At first glance, email marketing may not seem like a critical channel for an eCommerce business. After all, website visitors can just as easily click on a link or visit a product page directly, without ever having to leave the platform they’re already on. But there are a number of email marketing tips and strategies for eCommerce businesses that can’t be overlooked.
Create a User-Friendly Experience for Prospective Customers
If you’re creating an email marketing campaign for prospective customers, you need to make sure that they have a simple, pleasant experience on your email marketing platform. Few things annoy a consumer more than a poorly designed email marketing platform that forces them to sift through a long list of poorly designed emails in search of the information they want. On the other end of the spectrum, a poorly designed email marketing platform can make a customer feel like your brand does not value their time or effort.
Instead of focusing on the mechanics of sending out your emails, consider the customer’s point of view and try to design an experience that’s as pleasant as possible. If you can implement features such as automated email responses and visual queueing, even better.
Customize Your Subject Lines and Body Copy
According to HubSpot Email Marketing Tips, when it comes to subject lines and body copy, consumers have short attention spans. Whether it’s the “5 proven ways to increase website traffic” blog post at the top of this page or the “3 tips for reducing friction between customer and merchant” email you’re sending out, you need to grab the attention of your readers with a snappy subject line and a compelling body copy.
To ensure that your emails get opened and read, you need to take the time to craft some amazing subject lines and a compelling message. Luckily for you, we’re going to tell you exactly what to write.
As mentioned, attention spans are short. Instead of just blasting out the same ol’ subject line and monotone body copy, use your imagination and try to come up with some unique, snappy ways to tempt your audience into opening your emails. Ideally, you’d like your email subscribers to feel like you’ve been sent to them by God (or at least, an especially clever marketing genie).
When you craft the perfect email subject line, keep in mind several important things. For starters, you want to make sure that you’re capturing the attention of your audience. To do this, compare your headline or subject line to that of your competitors. Then, measure the effectiveness of your subject line by seeing how many people clicked on it. Lastly, make sure that you’ve got a compelling body copy that will make your email stand out from the crowd. The better your body copy, the more chance you have of motivating your audience to take action. And taking action means getting a product or service that you offer, in this case, your eCommerce store.
Measure the Success of Your Email Marketing Campaign
Just because you sent out an email blast to a few hundred thousand people doesn’t mean that your email marketing campaign was a total success. The truth is, you can’t always predict how many people you’re going to get or how successful your campaign is going to be without measurest. Remember, you want to send out a constant stream of engaging messages to your email list, so it’s important that you track the success of each individual email.
Luckily for you, we’re going to tell you exactly how to do this. The first step is to set up a Google Analytics account and integrate it into your web site. Once you’ve got that taken care of, you can get down to business analyzing the metrics that matter most to you.
Email as a Lead Generation Channel
In today’s marketing world, it’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket. Especially when that basket is solely dedicated to generating leads for your sales team. That’s why you need to be strategizing other potential lead generation methods as well, such as Facebook ads and Google Search engine optimization. But if you want to generate leads quickly and effectively, nothing can match the power of a well-executed email marketing campaign.
When used effectively, email works in conjunction with your SEO and content marketing to pull in leads and turn them into paying customers. As a marketer yourself, you may be wondering exactly what type of content you should be putting out there to make the most of email marketing. Well, you can start by taking a look at the type of emails your customers are opening. Are they interested in long form articles on SEO or content marketing? Perhaps an email newsletter is the best option. Or, if you want to get really fancy, consider sending out a few emails with short stories built around a special offer.
Remember: content is king. Without good content to attract and engage your audience, you won’t be able to drive the sales that matter to your organization.
Once you’ve got your analytics setup and begin to gain a good understanding of which emails perform the best, it’s time to expand your email marketing strategy. What type of content do you need to engage your audience? What’s your go-to list of persuadable customers? Who are your competitors trying to reach?
Improve Engagement With a Few Simple Hacks
As we mentioned above, consumers have short attention spans and are growing increasingly tired of receiving the same ol’ boring emails from marketers. To counter this and improve open and click rates, you need to be doing a number of things.
One of the simplest ways to get more engagement is to incorporate videos. People love to watch videos, and they seem to prefer them to reading long form articles. So, when you’ve got a blog post or an interesting article that you think would be beneficial to your audience, consider turning it into a video. Not only will you be able to capture viewers’ attention with the novelty of a video, but you’ll also be able to present your content in a compelling way.
You can also consider using an email marketing platform that allows you to send out videos in your emails. This may seem like an unusual suggestion, but it’s fundamental to the growth of any eCommerce business. Videos are the future of internet marketing, and with good reason! In a 2014 report from HubSpot, 80% of consumers said that video content was either very important or critical to their purchasing decisions.
Even more impressively, 72% of respondents said that they’d rather watch a video explaining why a product or service is different from that of other competitors than reading lengthy descriptions.
Optimize Your Email List For Maximum Effect
We’d be remiss not to mention the importance of an effective email list. Without a good list of subscribers, you won’t be able to effectively send out quality emails. So it’s imperative that you work towards building a trustworthy list.
As your brand grows, so does your email list. However, it’s imperative that you nurture your list and keep it active. One of the best email marketing tips is to send out a welcome email to your new subscribers to generate interest and engagement. This email can be designed to fit with the rest of your brand’s identity and should contain information that’s useful to your audience. When you’re developing content for your email list, make sure that it’s of value to your subscribers. You can also include a link to a landing page or blog post that’s relevant to what they’re subscribing to.
If you want to get the most out of your email marketing strategy, take the time to build a quality list. Then, from there, you can segment your list and send out custom messages to specific groups of people. Do this by using a tool like MailChimp, which allows you to create automated emails based on segmented lists.
To get started, visit MailChimp‘s free tier and create a new list. Once you’ve done that, take the time to fill out the basic information, such as your email address and website URL. Then, under the section marked “Customize The Form Based on Your Target Audience”, you can enter the categories and the emails you want to use to send the message. In this case, we’re going to enter “ecommerce”. Finally, hit Save List to create your email list.
Setting up a Google Analytics account and getting familiar with its functions is a great way to determine the success of your email marketing strategy. Not only will this allow you to see the number of people that opened your emails, but it will also reveal the demographics and the stages of decision making that led up to the sale.