If you’ve yet to start using email marketing for your ecommerce business, you’re missing out on some significant growth. In today’s world, building and growing an email list is essential to making sales both on and off-line.
Using Email Marketing for Ecommerce
Email marketing goes far beyond sending out a few emails here and there to update your clients on new products. With the following strategies, you’ll be able to make serious strides as a company through your email marketing:
- Create a Marketing Plan
Regardless of whatever your goals for your marketing strategies may be, you won’t be able to put them into action if you don’t have a clear plan. Part of your planning process must include answers to the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What results are you aiming for?
- What will happen after the customers take action?
- Is your ecommerce business prepared to accept new customers
- How can you make it easier for customers to complete transactions through the email
Though there are other aspects of your plan to consider, these basic questions are a good starting point to make email marketing work for you.
- Choose Your Call to Action
One of the most important functions of email marketing is to promote a call to action. While you may be tempted to test out multiple calls to action, your efforts will be more effective if you choose a single one. Every email must clearly direct the reader to take one action and this will ensure they are one step further along in the sales funnel.
Whether you include a click-through linked to your landing page or ask them to share your content with their contacts, your call to action will work better if it’s one that calls for low effort. While the end goal will certainly be to make a sale, you shouldn’t try to push it in your initial emails.
- Automate Your Email Marketing
You’ll never get the results you’re aiming for if you are trying to operate your email marketing campaign manually. There are a variety of tools that you can use to start automating the entire process. With these tools you can easily create content, collect data, and automatically send out your emails.
Through the power of automation, you’ll be able to reach more people than you would otherwise. Moreover, once the emails have been sent, you can use the data analysis features to see what works and what doesn’t and use these metrics to strengthen the rest of your campaign.
- Make Your Emails Personal
Another important element to include in your ecommerce email marketing is the human element. No one wants to open an email that makes them feel like a name on another email list. With the right tools, you can ensure that every email you send out is personally addressed to each of your subscribers. While they will likely realize you haven’t sent out each and every email yourself, this attention to detail will show them that you care enough prioritize user experience.
Other ways to add personal touches to your emails is to send each subscriber content that is tailored to their specific interests. Whether it is a promotion or freebie for their birthday or a follow up after a sale, customers really find the value in these little efforts and will show their gratitude by way of customer loyalty.
- Create Original Content
Subscribers to your email list don’t want to see the same boring content with every new email you send. Taking the time to create new engaging content will ensure that your subscribers stay on your list and enjoy receiving emails from you. As you plan each email keep this in mind: the more insightful the content, the higher the click-through rate.
If content creation isn’t in your wheelhouse, outsource the writing of your emails to a copywriter. Just as your content needs to be engaging, it should also be succinct and filled with relevant information.
- Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
Your target audience should always be at the forefront of your mind when putting together your email campaigns. Each email should be written in a way that is targeted towards them. For example, a brand that caters to an audience full of millennials should reflect that in the language they choose to use in their content. Your readers want to feel like they can connect with you, so be sure to use terms and phrases that they use in their daily lives.
- Keep Mobile in Mind
Though we all know that most people use their phones to read their emails, many of us fail to consider this when putting together content for our mailing lists. If emails aren’t optimized and properly formatted for mobile devices, you’ll find that most people won’t even bother trying to read the email.
What may seem like a quick block of content on a computer can appear to be an essay on the phone. Keep this in mind as you format your emails. When creating emails for phones, keep subject lines short, content scrollable, fonts easy-to-read, and calls to action obvious.
- Include Images and Videos
In addition to the stellar copy that you’ll use in your emails, including images and videos will help to further engage your audience. While you shouldn’t go overboard and crowd your emails with gifs, video clips, and images, you can curate complementary visuals throughout the content. Similarly, you can also include links to visual content to encourage people to learn more about a particular product or service. This is another way to increase your conversions.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that every business can benefit from. Whether you’re just getting started or you’re looking for new ways to ramp up your email marketing, applying these tips to your ecommerce email campaigns will help you to make the most of your mailing list.