Email Marketing: Content is King

One of the most powerful marketing tools for an eCommerce business is email marketing. Email marketing is inexpensive compared to other forms of advertising and is inherently trackable, as emails contain embedded links to your site or a designated landing page.

One of the more frequent questions I get asked is “How often should companies be sending emails?”  This really depends on your company and the type of business you’re in. Generally speaking, you don’t want your readers to experience email fatigue and unsubscribe from your list.  You can’t keep people from opting out,but by segmenting your list, you reduce the likelihood that a reader will unsubscribe.

One good way to segment your list is to group the subscribers by the date of the customer’s last activity, or by what they purchased (or category of the purchase). By segmenting your lists, your email marketing efforts will be more targeted and, hopefully, more relevant to your customers.

It’s important to create compelling emails that will entice your recipient to open your message. Most people already have nightmarish quantities of emails to sift through, so your email subject line needs to grab their attention. Getting readers to open your message is half the battle. A nice touch is to address the reader by their first name but ultimately, it’s about tailoring your content, or offer, to the customer.

There are a number of occasions to use email marketing: reaching out to past customers, offering special deals to current customers, or just letting customers know about current specials, promotions, contests, new store openings and other company news.

There are some types of emails that can run on auto-pilot, once set up. These include drip campaigns that offer up a series of strategic product promotions relevant to your customers. Order confirmation, shipment confirmation, and abandoned cart emails should be triggered when a set action has taken place. These should be set up as auto-generated form letters to work behind the scenes so you don’t need to worry about them on a daily basis. These email templates should be reviewed on a periodic basis to ensure they are still up-to-date and relevant to the recipient.

Timing is Critical

There is one category of emails that needs to be sent promptly and that is the order confirmation email. Immediately after a customer checks out, send a follow up email thanking them for their purchase, along with a receipt or billing status, order status, tracking and shipping info., if available. Again, this type of email should be set up to automatically go out after a customer has completed a transaction. Providing this information is an ecommerce best practice that customers have come to expect. It also reduces the volume of “Where’s my order?” calls that can tie up your customer service department.

Give Customers a Reason to Sign Up

There are many ways to incent people to sign up to receive your emails: Give away a shopping spree on your site, hold a contest where customers submit photos/videos products in their home, innovative product use, etc., allow customers to share their experiences with products and services (product reviews) and involve them in discussions.

Test and Optimize Landing Pages

Email campaigns that contain promotions and sales of certain items should direct readers to a special campaign landing page on your website instead of just linking to your home page. Why? Because you don’t want to force your visitors to search for the promotion. In addition, a dedicated landing page provides more information about the promotion, keeping your email short and to the point. Lastly, the landing page can help you track conversions and measure how effective your email blast is in converting sales. Make sure your landing page and email match, from look and feel, to language and tone. It doesn’t have to be identical, but the messaging should be aligned, to avoid a disorienting change when a reader clicks from your email to the designated promotional landing page.

Once you have mastered the basics, there are some additional elements you may want to incorporate into your email campaigns. Social media, embedded product video, and personalization are some of the more advanced tactics. So, if you haven’t started email marketing yet, the key is to just get started. Learn from your buyers’ behaviors to see which email campaigns are most effective. Integrate email campaigns into your overall marketing and growth strategies, instead of the occasional email blast. If recipients forget they signed up on your list because you send an email once in a blue moon, they may see it as spam and unsubscribe. Be consistent!

Types of Email Campaigns

• Drip Campaigns
• Newsletter (talks about your company, new products, your customers as a community)
• New Product Announcement
• Order Confirmation
• Shipment Confirmation
• Abandon Cart Emails
• Promotions and Sales

Email Best Practice Checklist

• Personalized emails
• Accurate, catchy subject lines
• Compelling content (focus on offer, expiration creates urgency)
• Calendar (schedule of email campaigns in advance)
• Metrics and tracking (open rate, # of emails sent, conversion rate, sales revenue)
• Take advantage of holidays to send emails
• Clear call to action
• Send both image and text only emails
• Test all links for errors and to ensure links open the proper page
• Ensure the images are linked correctly as well as coded for alt tag (text description)
• Clear/easy unsubscribe from email list
• Add social widgets, like Facebook & Twitter, to enable easy sharing
• Segment list test email through spam filters before sending out
• Optimized creative and landing pages

Getting to eCommerce heaven is a marathon, not a sprint, but you can get better every week.

By: Shirley Tan