4 Ways Email Marketing Can Jumpstart Your E-Commerce Business
Despite the rumors, email marketing is not dead. Sure, many emails go unread and straight into the trash folder, but that is because most companies fail to segment their email list for marketing relevancy. We’ll save segmentation discussions for another blog because today we are going to discuss 4 ways email marketing can jumpstart your ecommerce business.
According to a McKinsey report earlier this year, email is a significantly more effective acquisition tool than social media—nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined! 91 percent of all US consumers use email daily, and emails drive purchases at 3X the rate of social media. Oh, and the average order value is 17% higher.
So how can email marketing help?
1. Email marketing can expand your footprint
If you follow best practices when you set up your email, you make it easy for your customers to share your email. Give them a compelling offer and they are more likely to pass the outstanding offer to family and friends.
Make sure your email makes it easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
2. Email can build excitement for a new product or service
It’s always better to have pent up demand built up for a product or service before the actual launch. Email is a great tool for creating pre-awareness with your customers and community. You can offer early access in exchange for an email address or provide extra value at the launch for people interested early on.
Mailbox did a great job of building pre-awareness for their Mailbox for Max product.
Once an email address was entered, a lead nurturing email was automatically sent with more information. This was a great strategy to build pre-awareness for the launch of the Mailbox for Mac product.
3. Email can reengage past customers
If you haven’t done a tremendous job at upsell, cross-sell and every other type of sales methodology, then most likely your customers fall into the one and done category.
Use email to reconnect with past customers and get them reacquainted with your company, the product or services and future offerings.
4. Email marketing can boost the over lifetime value of each customer
There are different kinds of eCommerce businesses. Some build their business on a subscription model while others are constantly looking for new, first-time buyers. Either way, email can keep those customers coming back for more.
If, for example, I purchase a book on Amazon, they send me follow-up offers for other books I might like based on how similar customers have behaved. How would I know about those other offers if they didn’t let me know via email?
On the other hand, if your business is built on a subscription model, emails can remind users to sign up for another month or year of your service.
So what are your next steps:
1. Identify any and every way customers receive communication from you
2. Get data on opens and click-thru rates
3. Start by optimizing colors, logos and copy to be consistent with your brand
4. Find an email provider that will allow you take control of these emails
5. Ensure they are mobile-responsive, functional and beautiful
6. A/B test your transactional emails and make changes based on the results
7. Learn about email segmentation and make your email campaigns RELEVANT!
How are you knocking it out of the park with your email marketing? We’d love to hear your success stories!
