Email marketing is a valuable promotional strategy for any eCommerce business.
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you gain a staggering $45 in return on investment.
No wonder 96% of the top online retailers say that email marketing gives them the best ROI.
But you can’t just create a visually pleasing email newsletter, send it, and hope it yields the best results.
To boost your eCommerce sales with email marketing, you need to follow best practices. Here are six email marketing tips to follow.
1. Identify and Profile Your Target Customers
The effectiveness of email marketing campaigns is highly dependent on targeting. This calls for accurate identification of target customers.
Your target customer is the person whose need or want will be met by the product or service you are offering.
To better understand your target customer, create buyer profiles. You can gather the data you need for your profiles by sending out surveys or looking at your historical marketing data.
With profiles, you can understand your target customers’ location, occupation, income, hobbies, marital status, gender, and age.
As a result, you can craft email marketing strategies and messaging that will get them to take your desired action.
But don’t just focus on your target customer’s demographic data. You’ll want to look at the customer journey as well. For this, you can create a map.
When you know how your customers become aware of your brand, how they engage with you, and how they make a purchase through your customer journey map, you can meet them where they are and deliver the right message at the right time.
2. Leverage Website Pop-Ups and Social Media For Sign-Ups
Before you can send emails to potential customers, you need to collect their email addresses first. This is where pop-ups come in handy.
Your pop-ups should urge your website visitors to sign up for your email list. You can do this by offering a lead magnet that provides value to your audience.
Those lead magnets can come in the form of ebooks, white papers, or sample products.
Pop-ups crop up automatically while a visitor is browsing your website page. You configure them based on your preference.
So, for instance, you can set them up to appear when someone is about to exit your page.
You may also configure your pop-ups to appear when your website visitor clicks on something or spends a specific amount of time on your site.
Although this amount of time depends on you, as a general rule, don’t make pop-ups appear immediately after the visitor lands on your page.
But don’t set them up to appear after they spent more than ten seconds on the page, either.
The rationale behind this is simple: You don’t want to disrupt the visitor’s browsing experience by inserting pop-ups too early.
At the same time, you want to make sure the visitor is still on your page when the pop-up appears.
You Can use tools such as Giosg and Wisepops to create your pop-ups.
But don’t just rely on website visitors to grow your email list. Social channels are just as powerful. You can use social media to build brand awareness first.
So, post valuable content frequently and interact with your social media audience.
Once you’ve built a sizeable following, you can promote your sign-up form link in one of your posts.
You can even run social media contests to increase your number of email subscribers.
If you’re selling jewellery online, for instance, why not ask your audience to take pictures of themselves wearing your product for a chance to win a 25% discount in your eCommerce store?
To join the contest, all they’d have to do is enter their email address. With this strategy, you don’t just encourage sign-ups.
You also encourage purchases of your products and the creation of user-generated content, which you can repost as part of your social media content marketing.
3. Segment Your Email List
Audience segmentation in email marketing is the division of an email list using given criteria.
It’s critical not just in eCommerce but also in pretty much all other industries. That’s how powerful it is.
Why? Well, segmenting your audience is the first step toward delivering personalised value-packed emails.
You want to share specific content that specific readers find valuable in order to capture their attention and guide them through a funnel.
If your emails are generic and do not offer tangible value to each specific segment, they end up being trashed.
Ultimately, it’s you who chooses the criteria for segmenting your email list. But you can segment according to the following:
- Geography. This may involve targeting different audiences with offers or discounts tagged on special days or events within their specific location.
- Stage in Marketing Funnel. You can use email subscriber and website data analytics to understand which clients are at what level in your marketing funnel. This way, you can curate specific content for clients at different levels.
- Behavior. You can study your customers’ data. What product pages do they tend to visit? Are they impulsive or thoughtful buyers?
Develop as many segments as you want based on your eCommerce business.
The more tailored your eCommerce email campaigns, the higher the chances of an increase in conversion rates.
You can decrease your unsubscribe rate as well. Additionally, consider using email verification tool to keep your email list clean and verified. This will help you improve your email deliverability rates and reach more of your target audience.
4. Write A Compelling Subject Line
The subject line is the first contact point between your marketing email and the targeted audience.
Whether your customer opens the email or not depends on the email’s subject line.
To write a compelling subject line, follow these tips:
Make Sure It Has the Right Length
A subject line longer than 50 characters is a long subject line that may be truncated on some devices.
However, a subject line that’s too short—with one to four words, for instance—might also fail to provide enough context for the email.
So, aim for a subject line that isn’t too long but isn’t too short either—from five to eight words.
Personalize
Email subject line personalization can take a few forms. You can add the client’s name to the email subject line.
Or add other identifying information, like a product the customer added to their cart.
Be Clear
A mismatch between the subject line and the contents of the email will fail to convert.
Therefore, write accurate subject lines with simple, inclusive language, making sure they align with the main email content.
Creating a compelling subject line might be the game-changer you’re looking for.
If you run out of email subject line ideas, Leverage AI for SEO to help you craft subject lines that are more likely to be clicked, by taking into account factors such as the recipient’s interests and the content of the email.
Then you just have to run A/B tests on your subject lines to identify which ones are the best for your eCommerce email marketing campaigns.
5. Include A Clear CTA
A CTA is a specific button or link that gets a consumer to take action.
The action can be either visiting a website, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.
For your eCommerce email to be effective, you must have a clear CTA.
Here are tips to follow to ensure a clear CTA and generate the best results from your email marketing efforts.
Make It Conspicuous
Make your CTA button big or use a different font or font color for it. The goal is to create a CTA that stands out from the email.
Use Actionable Language
The text used in the CTA should clearly describe the action the recipient should take. You can use words like “click here,” “sign up,” “shop,” or “learn more.”
Ensure It’s Relevant
The CTA should be clearly in line with the contents of the email. Don’t ask the email recipient to Visit Website if your email gives tips on how to groom their pets.
If the CTA appears irrelevant, the reader won’t take the required action. So, in this case, a better CTA is probably Buy Grooming Products.
6. Tap Into Automation
Email automation is an amazing addition to your eCommerce email marketing campaign.
With automation, you can send the right email to the right client at the right time.
Your message arriving in a prospective customer’s inbox just as they needed your product or service can up your email marketing game. It can help you grow your eCommerce business.
To ensure effective marketing automation, link your CRM with email automation software.
With the two integrated, you are able to nurture and follow through with your clients every step of the way.
Here are some types of emails the sending of which you can automate:
- Welcoming email series for new subscribers
- Transactional emails like an email confirmation of order
- Shipping confirmation email
- Promotional emails like upselling and cross-selling emails or a product launch email
- Cart emails
To automate the sending of an email, just get an email automation application such as Mailchimp or Convertkit.
In the email automation software, you set up the trigger, and the email will be sent when the trigger is activated.
For instance, with a welcome email to new subscribers, the trigger may be the submission of their email address.
Once new subscribers do this, the email welcoming them to the eCommerce store is automatically sent to their inbox.
In Closing
Email marketing is an outstanding tool you can use to increase your eCommerce sales. However, to take advantage of email marketing, you must do several things right.
You learned six e-Commerce email marketing tips. identify and profile your audience. Leverage pop-ups to get their email addresses and then segment your email list.
When writing those emails, ensure that you have a compelling subject line and a captivating call to action.
You should also automate your email marketing campaigns to help you deliver the emails on time and to the right people.
With these tips implemented, expect a boost in your sales from your eCommerce email campaigns. Good luck!
