Ecommerce sales saw an 11% increase from 2020 to 2021. Online sales also made up nearly 21% of total retail spending, which was roughly close to last year’s percentage and up from 14.6% in 2019.
With all that in focus, this is a high time for ecommerce store owners to work on their ecommerce marketing and sales channels. And, do you know which is the best channel for increasing sales during the holiday season? Ecommerce Email marketing!
According to a research study, email marketing has an ROI four times greater than that of any other medium. This makes it a highly efficient medium to get more sales and profit even during the regular sales days.
Quick Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips
- Strengthen your Email List
- Remind Shoppers About Cart Abandonment
- Use a Killer Subject Line
- Don’t Pitch for Sales
- Keep Your Emails Short
- Personalize Email For Better Results
- Channelize Promotional Offers With Email
- Ask Customers for a Feedback or Review
- Deliver High Quality Content Through Newsletter
- Leverage the Power of Automation
- Use it to Activate Your Dormant Customer
- Try A/B Testing
- Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
- Customer Loyalty and Re-Engagement Emails
- Reward Loyal Subscribers
- Notify Customers About Previously Out of Stock Items
- Keep Things Simple
Ecommerce email marketing is one of the best ways to increase conversions, and most importantly build up a relationships with your potential customers. In addition to this, email marketing campaigns can be customized to reach out to your existing customer base as well. The amazing part of all this practice is that you address your target audience directly and there is a two-way communication.
Let’s talk about the above mentioned “relationship”. You cannot deny the fact that any physical business runs and survives on goodwill, and you can’t build it overnight; it is the constant efforts of delivering promises, quality and customer satisfaction with excellent communication. However, things work a bit differently when it comes to online business. You might not find any tool as personalized as email that allows you to communicate with your customers in the most powerful manner.
Email marketing is all about the right technique and timing. Drafting the perfect email that touches the pain point of your audience is an art.
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Brilliant Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips for Holiday Season
Following is a compilation of some tried-and-tested tricks and tips to carry out a successful email marketing campaign for an ecommerce store.
1. Strengthen Email Marketing List for Ecommerce
The first important task is to construct a strong email list. Your whole campaign can turn useless if you don’t have an extensive email list to send out your engaging content to. Considering that you’re a newbie with close-to-negligible email list, then how can you build one?
The art of fetching email addresses is no rocket science, but sure it is creative. Here are some ways to get people to give you their email addresses.
- Opt-ins work well for this purpose, but they need to be placed at the right spot with high quality graphics
- Use proper calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end of blogs, asking for email address. It will work fittingly well with the quality of your blog’s content
- Offer incentives in exchange for email addresses such as discounts or free e-books
- Build separate landing page to get leads that ask for their email address. You can also use an email lookup tool to find accurate email addresses
2. Remind Shoppers About Cart Abandonment
Almost 60% visitors leave a cart during the shopping process and many of these do so because their attention was diverted by something. This is a big loss for many ecommerce stores that receive a small amount of traffic. These ecommerce stores can easily decrease this percentage by reminding their customers about the cart abandonment.
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One way of email marketing ecommerce is by sending a polite email with subject like ‘Your PRODUCT is waiting for you…’ or something similar will not only make the customer smile, but may also make him buy the product.
3. Use a Killer Subject Line
Subject line is the first thing an individual online buyer sees. It shouldn’t only be short and concise, but also summarize what’s inside the email. If you have an amazing offer inside your email, but its subject line is not so compelling, then it could be a major loss for you. That’s one way of email marketing ecommerce.
The open rate of emails primarily depend on the subject line. According to MailChimp, average open rate of ecommerce industry is only 16.75%.
4. Don’t Pitch for Sales
“Don’t push for sales”, that’s the next tip going forward. Yes, even if you know that you are writing to a potential customer, you shouldn’t ask them to buy. Instead, strive to focus more on informing and educating your audience. For example, if you have put up a discount offer, ask your audience to avail the superb offer by informing them with an exciting tone.
5. Keep your Emails Short
One email marketing for ecommerce is to keep your emails concise and to the point. You, along with all the entrepreneurs out there, need to understand that the audience do not have time to read lengthy emails. The best practice is to keep them simple and to-the-point; just be sure that your email content serves its purpose of conveying the message.
We all are familiar with the fact that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and it holds true for emails as well. Try including high quality images in your emails and sum up information in the form of a banner or two to get your story through to audience. You can also use abandoned cart recovery plugins to retarget customers.
6. Personalize Email For Better Results
When email marketing for ecommerce, try adding personal touch to the emails by mentioning the name of sender as well as recipient. Also, refer to any previous sale that took place with them to get the conversation going.
Personalizing emails can help your customers easily remember you, and it can even entice them to check out your offer once again. This can also be an opportunity and the point of difference between you and your competitors.
7. Channelize Promotional Offers With Email
Email marketing is an essential method to promote any marketing campaign, particularly if your campaign revolves around promoting discounts, coupon codes or deals for holiday season. It can help you target a particular chunk of your customers — if the need be. You can send out emails to specific set of audience, targeting their pain points and solving their problems.
A very important factor that must be part of all your emailing strategies is the CTA. Whether it’s a promo email or welcoming one, be sure it include a CTA that directs the reader towards the next step —. I.e. your website or the specific landing page. You must use actionable verbs in CTAs to entice your visitors take action.
