How To Do Email Marketing For Ecommerce … Solohacks RoundUp

 

Email Marketing And Ecommerce Are Like Twin Brothers. Without Emails, Ecommerce Sites Wouldn’t Be Able To Nurture And Convert Prospects Into Buyers.

If you really need to understand how far you must go with email marketing for your ecommerce business, you just have to follow Amazon on your next trip to their site. They study your interests and behavior, and then very smartly and appropriately nudge you to buy – and then keep buying more.

At Solohacks Academy, our roundups usually pick topics that most people would consider a question that begets inspiring answers. On a topic like using email marketing for ecommerce, most experts have certain points they emphasize, and it’s good to know what these are.

Just because email marketing is the cheapest and most effective form of contact with prospects and customers, many entrepreneurs tend to be slack in their efforts. If that describes you, you need to read this roundup and pay attention to the nuances that matter.

Our picks for this Solohacks RoundUp include 10 great quotes from the blog posts of Tracy Wallace, Sam Thomas Davies, Jacinda Santora, Neil Patel, Pritha Bose, Alaa Hassan, William Harris, Michal Leszczynski, James Scherer, and Ron Dod.

 

 

 

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1. Building an email list is invaluable … this is proprietary data no one else on the web has but you: Tracy Wallace

 

Tracy Wallace in the article “31 Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips to 5x Your Conversion Rates”:

One of the most valuable aspects of running an independent webstore is your ability to build an email list. This is proprietary data no one else on the web has but you. It is your leg up on the competition. It is your vehicle for building value and engaged relationships with your customers. It is a key mechanism for how you increase customer lifetime value and successfully predict the trajectory of your business.

The strategies you employ with your email list are important, in the same way how you talk to and interact with your customers on social media, on calls or in forums is important. You are building a relationship. You are sharing information. You are providing opportunities and touch points beyond what someone not on that email list would get.

These people are VIPs. After all, they have already purchased with your brand. Industry benchmarks show that nearly 21% of people will open your email, with 2.56% of them clicking through to your website. Additionally, 33% of recipients will open your email on subject line alone and 55% of emails are opened on a mobile device.

Of course, your brand doesn’t have to settle for benchmark standards. You should strive to beat them — and the following email marketing best practices will help you do just that.”

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2. Ecommerce email marketing isn’t just about the right strategy; it’s about the right sequencing of your emails: Sam Thomas Davies

 

Sam Thomas Davies in the article “E-Commerce Email Marketing 101: 11 Must-Have Emails (2021)”:

If you’re like most e-commerce marketers, you’re investing in email marketing. You’re growing your email list, sending well-written email campaigns and engaging return visitors with personalized on-site messages.

But as effective as email marketing is, it’s not enough on its own. Why? Because e-commerce email marketing isn’t about the right strategy; it’s about the right sequencing.

Mail the right emails at the wrong time to the wrong prospect, and people will opt out of your emails (or worse, move to a competitor). But mail the right emails at the right time to the right prospects, and you won’t just have lifelong customers, you’ll have brand evangelists.

There’s also something else that’s equally important: your brand’s unique voice. If you haven’t found your voice, yet—keep searching. If you do, and you become a recognizable brand, your email marketing will pay for itself.”

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3. Personalization can drastically improve open rates, clicks, and engagement while reducing bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports: Jacinda Santora

 

Jacinda Santora in the article “13 Simple eCommerce Email Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Your Sales”:

You may have more than one target audience that you’re trying to reach. It’s not uncommon for a product or service to appeal to more than just one segment of the population. But what if you know you’re not going to be able to reach your entire audience with a single message? That’s where personalization comes in.

Personalization can drastically improve open rates, clicks, and engagement while reducing bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports. If you’re not segmenting your list and personalizing your emails, you need to start now. Sending emails with content that’s tailored to each audience segment is a great way to keep your subscribers happy, and subscribers who are happy are more likely to buy.

So, how can you make this part of your eCommerce email marketing strategy? You could start by segmenting your list into the standard demographics like age, income, education, and maybe gender identity if it really matters for the products or services you’re offering.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. While demographics tell you easily-discoverable details about your subscribers, psychographics go deeper into things like their values, personality, and interests. Together, this creates a complete and incredibly valuable picture of your subscriber and how to communicate with them.”

