Ecommerce Email Marketing: Strategy, Testing, Technique, and Tips
Ecommerce email marketing is among the most effective marketing techniques. In fact, 47% of marketers believe that it is the most important one.
Email marketing is free, personalizable, and action-oriented. You do not have to spend hours and thousands of dollars on attracting prospects because newsletter subscribers are already interested in your brand. It is an amazing tool for customer retention, data collection, and self-promotion.
In this guide to eCommerce email marketing, we will go through the basic and pro-level tips that you must know.
We divided the article into three main parts: strategy, testing, and technique tips. By doing so, we tried to provide advice for every step of your email marketing journey.
So let’s start off with the basics: what is email marketing in eCommerce?
Ecommerce Email Marketing Strategy
The first step of any marketing technique is setting up a strategy. When it comes to email marketing for eCommerce businesses, here are the main questions that you need to answer:
- Where and how to get email addresses? How to build a substantial email list?
- What emails to send them?
- When to send emails?
Choose an Email Marketing Service
Email marketing services are a great help when it comes to email creation and distribution: you will be able to design beautiful emails that will not get into spam folders (as it usually happens when you send an email to many people at once from a personal account).
Moreover, email marketing services will provide help and training for those who never created newsletters before. Tracking of who opened and clicked is possible with email marketing services that will help you evaluate your email marketing performance.
There is a great variety of email marketing services – you can get easily overwhelmed and lost in the features, truths, and lies. Our goal is to help you choose the best email marketing se
So what makes a good email marketing service?
First of all, it should be user-friendly. You do not want to spend hours figuring out the tool. It should be easy to manage contact lists, segment users in groups, and do the analytics as well.
Among the most popular email marketing services are tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact, SendinBlue , or any of the seemlessly endless list of ESPs.
Create a Subscription Form
In order to get the email addresses, you have to let people know about the existence of your newsletter. The subscription form should be easy, visible, and provide some kind of value.
Do not ask for thousands of details because customers are usually too lazy to fill out a form that contains more than 5 questions. The simplest you can get is a name and an email.
You have to add a form on the main page (near contact info) and at the register. You can consider a pop-up form for when someone leaves your site as well. Do not forget to promote your newsletter on social media!
Customers expect a reward for their subscriptions. You have more chances to get that email if you provide a free coupon or a sale for the subscription (and more chances to make an immediate sale as well). If sales and coupons are not for you, try to address the benefits of being subscribed: information about new products or season sales, a list of the best articles of the week, a community of like-minded people, etc. Additionally, implementing e-commerce monitoring can greatly enhance your understanding of customer behavior, allowing you to optimize your strategies and improve conversion rates.
Prepare Emails for Different Occasions
A newsletter is not only about new products and sales that you should create every week. There are a couple of standard letters that do not require a creative mind every week. Those are:
Welcome Letters
This once comes in handy for fresh subscribers: they have the biggest open rate of 82 percent and should include the prettiest design you can manage, personal touch, and a bit of information on your brand (values, mission, fun facts).
Abandon Cart Email
It is the one that is sent to a customer after they have stopped their shopping midway. Here you can include sentences like “looks like you forgot something”, a coupon, and reviews from satisfied customers. It is needed to remind your customers of their abandoned items and give them a little push to finally make this purchase.
Ask-for-Review Letter
It is essential for businesses to ask for customers’ opinions and analyze their work. Email is the best place to do so since, as we have said before, they are action-oriented. You can send one right after a customer has purchased something or got a delivery.
Know When To Send an Email
It is essential that you send the emails before it gets swamped with all the other working emails or when people actually have money to pay for those. Consequently, it is better to send emails with offers at the end or beginning of the month because that is when workers receive paychecks. “We have tried various days but Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday: people are not as busy as they are on Mondays and they are not in a party mood as it happens on Fridays”, – says the head of the marketing department at IvoryResearch.
When it comes to actual time, it is best to send emails at 6 am (people check email before work), 2 pm (lunch break), and 8 pm (after a long day). It is unnecessary to send emails when people are working – they may ignore it due to reading business emails.
Do not forget to consider time zones and divide customers into segments to send newsletters based on the location.
