Email Marketing, if you strip everything else from your digital marketing strategy, can be the sole breadwinner in terms of sales and revenue for your ecommerce business.
It’s also not as daunting as it might seem if you’ve never done it before for your eCommerce brand.
The sweet spot that email marketing hits is that it tends to a captive audience -- a set of existing or potential customers (hopefully, you’ll segment them as such) who are aware of your brand, who’ve signed up to hear more from you, and those who’ve expressed interest in your niche, your products, services, or the brand itself.
These are people who voted with their inboxes.
It’s a captive audience that wants to learn more from you -- as against any random target audience on Google Ads or Facebook Ads who aren’t aware of what your brand is about, what it stands for, and as to how your products and/or services can help them.
If you’d like to learn how to start an email marketing strategy for eCommerce (and if you haven’t done it already), here’s how to do it:
Make an Offer (What do I get? Why Should I Care?)
Given the number of competing e-commerce brands, striving to get customers all over the room, you’d be hard-pressed to convince customers to use your products and services.
You’d have to get their attention first, and that’s a start. You do that with an offer.
To make offers effectively, you’d have to appeal to emotions or promise to solve their problems first.
The easiest way to do it is with information (and hence the power of content marketing). Give away a PDF checklist, a short user guide, a tip sheet, or a handy reckoner that relates to your business or your products in general.
Or give out discount codes (coupons). Making that offer is the foundation of your email marketing strategy.
Start Sending Emails
For your email strategy to work, the primary requirement is to send emails out in the first place. As for the frequency of emails, what the emails should contain, types of emails, and more - you can learn, tweak, change, improvise, experiment, and repeat all over again.
The critical aspect of email marketing is to keep leads nurtured, while staying in touch with older customers.
Objectives Meet Email Types
There are several different types of emails you’d send, within the umbrella of email marketing. There are casual broadcast messages and there are sequenced (strategic) strings of emails designed (and sent out in a sequence) to not only provide information but also help you sell products.
There are automated one-time emails and maybe a whole sequence of emails. There are transactional emails (order updates, shipping updates) as well.
Each email type has use cases (and an appropriate way of using these).
These are all tools and techniques, within the sphere of email marketing, that you’d use depending on your objectives.
The key is to use them, depending on your objectives.
Graduate to Email Automation
Ever tried sending out more than 10 emails using your personal email account? It’s tiresome.
Manual tasks must give way to automation at some point for operational efficiency, to save time, and to double-down on already scarce resources.
Consider email marketing for retargeting: If you’d receive 1000 visitors a day (and hence an average of 30,000 visitors per month) and assume that 10% of these visitors add products to their shopping carts. Let’s assume that all of those folks who abandoned shopping carts don’t ever visit again.
Retargeting with emails is an effective way to bring those potential customers back. But can you imagine the operational nightmare (not to mention back-breaking task it’d be to do this with a degree of automation).
Using email automation cuts across in different ways and aspects of your eCommerce business.
The point is this: Embrace and use automation.
The sooner the better.
Bring it together: Track and Tweak
Once you get going with your email marketing strategy, you’ll have data available to you that tells you stories. How many visitors turn into email subscribers?
How many email subscribers convert into customers? How many customers repeat their purchases, thanks to email marketing alone (and additionally, what are the other channels that you can attribute your sales and revenue to?).
The only you’d know what you’d have to know is thanks to tracking, analytics, and reports. Every single email marketing program gives you access to reports that go deep into detail on email delivery rates, email open rates, email link click-through rates, revenue attributed to these email campaigns, and more.
Learn. Implement. Tweak and experiment to improve on your email marketing strategy.
If you’d like to learn what the usual industry benchmarks are, how other eCommerce brands execute their email marketing strategy, the contents of emails, email design, subject lines used for email campaigns, and more, get access to Panoramata.