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4. At its crux, email marketing is about building trust with your existing and potential customers and encouraging loyalty: Neil Patel

 

Neil Patel in the article “How to Maximize Ecommerce Sales Using Email Marketing”:

At its crux, email marketing is about building trust with your existing and potential customers. To accomplish this, you may use a promotional email, a personalized transactional email, free shipping coupons and anything else that will encourage loyalty.

Email marketing is only going to work if you’ve got people on your list in the first place. So, the most important question for an online retailer is – ’how do I get people onto my list?’ When it comes to marketing an ecommerce business, there are several ways that you can get people to join your list.

If your site is already generating sales, then you should already have a list of ‘buyers.’ If you don’t, there are some tactics that you can use to collect email addresses.

One method involves creating a ‘pop-up’ that appears on your site and provides people with a coupon. While a solid marketing strategy, what’s important to remember here is that you don’t have to ask for an email address right away when displaying your pop-up.

If you entice people with a discount coupon, they’ll be more willing to buy from you. And, when they buy from you, they’ll provide their email address. Ecommerce marketing pros know that this is a good way to generate leads and sales, without seeming overly pushy.

Once you have an email list in place, you then need to get these people to buy. In order to do that, you’ll need to run some promotional email campaigns that engage people and get them buying.”

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5. Short and clear email copy works marvelously to boost the ROI and improve the open inbox rate for your marketing campaigns: Pritha Bose

 

Pritha Bose in the article “30 E-Commerce Email Marketing Examples To Take Note Of”:

When a visitor is browsing through your website, chances are high that he/she is not willing to make a purchase then and there. So, do you let that visitor go? No. You instead ask them to subscribe to your newsletter for further offers.

This gives you time to convince your visitor, nurture the connection, create a brand awareness, and convince them to hit the ‘buy’ button. It doesn’t happen in one day. Brands are conscious about creating an awareness and instilling brand loyalty.

That’s why eCommerce brands have their undeterred focus on creating awesome email newsletters. We are living in an age where communication happens mostly online. And there is no doubt that emails have always been the most preferred way to initiate a one-to-one conversation or connection.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that brands spent a huge amount of time and effort in designing their newsletters, finalizing the contents and images, and deciding on the frequency.

A short and clear email copy works marvelously to boost the ROI and improve the open inbox rate for your marketing campaigns. You will lose subscribers if your email copy is devoid of good content. So, use actionable language and craft personalize subject lines with relevant content. Never compromise with clarity in the content and make it your top priority to engage the audiences.”

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6. Are you ready for the best part? Email marketing is inexpensive, which makes it easy to experience an impressive ROI: Alaa Hassan

 

Alaa Hassan in the article “What Is Email Marketing And Why Is It Important for eCommerce?”:

Are you sending emails to your website visitors? If not, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to convert them to buyers. Email can be directly used to sell by sending offers to users who abandoned shopping carts or haven’t purchased in a while. Or they can be used in a more indirect way to remind people that you exist and are still relevant with newsletters and helpful tips.

And are you ready for the best part? Email marketing is inexpensive, which makes it easy to experience an impressive ROI!

Email isn’t just for getting people to buy or reminding them that your brand still exists. It is one of the most valuable tools you have as an ecommerce provider to keep in touch with customers about their orders. Use email to send tracking numbers, thank you notes and more.

And when you send these emails, don’t forget to ask for product reviews. If you have done your job right, your customers will be happiest when they open that package that arrives in the mail. This is when you should ask for a review or recommendation.

By the way, prompt order confirmation and tracking emails also help improve customer experience, which will make customers more likely to return and want to recommend your brand.”

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7. To go beyond the sales email and understand where other emailing opportunities lie, it can help to map out the customer journey: William Harris

 

William Harris in the article “The Advanced Guide to Email Marketing for Ecommerce”:

When it comes to investing in email marketing for ecommerce, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to only send sales and promotional emails to your leads. When you’re new to ecommerce, it’s sometimes hard to think about what kind of emails you should be sending outside of the ones that offer discounts and free shipping notifications, but there are a lot of other types of campaigns you can and should be sending in order to nurture relationships and build loyalty.

To go beyond the sales email and understand where the opportunities lie, it can be helpful to work on mapping out the actual journey that a typical customer navigates through who buys from you. The customer journey, or buyer journey as it’s also called, looks different for every business, but here is a helpful example of what they typically look like:

Image courtesy: Apruve

As you can see, there are a few primary phases that your prospective customers will enter in and out of as they navigate through their journey toward buying. The phases are: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention (or Loyalty), and Advocacy. As an email marketer, your job is to determine how to leverage email to help move people along in the process toward conversion and eventually advocacy.

