As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, you’re likely already sending the occasional email campaign to your list, but you might not have a clear or proactive strategy in place. To get to know your audience better, consider these three tips: Tip #1: Dig into Your Customer Data – If you haven’t already, spend time digging into your existing customer data in order to get to know your customers better. You probably have a good amount of subscribers on your list who have never purchased from you. Use the data you can collect from past customers to inform how you communicate with your future customers. If you’re like a lot of other ecommerce business owners, you might not have ever really had the time to sit down and work on an actual email marketing strategy for your business. If you don’t have a clear strategy in place, it’s hard to know what’s working and what isn’t. 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 To learn more about customer journey mapping as it relates to ecommerce, read through this helpful blog post from Shopify. Instead, add personality and a human component to your email campaigns by having them come from a real person who can sign their name at the bottom of the copy. If you want to get the people on your list to visit your product pages and purchase, you have to make them feel like they have a personal connection with you. Over to You What’s working well for you when it comes to email marketing?
To grow your ecommerce business in 2018, you have to be willing to invest in email marketing. As industries become more saturated and competition heats up, you have to work harder and harder to establish and nurture real relationships with your leads and customers.
Email is one of the most powerful channels you can leverage when it comes to communicating with and persuading the people who are ultimately going to buy products from you. Consider the following statistics about the power and value of email marketing for ecommerce:
- The number of email users worldwide is forecasted to rise to 2.9 billion by 2019 (WordStream).
- 73% of millennials identify email as their preferred means of business communication (WordStream).
- Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter (Campaign Monitor).
- Every dollar spent on email marketing generates a $38 return and delivers a three-fold increase in purchases compared to spend on social (Content Magazine).
As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, you’re likely already sending the occasional email campaign to your list, but you might not have a clear or proactive strategy in place.
This guide will provide you with 6 tips that you can use to build a clear strategy and start getting more ROI from your email marketing efforts now and in the months ahead:
1. Know Your Audience
To build an effective email strategy for your ecommerce business, one of the first things you need to do is make sure you have a firm grasp of who it is that you’re actually trying to reach. Taking time to know and understand your audience is crucial to your success now and in the future.
Every time you send an email out to your list (or a segment of your list), you’re creating the opportunity to connect directly and personally with your prospective customers in ways that you just can’t do on Facebook or Twitter. If you’re sending messages that don’t resonate with your subscribers or motivate them to take action, you’re wasting your time and potentially damaging your reputation in the process.
Your email marketing strategy needs to be built upon a foundation of knowledge about your audience.
To get to know your audience better, consider these three tips:
- Tip #1: Dig into Your Customer Data – If you haven’t already, spend time digging into your existing customer data in order to get to know your customers better. Look for trends relating to age, location, and purchasing habits. You probably have a good amount of subscribers on your list who have never purchased from you. Use the data you can collect from past customers to inform how you communicate with your future customers.
- Tip #2: Build Audience Personas – If you want to think more broadly about who your target audience is, spend time working with your team to build a few audience personas that you can reference and refine over time. Need help getting started? HubSpot has a great template that you can download and customize for your business.
- Tip #3: Check Data from Your Social Pages – You can also find a wealth of data from your social media page analytics about your audience. Dig into demographic and engagement data to get ideas about what kind of content to send to your email subscribers and when to send it to them. Not sure where to start? Click here to go through some of the resources Facebook has built for page managers like you.
Once you are confident that you know who your audience is, you can start thinking more about how you want to interact with them through future email campaigns.
2. Build an Actual Strategy
When you’re new to ecommerce, it’s easy to fly by the seat of your pants for a while until the dust finally settles. If you’re like a lot of other ecommerce business owners, you might not have ever really had the time to sit down and work on an actual email marketing strategy for your business. But building a specific strategy that you can work against is important. Here’s why:
- A strategy can help you focus. There are a lot of directions you can go with email marketing. A strategy can help ensure that you are not getting too distracted. It can help you prioritize efforts and focus on the ideas that matter most.
- A strategy can help you understand what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t have a clear strategy in place, it’s hard to know what’s working and what isn’t.
- A strategy can keep you and your team accountable. A strategy can help you and your team stick to deadlines, priorities, and goals.
- A strategy can help you set clear goals. A strategy forces you to think about the why. It forces you to think about why you want to send emails to your list, and what you’re hoping to get out of it.
- A strategy can be built upon and evolved over time. Without a clear strategy in place, it can feel like you’re starting over every 6 months. You don’t remember what worked, what didn’t, or why you tested one campaign over another. With a strategy in place, it’s easier to learn from the past and think about what you need to do differently in the future.
- A strategy can be handed to someone else. As an ecommerce business owner, you have to be…
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