Email Marketing Testing for eCommerce
A strategy is all good but it does not have a practical element to it. The real work begins when you start to try things. Before you get the perfect formula that works for your subscribers, you have to test a lot and acquire what is called a growth experimentation mindset. By testing, you will be able to understand how elements of your email influence customer behavior: do they mark it as unread without opening it? Do they click on specific buttons? do they unsubscribe after the second letter? Testing is essential for achieving amazing KPIs and getting all the benefits that we have listed at the beginning of the article.
So we recommend you test the following:
Subject Lines
Based on the subject line, people decide whether they will open the letter or not. It has to be engaging and include information about what the email is about at the same time. It is good to try different lengths, contents, personalized and not personalized versions, and including promos.
Pre-Header
Pre-header can be read before the email opens as well, so you better work on it.
Time and Day
We have already said what the best days and times are but it is very generalized. As you know, what works for one online business, is a complete flop for another. If you are at a brunch cafe, people are unlikely to be interested in your email in the middle of Wednesday.
Call-to-Action
Is it noticed by newsletter readers at all? Test direct and not so direct call to action, try different colors and fonts for them.
Content
There is a lot you can do about content. You can send promos, catalogs, stories about your brand, or blog articles of the week. You can keep it short or long. You can use positive or negative language. You can use personalization or not. There are a lot of possibilities to mix and try.
Email Marketing Technique Tips for eCommerce
In every niche, there are these obvious and hidden tips that do not fit in any specific step of the activity. This part concentrates on these tips exactly.
Encourage Readers to Reply
Email’s main purpose is to convey information that the reader should reply to. It is natural for email users to have a desire to reply or do basically anything with an email. So give them a possibility to fulfill that urge – ask questions that encourage conversation, live links that they have to follow, or create a distinctive call to action.
HBO adds distinctive call-to-action. To be more precise, there are three of them.
HBO Max is here!
Offer Sales to Email Subscribers Only
It is yet another way to encourage people to subscribe to a newsletter and make them forget about the unsubscribe button. They can check your sales on the site or read your blog whenever they are in a mood for it – there is no need to receive 2-3 emails from you a week. So make them believe that your newsletter community has something very unique, something that other people are not privileged to have.
Swarovski uses the word “exclusive” which is a major trigger to customers.
Email exclusive: Pre-SALE starts now
Address People With Their Names
It is a known fact that all customers want to feel cared about and to feel unique. A little personal touch like addressing them with their names makes them feel all these things.
It is a personalization, taken to the next level by Resy.
Here’s how you dined in 2019, by the numbers.
Put Additional Effort in Design
Many people care about designs more than anything: we visit beautiful coffee shops, even though they are more expensive than regular ones, we are tempted to buy pretty things, just because they are pretty, we even choose books by its cover more often than not. So nice design matters!
Aillea uses different fonts, showcases its product with the help of aesthetically-pleasing images, and keeps using white and pink in its design.
We’ve missed you.
Format for Every Device
It is common knowledge that sites with mobile-friendly versions perform better. However, the same rule works for email and we often forget about that. You can make a wonderful design for the newsletter but it will end up in the trash can because a mobile user cannot even open it or it comes as something hideous and twisted.
Make It Easy To Unsubscribe
If you do not give an option to unsubscribe with one click, your customer will just end up being mad at you and never buying from you again.
Miro leaves a link that you can easily follow and unsubscribe. It is a better decision than asking your customer to reply to an email, or go to their account and manage notifications.
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Conclusion
Email marketing has numerous benefits that you can use, once you have your strategy, you did your testing, and you use tips from professionals.
The strategy consists of choosing an email marketing service, creating and promoting signup form, preparing standard emails, and analyzing the best time for your audience.
Testing is essential for doing the best you can with a newsletter. You have to test subject lines testing, pre-header, time and day, call to action, and content.
The most useful tips are to encourage readers to reply, offer limited sales for newsletter subscribers only, address people with their names, but the additional effort in design, make sure that it is formatted for every device, make it easy to unsubscribe.
Email marketing is not rocket science if you know what to do. This article, hopefully, gave you this knowledge.