Here are some examples of email campaigns you could send during each phase of the customer journey:

• Awareness: Welcome Emails, Product Education Emails, Blog Post Emails, Company Origin Story Emails
• Consideration: Product Feature Emails, Video Emails, Customer Story Emails, Abandoned Cart Emails, Promotion Emails
• Purchase: Promotion Emails, Order Confirmation Emails, Shipping Confirmation Emails
• Retention: Feedback Emails, Thank You Emails, Promotion Emails, Recommended Product Emails, Video Emails
• Loyalty: Special VIP Offer Emails, New Product Emails, Blog Post Emails
• Advocacy: Referral Offer Emails, Customer Story Emails, Customer Delight Emails”

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8. Aim to make your email marketing smooth and frictionless on all devices, and pay attention to your mailing frequency: Michal Leszczynski

 

Michal Leszczynski in the article “10 Tips on Increasing Sales with Ecommerce Email Marketing Automation”:

It’s been said too many times already, but I’ll say it one more time. When designing your email campaigns, landing pages, and ad campaigns – focus on all the devices your customers might be using to access them. If a single element in this equation’s not working, you might be wasting your marketing budget and your customers’ interest.

Pay attention to the images, size, and placement of your call to action buttons, the product page, check out process, and everything else your customers might encounter on the way. You’ll want the experience to be as smooth and frictionless as possible.

Every once in a while, we all get tempted to send an additional email campaign. We do it thinking that there’s little harm in it and the outcome can only be good for the business. While in many cases that might be true, the data from our study seems to be telling a different story.

Before you decide to increase your mailing frequency make sure to analyze the data carefully and take note of when you’re making the changes. The number one reason why subscribers opt out of email campaigns is because they receive too many emails in general.

At the same time, the total revenue you’ll make from the campaign may outweigh the costs of attracting new customers to replace the ones who unsubscribe. Whatever you decide, make sure your long-term goals aren’t sacrificed by your short-term plans.”

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9. Because email is so widespread it takes a substantial amount of creativity to stand out inside the email inbox: James Scherer

 

James Scherer in the article “6 Ecommerce Email Marketing Examples & Strategies That Improve Sales”:

Email marketing is absolutely critical to success in ecommerce. I’d go as far to say you can’t have one without the other.

Ecommerce giants like Sephora, Amazon, BestBuy, all heavily rely on email marketing as a tool to pull customers back to their websites.

Although we’ve been using email for ages, it is still considered the most effective form of marketing. Why? Other than picking up the phone, email is as close as you can get to engaging with a customer directly.

Technologies like Facebook or Google Ads still rely on “pushing” ads out for people to stumble upon whereas email “pulls” customers in.
Now because email is so widespread it takes a substantial amount of creativity to stand out inside the email inbox.

Getting a customer to open an email is difficult enough, let alone getting them to click through on an offer. It helps to have inspiration during the development of a campaign.”

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10. Develop a great pop-up strategy. Though quite common in recent years, many websites are still not doing it right: Ron Dod

 

Ron Dod in the article “5 Tips for Email Marketing for eCommerce: How to Grow Your List and Make More Sales”:

Develop a great pop-up strategy, This has become quite common in recent years, but many websites are still not doing it right.

About 98% of your website visitors will usually not use the sign-up sheets on your website. This reality has increased the use of pop-up sign-up sheets. However, there are some considerations to doing it right.

Pop-ups that show up immediately or about a minute after the visitor comes on your website are not very effective because the visitor has not yet had a chance to see what you are offering. It is often safer to have pop-ups come up when visitors open inner web pages.

This way, you can be more confident that they are at least interested in what you are selling. If your first pop-up sign-up form did not work, then exit-intent pop-ups might do the trick. Make room for the usual customer hesitancy—give them a chance to get at ease with your online store and, when visitors are about to leave your site, trigger a sign-up form instantly.

The wording of your pop-ups can also help reduce the perceived rudeness of pop-ups. One website’s pop-up started this way: “You don’t like pop-ups? Ahh, shoot! Well, since we have your attention already …” It worked on me.

Pop-ups, by their very nature, come up uninvited, so the key is to word your message in such a way that it relaxes the minds of customers and doesn’t make them feel harried.”

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So What Are Your Thoughts? Do Share!

This post is incomplete without your input. The community of Knowledge Commerce solopreneurs would feel galvanized to hear from you … so do share your thoughts on this topic with us, in the comments field below this post.

 

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