From promotional emails to PPC ads, there are numerous ways you can go about while generating sales for your ecommerce business.
Top notch online retailers know that one of the most profitable and reliable method to skyrocket their sales is via email marketing.
However, email marketing may offer tremendous challenges. There are many elements in an email marketing campaign that can lead to failure. It’s not enough to just send emails to your prospects or customers without a solid strategy in place. Ecommerce email marketing is a massive subset of an even bigger ecommerce marketing strategy that requires attention and time.
Remember that email marketing is one of the best channels to reach out to customers. For every $1 you spend, you can expect an average return of $38, which is certainly big. 59% of marketers say that email is the most powerful channel when it comes to revenue generation.
This is why we have listed some effective email marketing tips that can skyrocket your sales in no time.
Now before diving into these tips, it’s utterly essential that you’re using the best email marketing software so that you don’t lag behind your competitors.
Let’s begin:
1. Get People On To Your List
Email marketing will work only if you have people on your list in the first place. Hence, the most fundamental question for you as an online retailer is, “How to get people on to your list?”
There are many ways by which you can achieve this. If your website is generating sales, you should have a list of prospects.
However, if not, there are some tricks to collect email addresses.
Step#1: Create a pop-up
The first technique involves creating a pop-up on your site and providing visitors with a coupon. An important thing to note here is that you aren’t asking for an email address whenever people visit your site. Rather, you’re enticing them with a discount coupon, which they would be ready to trade with their email address. This is a terrific way to generate leads and sales, without getting overly pushy.
Step#2: Offer free content
Another useful tactic is to give away free, valuable content related to your product.
Let’s say you’ve a business that deals with cooking equipment. You might have some lead magnets like tips on cleaning cooking equipment after use or recipe guides. This can be a cost-effective and smart marketing strategy implemented by many online retailers.
For instance, akitchen.com a top online restaurant equipment company, has a seductive blog section that discusses everything from kitchen equipment to cooking.
If you can give away quality content for free, there’s no reason why visitors won’t sign up.
Step#3: Run a contest
Running competitions can rapidly assist you amass a huge number of email addresses to kick start your email campaign. The only risk with contest is that you may end up generating a lot of unimportant and unrelated subscribers. People who may not be interested in your services/products may barter your email list just to win the contest.
But you can always experiment to see the results you generate
2. Run Promotional Email Campaigns
After you’ve built your email list, the next step involves getting these people to make a purchase.
How do you do this?
It’s simple – try running promotional email campaigns that engage visitors and persuade them to buy.
If you want to generate sales right away, start running a “welcome email” campaign!
Welcome emails are tremendously effective, with 320% more revenue being attributed to them on a single email basis than promotional emails. Also, welcome emails are read by 42% more subscribers than regular promotional emails.
With so much potential, you should encourage subscribers to make a purchase with a welcome email or check out your offers.
Below you can see an attractive welcome email from Bonobos, an e-commerce-driven apparel subsidiary of Walmart.
Note that it contains a coupon, which can be brilliant to influence users to make their maiden purchase from you.
Another favorite email campaign among online retailers relates to seasonal events.
Whether it’s New Year, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Christmas or anything else, you can easily craft a killer email campaign around those events.
Of course, it takes some level of creativity, but by investing time and energy, you can always find out how your products align with seasonal events. With that knowledge build enticing marketing campaigns.
If you need help on doing this, build a throwaway email address and sign up with a bunch of marketing lists. Within a few months, you can see some insightful examples on achieving this feat.
No Rest For Bridget once came up with a mesmerizing idea during the holiday season by giving their subscribers a free holiday gift guide. They created separate list for different audiences and came up with unique guide ideas like gifts for husbands, gifts for moms, gifts for grandkids etc.
You can also choose to run cart abandonment emails. Such campaigns run continuously and are based on segmenting your list (More about that in the next section). But they can surely bring some terrific wins.
These emails are designed to get in touch with people who showed interest to buy something from your e-commerce store but didn’t make a purchase.
When done the right way, abandonment emails can be a powerful technique to boost your sales. According to a latest study, 50% of users who clicked on cart abandonment emails surprisingly purchased.
So running cart abandonment email campaigns on a consistent basis is something you should consider as part of your email marketing strategy.
Here’s a wonderful example from Chubbies Shorts:
For bolstering the results of your cart abandonment email campaigns, offer free shipping or add a coupon code.
3. Segregate Your List
As far as email marketing is concerned, the best list you can have is a “buyer’s list.”
While evaluating the characteristics of people belonging to your buyer’s list, there are many insights that can be discovered.
Firstly, you know that these buyers are ready to spend money.
You also know that they trust your brand and have experience with it.
That said, there is a technique to make your buyer’s list additionally effective – and that’s by segmenting.
Let’s take a look.
If you can segment your list based on the interest of people, the actions they have taken on your online store and the products they have bought, you’ll drastically boost your ROI.
The other advantage of segmentation is that it’ll improve your open rate.
How?
You’d despise the idea of sending emails to people that may not be of any relevance to them. In fact, doing so would repel them and force to hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button.
On the other hand, if you send emails based on the past behavior of subscribers, you would be sending out only relevant emails, which would naturally increase your open rate.
Approximately 53% of consumers receive irrelevant emails from brand – and 17.3% of emails are classified as spam.
Being flagged as spam can be a nightmare since your email deliverability rates go down significantly. However, if you’re able to send only relevant emails, because of segmenting your list, the chances of them being marked as spam will drop. On the long run, your open rates will shoot up, indicating more people will be exposed to your product, which can boost your sales.
When talking of segmentation, you can re-engage old customers and reward the loyal ones. If someone consistently purchases products from your store, you can send a thank you note along with a gift card. You can also send gift cards to those who haven’t bought anything for the last 12 months.
The gift card acts as an incentive to get them engaged with your brand again.
Amazon works hard to segment their list based on website behavior. The concept here is to create an email campaign for people who visited your website but didn’t add anything to their basket.
Here’s a quick example from Amazon:
By doing so, Amazon encourages people to move on with their shopping and find similar and better products.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve an online store, using email marketing should be your number one priority. If you fail to do so, you’ll be leaving a ton of money on the table.
The bottom line here is to build a list of subscribers and then experiment what works best for you.