Whether you own an e-commerce store or other type of business, your email marketing strategy can be one of your businesses most powerful marketing tools.
Email marketing delivers the highest overall return on interest (ROI) on average, according to The State of the Email Marketing by Industry Report from GetResponse, “21% of marketers across all industries stated that email marketing delivers an excellent return on investment, making email marketing the clear leader in delivering the highest ROI.”
These email marketing tips can help your campaign by increasing engagement and conversions.
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #1: Reward Email Subscribers
As Internet grows, free meals become scarce. Today Internet users must give an email to receive almost anything online. That means that they get bombarded everyday with emails. On average, office workers receive 121 emails per day, according to DMR Business Statistics.
If you have earned subscribers, rewarding them will keep them engaged and convert more of them to customers. Treat each of your existing subscribers as a “very important person” (VIP) member. Provide them with members-only content, and give them a heads up whenever you are about to launch new products or services. Insurance companies, for example, provide discounted loyalty rewards, based upon continuous membership years.
VIP teasers, such as discount coupon numbers and other perks, will make them feel rewarded for being loyal subscribers. Loyalty spawns engagement. TechnologyAdvice found 56.8% of consumers said that they would be more likely to participate in a loyalty program that offered VIP rewards.
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #2: Personalize Emails
You probably already know, that you can personalize emails by including the correct name of every client in the email. Emails do that practically automatically. Plenty of email apps and platforms, like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, EmailDirect, and others provide different features to meet every email marketer’s needs, according to Zapier.
However now you can personalize your email in many other ways. For example you may have subscribers that live in different time zones. You can schedule emails to go out at the optimal time in each zone.
You may market to different personas, and different header images may get more attention from each of those personas. It’s easy to segment your email list and target relevant content to the inbox of segmented populations.
Research by Klaviyo Showed that by segmenting email campaigns, a business can increase campaign performance by 300%. Research by MailChimp showed that segmented email campaigns received 14% more opens, 101% more clicks, 5% fewer bounces, and 9.37% fewer unsubscribes.
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #3: Share Their Triumphs … and Yours
Businessman, author and syndicated columnist, Harvey Mackay, way back before email was even available to businesses, used to have his company collect birth dates. “At our company, we have our customers’ birthdays on computer, and they get a birthday card, of course. But guess what? That buyer also gets called on in person — and asked out to lunch — when that special day of the year rolls around. It’s not too surprising occasionally to see our sales break the sound barrier on the same day our customer is celebrating a birthday.”
If your business works locally, or has customers all over the country like his did, you may be able to use such tactics. It’s not viable for most of us. However you can celebrate your subscribers triumphs.
It’s easy to include a request for a birth date on subscription forms. Some restaurants for example send out a coupon for a free meal or a free dish for birthdays.
Also share your celebrations with your clients. If your business is celebrating its one-year anniversary, let your VIP clients know and offer them an invitation to celebrate at your business place. A simpler offer could be a discount an anniversary discount on one of your products.
Most businesses have plenty of milestones to celebrate. Why not make one of them a big shebang by inviting your customers?
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #4: Listen to Your Subscribers
Everyone likes to be listened to, but business owners may find little time to engage with customers. It’s easy to run a business, even a successful one, for years, and not really know what your customers want.
Of course if you can figure out what your customers want and give it to them, you can increase the success of your business overall. Search Engine Journal suggests asking clients what kind of content they would like to receive. Instead of sending them emails blindly, try to find out what they would from you.
Many internet users like taking surveys. Today it’s easy to put together a survey with tools like SurveyMonkey, or Google Forms. If you take the time to ask customers about how often they would like receiving your emails, you can avoid overwhelming or under emailing subscribers. Teamwork the project management software company, for example, asks its subscribers about the specific features they would like to learn more about.
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #5: Send Reminders
Dentists’ office staff have this down to a science. They never miss scheduling any of your insurance policy benefit appointments. If you have a paid cleaning every 90 days, you’ll find an email in your inbox somewhere around day 83.
You can do this with your E-commerce products too. For example if you sell dietary supplements in containers of 60 doses, at two a day, you know that your customer will be running out around 30 days from the purchase date. By sending your subscriber a one-click purchase link with a discount as a repeat customer, you boost the odds of making the second sale. Easy-to-use email scheduling apps and add-ons, like Boomerang, make it easy to schedule email reminders.
Email Marketing Tips – Tip #6: Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts
Baymard Institute reports an average of about 69% documented online shopping cart abandonment. To keep your customers’ abandoned shopping carts from bringing down your ROI, send out emails to customers to help them re-engage with the shopping card and complete their purchases.
Ned Heagerty, the Founder of Silk Road Teas, reported that his company used “BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box Abandoned Cart Saver” to recover 17% of customers who abandoned their carts.
Abandoned shopping cart emails should be a part of every e-commerce email marketing strategy.
These are just a few email marketing tips to add to your overall email marketing strategy. Once you dominate these, you’ll find many more. Take a look at the emails in your inbox and see what grabs your attention.