to date on the brand, and with that, implements the 5Cs of marketing.
The importance of eCommerce email marketing
The benefits of having an attractive newsletter are immense for eCommerce businesses. Statistics show that eCommerce email marketing can help you to take your business to the next level. In 2022, 4.03 billion people around the world use email, and this number is expected to rise to 4.6 billion by 2025. In the same year, 376 billion emails will be sent every day. This clearly shows that the number of email users significantly exceeds the number of users of any other media outlet such as social media. This means that other platforms can’t even come close to eCommerce emails’ potential reach. Email marketing is the second most popular type of content because of this. In 2023, 74% of B2C marketers will use this tool. Even though it’s a great tool, you need to know how to use it well in order to get a return on your investment. This is why in this article, we collected useful tips and tricks that will help you to excel in eCommerce email marketing and drive your business to success.
What eCommerce email marketing consists of?
Most of the time, when we think of eCommerce email marketing, we only think of promotional emails. But the truth is that promotional emails and transactional emails should go hand in hand if you want to set up a plan that helps your customers and grows your sales. To understand the difference between the two and why you need both, read further.
Promotional eCommerce emails
It is crucial to have a form placed on your website to allow your visitors to sign up for your mailing list and for you to be able to collect their data for future promotions. Promotional emails or email newsletters are campaigns that are mailed to your emailing list subscribers who opted in to receive your emails on a regular basis. With promotional eCommerce emails, business owners can stay in touch with their customers and remind them of their brand. You can use them to tell your customers about sales, discounts, and new collections, share stories of happy customers, and get to know them better.
Transactional eCommerce emails
Transactional emails let your customers know what’s going on at every step of the buying process. From the time the payment is confirmed until the order is delivered, you should send emails to your customers so they can track their orders and know where they are. Since your customers will be interested in these emails, use the chance to ask them to write a review of your store or the product they bought and remind them of other products they might be interested in. When choosing a service or software for email marketing, make sure you can use it to send both marketing emails and emails about transactions. This will help you keep a consistent design across all your communications and give you a place to keep track of all your emails.
How to step up your email marketing for your eCommerce business?
Make design templates that stand out.
Pre-designed eCommerce email templates can, not only help you with maintaining a consistent brand image, but can also come in handy when you want to send out an email quickly. By using templates that you have previously created, you will not need to build each and every email up from scratch and you can cut back on the time spent preparing your upcoming eCommerce email marketing campaign. Most email marketing services and software let you change your email templates by dragging and dropping sections in an editor. This means that you don’t need to know how to code to make beautiful emails. You can also put a digital business card at the end of your emails. This is a good way to get people to visit your online store, and you can also use it to sell more products or services if you want to.
Say hello to your new readers.
A welcome email is a great way to show your new subscribers that you’re glad to have them on board and gives you a chance to introduce yourself and your brand to them. Also, statistics show that customers who receive a welcome letter after signing up for a newsletter are showing 33% more engagement towards the brand. In these emails, you can offer a first-time-visitor discount to get your new audience to buy something. You can also add all your social media links and a CTA (Call To Action) to get them to interact with you on multiple platforms.
Sort your customers into groups.
All visitors have different interests, so segmenting your eCommerce email marketing subscribers is the first step you must take. This way, you can make sure that each of them only gets messages that are relevant to them. If they get too many messages, they might get annoyed and unsubscribe from your mailing list. You can analyse and list your subscribers into segments according to the actions they have previously taken on your website. Depending on how engaged your customers are, you can divide your marketing funnel into different stages:
- Stage one is when a visitor signs up for a promo or free educational material but they have not made any purchases yet. The goal with these visitors is to get them to buy something for the first time.
- Stage two is when at least one of your visitors has become a customer and bought something from your store. Your goal with them will be to keep them engaged and encourage them to make repetitive purchases over time
- The third stage is when your old customers no longer interact with your brand and don’t open your emails. Your goal with these customers is to get them to buy from you again or at least open your emails.
By having this information you will be able to categorise and target your subscribers with personalised content, product recommendations, and promotions that will result in higher engagement rates.
Nurture your leads
With the help of your eCommerce email marketing strategy, it is important for every business to keep subscribers interested and turn them into loyal, repeat customers. One way to do this is to give them regular educational content that they can use. Also, you can get people to come back to your website’s blog where you can write more in-depth about relevant topics if you send them educational teasers.
Re-engaging visitors
If you notice that some clients are losing interest in your brand and products, you can get them interested again with just one email. There are different ways to do this. First, make sure you try to capture their attention with promotion and try to invite them back to your website with a special offer or a promo code. If you see this working, you have successfully re-engaged a visitor and potentially ended up with a new sale. If they still don’t want to interact with your brand, send them an email asking if they are still interested in your eCommerce email marketing and if they would like to change their email preferences. Even though it’s not the goal, make sure that your customers can unsubscribe from your mailing list at any time. This will keep your store’s reputation and integrity in good shape.
Cross-selling, up-selling, and getting back carts that were left behind
To get your customers to buy more from you, you can send them promotional emails that feature products that go well with what they’ve already bought. Profit from cross-selling by giving them things to buy based on what they’ve bought before. When using this strategy, it’s very important to divide your customers into groups. You don’t want to offer free items that aren’t relevant to your customers, because that could make them think less of you.
eCommerce email marketing can be a great way to get people who have left items in their shopping carts to come back to your site and finish their purchases. First, you can send them a simple email reminding them that they have things in their cart. If they still don’t come back to their cart, you can try giving them a discount code or upselling to make their purchase seem more valuable. When upselling, you can offer your customers more expensive products by pointing out the extra benefits of the more expensive items, or you can offer a free gift or shipping if they spend a certain amount. This makes it more likely that they will come back to your store’s page and finish the checkout process.
Use email automation to help you.
Automation can be a lifesaver when your business is doing well because it can save you a lot of time on your eCommerce email marketing. There are a lot of email services and programmes that let you send emails to your customers automatically when they do something that sets off the algorithm. This makes automation both timely and useful, which will lead to high rates of engagement and sales.
Measure and figure out
To make sure that your email marketing efforts are successful and worth the time and money you spend making and sending them, you will need to track your audience’s response and see how they interact with your emails. Statistics show that eCommerce business owners care most about the open rate (95%), the click rate (88%), and the unsubscribe rate (73%). Surprisingly, less than 20% of business owners measure their return on investment, and even less (12%) measure subscriber lifetime value, which should be the North Star of metrics. Subscriber lifetime value tells you how valuable a subscriber is to your business based on how much money you can make from them. To do well in this field, you should always do a deep analysis of your results and make your own KPIs to measure how well your eCommerce email marketing strategy is working.
Conclusion
ECommerce email marketing has a lot of potential for your store, but as this article pointed out, there are many things you need to pay attention to if you want to excel in this field and get the most out of your time and effort. Thanks to the improvement of eCommerce email marketing tools, it’s easy to keep track of what your customers do and send them emails that are more relevant to them once you have a plan for each segment. Try to find potential drop-off points at each stage of your funnel and figure out how you can best get back in touch with your customers and give them something of value.