8. Ask Customers for a Feedback or Review
Earlier in this blog, we talked about the relationship between you and your customers and email marketing can be a major platform to do so. You can use emails to communicate with your customers, asking about their experience with the website, review on the last product they purchase; or simply ask them for suggestions on improving your product range and services.
9. Deliver High Quality Content Through Newsletter
Use your email list to the maximum in building relationship with your subscribers and customers. Deliver them high quality content that improves their knowledge in the form of weekly or bi-monthly newsletter.
It is important to note here that you should only deliver content related to the buyer persona. With ecommerce email marketing you can use segmentation to cater to different personas at a time.
You can also use email tracking tools to get a better understanding of how many people open and read your newsletter.
10. Leverage the Power of Automation
Here is again a brilliant hack to get personal with your customers by greeting them on their birthdays, anniversary or any special events. There are a bundle of free and paid extensions that can help you automate this process and act as an autoresponder to your emails. Read more about automation for email marketing.
You might want to keep an eye out for the time of day you set up your automated emails to be sent. Unless you know that your customers work sleepless jobs that keep them up late or are in another timezone, it’s probably best to send them out during the day so that they are actually read, and also because you don’t want email notifications bothering anyone at night.
For instance, Dotmailer can serve this purpose for your Magento store and Remarkety can do the same for a WooCommerce store. It will bring a sense of remembrance among your customers and they will feel valued.
11. Use it to Activate Your Dormant Customer
You can run a separate email campaign for customers who haven’t returned to your ecommerce store since their last purchase. You can separately address them and ask for a word. Make a fascinating offer that compels them to visit your website again and try to sort out their bad experiences — if they had any. This is the beauty of personalization that can be easily achieved via emails.
12. Don’t Stop — Try A/B Testing
Another important tip is to carry out A/B testing before taking any kind of marketing leap. Try out different subject lines, text and graphics to calculate the difference in open rate, click-through-rate (CTR) and conversions. A/B testing will help you plan better for your next move.
13. Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
Customer ordered something and you shipped it. Now what? Wait for more customers? Nope. You can upsell him your products. How? Simply email him with a list of items that will look even better with the things (s)he has already bought. For example, if (s)he has bought a BBQ grill, you can also sell him knives, tray, and gloves.
This will not only make the customer think that you care for the individual, but you will also be helping the person buy more from you.
14. Customer Loyalty and Re-Engagement Emails
Engagement on your ecommerce store can enhance its organic reach. It also makes the store look more credible among potential customers. So, how do you increase engagement? Simply ask your customers politely through email to tell about the product on your product page.
For example, if a person has bought a punching bag, you can ask him how was the quality of the bag. Send him the product link from where he can automatically add the review.
This tactic has been used by Amazon. And, most of the reviews you see on Amazon are because of it.
15. Reward Loyal Subscribers
This is an extension of the review email we have mentioned above. Let’s suppose some of your customers have become active on your webstore. So, what is the best way to keep them engaged? You must reward them.
Pick some of the most engaged users and send them an email that because of their loyalty to your ecommerce store you are offering them a free gift and a an exclusive discount. You can even announce it on your social media profile so more people become engaged.
16. Notify Customers About Previously Out of Stock Items
Sometimes visitors want to buy a product that is out of stock. Add a prompt on the product page to ‘Notify when item is available.’
Now, you can notify these customers when the item is back in stock. Use any In Stock Alert app to target these potential customer with the relevant notification to get more sales.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. Why Email Marketing Open Rate is too Low During Holiday Season?
There are two reasons:
- People tend to receive a lot of emails. So, they will be ignoring your email.
- Your email’s subject line isn’t catchy enough.
The solution to both these problems is to focus on your customers’ problems. Don’t just promote your products. Send them infomercials about how your product can solve their problems. This should be your strategy especially if you are cold mailing them.
Q2. Why Shoppers are not Converting through Email?
The average conversion rate through email is only 2% to 3%. This can even vary industry wise. If you are getting a conversion rate less than this, then you need to change the way you are sending emails. There are a few reasons behind it: For example:
- You may be sending too many emails at once
- Your email may have a crappy layout
- The subject line is too generic
- Audience doesn’t know about your store and consider you a spammer
- Your emails are falling in the spam folder
Q3. How to Create an Ecommerce Email Marketing Funnel?
Make several strategies keeping all the stages of the funnel in mind i.e. Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Delight.
Test these funnels to find out which one works best for you.
Final Words: Keep Things Simple
All in all, I’d like to emphasize on the KISS (keep it simple and stupid) principle in order to produce more results. Go for a killer subject line and don’t forget the CTA. Add a personal touch to your email address and don’t compromise on the quality of the content you deliver
So, are you planning something for upcoming holidays season? Use these tips to run a successful ecommerce email marketing campaign for promoting your offers and discounts.
Until we discuss our next subject again, check out the ‘importance of ecommerce customer reviews with ways to get them.‘
*Sources used:
Multi Channel Merchant, USA Visa
Sajjad Shahid
Sajjad is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves helping out Ecommerce store owners, merchants and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups. Sajjad enjoys playing table tennis and cricket over the weekend.