eCommerce Email Marketing

3 Reasons why Email Marketing is Useful to Grow your eCommerce Business and How it Should Be Done (A Step-By-Step Guide)

As businesses continue to take advantage of eCommerce, email marketing is a pillar to increase brand awareness and customer retention. Email marketing is also a highly effective tool to grow sales as they create a variety of sales opportunities that would have otherwise been missed. In this article we will discuss 3 methods in which your eCommerce business can successfully integrate emails as part of your marketing strategy, following an easy step-by-step guide on how you can get started.

email marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is when a company’s products/services, promotional campaigns and newsletters are communicated to customers via email. As the sender, you control the content that will be included in the email and this can vary depending on the goal of your eCommerce business. The success of an email’s Call to Action (or CTA) depends on the overall information and how it is presented to the viewer.

3 Reasons why email marketing is useful to grow your eCommerce business

  1. It is a great way to remind customers of current promotional events and important messages about your eCommerce business after exiting the website. This way, you are repetitively able to grab their attention and attract them back to your website. 
  2. When new subscribers sign up for an email newsletter, it is a definite sign that they are interested in learning more about your products and services. You are also able to optimize this opportunity by including a blurb of your company’s overall purpose. 
  3. Email marketing also provides you with an additional marketing strategy referred to as, “Permission-based marketing”. This type of strategy allows you to offer up something to the customer in exchange for their email. Usually, it is something made personal for them and it adds a sense of exclusivity. 

How to set up email marketing for your business (Step-by-Step)

Step 1: Select an email marketing solutions company

Nowadays, there are a handful of email marketing solutions companies that facilitate the way your business can communicate with new and existing customers. Email marketing, in and of itself, can seem like an overwhelming task but luckily, there are companies that simplify this challenge. According to Hubspot, the top 3 rated email marketing services are HubSpot Email Marketing Services, Omnisend and Pabbly Email Marketing. Aside from providing businesses with captivating and easy-to-use email templates, they also provide marketing automation, email list segmentation amongst other email services that maintain customer retention.

Step 2: How to put together an email list

Your email list is your greatest asset, especially as an eCommerce business and there are a few different ways to build a great one. To get started, there are a few areas of your website where you can place email opt-in forms for your visitors.
Header and Navigation Bar
A landing page that is dedicated to email sign-ups keeps your website looking organized but there are different areas of your website that you can also utilize to turn visitors to subscribers. Areas like the website header and navigation bar can simplify the sign-up process and increase the numbers on your email list.
Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a term commonly used in email marketing; it is a Call-to-Action (CTA) window that pop-ups after a few minutes (usually 2-3 minutes) of someone browsing your website. This window provides an incentive to the visitor where they are able to exchange their email for a piece of downloadable digital content — this can be an exclusive coupon, PDF or other exclusive extras. When customers visit your website, consider setting up a lead magnet that will get visitors to sign up for your email list.
Pop-up window
This is convenient when wanting to grab your visitor’s attention but it is important to design it in a way that makes the reader want to be part of your email community. Some headline ideas can be an upcoming sale, limited offers, new product launches and VIP coupons that can be used on future purchases.
Customer accounts
Customer accounts help organize how a visitor can shop your website. By giving them a chance to create a customer account, you can ask for their email to save their activity on your website such as what they have recently viewed, added to their cart and purchases made.

Step 3: Create a list of email prompts you want to communicate with your new subscriber

Email marketing has many different avenues that will benefit your eCommerce business, many of which are promotional.
Newsletters

This traditional form of email marketing can be an asset to roundup announcements to your email list that tell them more about your eCommerce business, any upcoming events and sales. While it is still a good use of email marketing, customers nowadays are bombarded with information overload, newsletters included.

As a solution, try organizing relevant information together while keeping the other stuff separate. What this allows you to do is to send shorter, compelling emails that are straight to the point without overwhelming the reader with too much data.

Order confirmation emails
An unexpected way to achieve customer retention that doesn’t use a promotional approach is through order confirmation emails. In this email it is important to answer the 3 W’s: where the order is being shipped from and its arrival destination, when the customer can expect their package and what items they’ve ordered, including their order number. This creates a high level of transparency and trust between you and the customer, growing the relationship further.
Email segmentation
This is the grouping of customers that have similar interests to each other and it allows you to send emails that are specific to them. A few ways you can track your subscribers interests is through their account activity; transactional and browsing. Using this data, you can target messages based on similar customer behaviour.

Expand your eCommerce business presence and customer relationships

Email marketing goes beyond sending subscribers promotional information. It is an extension to this and lets your business grow the relationship you have with your customers on a personal level. Developing an email marketing strategy can be challenging but using the step-by-step guide outlined above simplifies this task. It’s never too late to begin building your email list to get your eCommerce business started.

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