Wouldn’t it be great if you could send DMs to your hundreds of followers without being regarded by the algorithm as a spammer? Your personalized offers will be more captivating and have a high conversion rate.
Well, you probably can’t do it on social media, but there is a marketing strategy that parallels this concept, which is email marketing.
Email marketing has become an essential marketing strategy used by almost every ecommerce business. According to Campaign Monitor, the conversion rate of email marketing is 174% higher than social media. It’s no surprise to see why this strategy has been widely adopted, and today we will discuss how to implement email marketing in your store.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the practice of building an email list and sending promotional, transactional, and educational messages to customers to increase sales and build a community. It allows businesses to segment their customers and send personalized offers to increase conversion rates such as AOV and CLV, and reduce marketing costs significantly.
Boost Sales with Effective Email Marketing
1. Segment Your Audience
Building an email list is the first step of email marketing, there’s more you have to do before you can start your email campaigns. Customers will react differently to the same offers based on their interests, behaviors, and purchasing powers. Understanding your customers’ profiles allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to deliver personalized and more relevant offers that are more likely to convert. Here is how you can segment your email list.
Demographics
The simplest way to categorize your customers is by demographics such as age, gender, and location. You may be selling different products that are only appropriate for some of your customers but not all. For example, recommending women’s best-selling shoes to men or offering coats to customers in warmer weather may not be a good idea, unless there are other signs indicating that they may be interested.
Purchasing behavior
You can segment your email list by categorizing your customers based on their purchasing behavior. Some customers have more purchasing power than others, and hence you can recommend more luxurious products. Other ways to divide your customer base include considering their category preferences and purchase frequency and whether they are repeat or first-time buyers.
Engagement Level
They are customers who subscribe to your email list and forget about it, but they are those who are excited about every offer you send. Sending win-back emails to inactive customers can be effective, but they will be irrelevant and confusing for your loyal customers. Therefore, different email marketing campaigns should be designed to resonate with your customers.
Browsing behavior
Finally, you can also group your customers based on their browsing behavior The products and pages they view, or wishlist items if that is a feature of your website, can provide you with some ideas about your customer interests.
2. Write Compelling Subject Lines
Subject lines need to quickly grab your email subscribers’ attention by stopping them from being distracted by other more “important” emails. You have to hook them in the moment they see it and make them click on the emails to find out more about the attractive deals.
Here are some tips on how to write your email subject lines:
- Keep them short and concise – Aim for under 50 characters.
- Create urgency – Create a sense of urgency to make them feel FOMO.
- Create curiosity – Create curiosity to make them want to find out more, but avoid using clickbait.
- Include numbers when relevant – Such as discounts you offer or social proof.
- Test emoji usage – 60% of subject lines with emoji have a higher click-through rate compared to the same subject lines without emoji.
- Personalization – include their names in the subject lines to speak directly to them
Some examples:
- [Number] + Benefit: “5 Ways to Transform Your…”
- Curiosity Gap: “The Shopping Mistake You’re Making…”
- FOMO: “Last Chance: Your 20% Off Expires…”
- Question: “Are You Making This Common…”
- Social Proof: “See Why 10,000 Customers Love…”
3. Design Mobile-First Emails
According to Litmus, mobile devices account for 41.6% of opened emails. People are no longer using desktops to check their emails as mobiles are more accessible and convenient. Ignoring mobile optimization can cost you 40% of potential sales.
Here are some tips:
- Use responsive templates – That work on both desktop and mobile
- Subject lines under 50 characters – Subject lines cut off around 33-43 letters, including the important important information within this limit.
- Implement single-column layouts – best for mobiles
- Test across multiple devices – ensure a uniform appearance
4. Automating Your Email Marketing
Setting up automated emails guarantees that your audience receives the necessary emails at the right. It simplifies the process and reduces your team’s effort so they can focus other other email marketing campaigns to acquire more customers and increase sales. Apart from the Welcome Series, there are several other automated emails you should set up.
Abandoned Cart Email
Abandoned cart email is an effective strategy for customers who show interest in purchasing a product but fail to complete it. It can help your store to recover 10% of lost revenue. When customers fail to make the purchase and leave their items in their cart, you can send an email to remind them and provide offers to further incentivize them to complete the purchase.
Example of how you can set up your abandoned cart email automation:
- 1 hour: “Did you forget something?”
- 24 hours: “Your cart is going to expire…..”
- 48 hours: “ Last chance to grab…….”
- 72 hours: Additional offers (optional)
Post-Purchase Emails
Post-purchase has become a standard practice in ecommerce. When customers complete a purchase, they expect an email in their inbox to inform them that the purchase is completed along with other information such as shipping information. If you don’t do that, you may have anxious customers reaching out to your customer service team after every sale
What to include in your post-purchase emails:
- Order confirmation + excitement building
- Asking customers to sign up for your email lists if they haven’t already
- Surveys
- Shipping notification + tracking
- Delivery confirmation + setup/usage tips
Examples of post-purchase action:
- 3 days post-delivery: Check-in + care instructions
- 7 days: Review request
- Additional campaigns if they have agreed to receive emails from you
5. Measuring and Improving Your Results
Metrics are not just numbers, they are information to guide you on the right path and tell you what you are doing right or wrong. By measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, you can find room for improvement and further scale your business. These are the key performance indicators you should track:
Open rate
When you send an email to your subscribers, there is no guarantee that they will open the email. Open rate measures the percentage of subscribers who open an email. It provides insights into your subject lines and what content your subscribers are interested in so you can readjust them if needed.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the percentage of subscribers who click a link or ad in an email. It measures the engagement level, and provides insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns, how attractive your offers are, if you need to change your CTA, and more.
Conversion rate
When a subscriber clicks a link in the email, they don’t always do what you tell them to. Conversion rate tells you exactly the percentage of subscribers who are not only interested in your offers, but go to the link you provided and complete the purchase. It’s one of the most essential metrics to track in email marketing.
Return On Investment (ROI)
High conversion rates alone don’t necessarily indicate a successful campaign. If the cost of your email campaigns is more than the revenue they generate, you might how to reconsider your strategy. The ROI gives you a more accurate depiction to help you evaluate the overall effectiveness of your campaigns
6. A/B Testing
Testing different offers is not the only thing you can do. Your offers may be strong but other specific elements of your emails may be the problem, which is why you should be testing different versions of the same offer to figure out the best combinations.
Things you perform A/B testing on:
- Subject lines
- Length
- Personalization
- Emoji usage
- Power words
- Questions vs. statements
- Send times
- Day of week
- Time of day
- Frequency
- Time zones
- Email design
- Layout
- Images vs. no images
- Button color
- Copy length
- Font choices
- Offers
- Discount types
- Free shipping thresholds
- Bundle deals
- Timing of offers
Bottom Line
Email marketing has the potential to completely transform your e-commerce business if you employ it strategically and measure your results. Start using this strategy today and see how it changes your store.
