The Beginner’s Guide to Drive More Sales With Email

Are you an eCommerce store owner? Odds are that you’ve made some sort of sale at one point or another. While retail sales often mean signs on the windows, store managers or floor managers assisting you wherever you go and special clothing racks, on the other hand, sale strategies work differently for eCommerce. 

If you want to build a sustainable, scalable, and competitive eCommerce business in a highly competitive market, you have to be bold and daring to be able to invest in email marketing. Here’s the catch: if you’re new to the world of eCommerce entrepreneurship, or inexperienced with email marketing in general, it’s not always easy to know what to focus on or how to even get started. Generating revenue through personalized email marketing takes more than just sending a few emails every month; you need a complete strategy and a calendar that starts with email components and ends with marketing automation. A well thought of email strategy can help you boost brand and product awareness, qualify and prioritize leads, become more proactive when it comes to nurturing authentic relationships with current and prospective customers, increase your store traffic, drive repeat sales, and build a stronger, more profitable eCommerce business over time.

If your email doesn’t make the cut right away, it’s lost forever. But, there are foolproof ways to get your emails to be read by any prospect, so you can crush your sales goals. 

Read on to discover actionable tips, recommended tools and additional resources that can help you build an effective, and profitable email marketing strategy for your eCommerce store.

Building an Email Strategy for Your Ecommerce Business

Set Measurable Goals

measurable goals

The best way to establish the right goals for email marketing is to match them up with your company’s overall goals since The goals you set in Phase 1 should influence majorly on what type of email are you sending. Ask yourself these questions as a marketer, “What do you want to achieve with your emails? Do you want to drive more traffic to the website? Create brand awareness? Drive immediate sales or convince people to refer their friends?” 

Once you’ve nailed down the “why” behind your email marketing campaign, consider the big picture of your email marketing program to be what you want to accomplish with each specific email campaign. You may also want to experiment with sending re-engagement or re-targeting emails that can help clean up your email marketing list. No matter what your goal is, ensure that it’s clear, simple, and measurable. Documenting your goals holds your program accountable, but also provides a framework for you to see how the campaigns are improving over time.

After you’ve taken time to think more about your audience, your brand, and your goals, the next step, you will then be able to think about what types of emails you want to finally send out to your list in order to drive more sales and create more engagement.

Understanding the Different Types of Emails

different types of Emails

When you’re building your eCommerce strategy, you need to think about the type of emails that you want to send to your list in order to boost sales. 

Here are some of the most common types of emails that eCommerce brands should send out:

Transactional Emails Transactional emails are trigger-based messages that you get based on specific actions that you take on an eCommerce website.

Optimized Transactional Emails – These are transactional emails that have been specifically optimized to drive repeat purchases using an eCommerce intelligence tool. Optimized transactional emails have strategic messaging, graphics, and CTA buttons that aim to direct people back to other product pages.

Welcome Series Email – These are emails that you send to people who sign up and subscribe to receive updates, newsletters, offers, and blog content from you. Welcome emails can help you make the right first impression, and allow you to begin to establish and nurture relationships with prospective customers as you move forward.

Education-Based Emails – These are emails that you send to people to help educate them on the pain points you know they have, the pain points that relate to your industry and products, and the products (solutions) you are offering to them. Education-based emails could include repurposed content from blog posts or original content that you created specifically for your email campaign.

Re-Engagement Emails – The most effective re-engagement emails are the ones that send specific, personalized product recommendations based on past purchases. In these types of emails, you’re promoting products that you know will be loved by the people receiving those emails.

Upsell & Cross-Sell Emails – With upsell and cross-sell emails, the focus is all on personalization—showing your customers that you know who they are and what they need.

Theme Based & Customer Delight Emails – These are emails that you send to promote certain holidays and seasonal themes that you know your customers will care about. These usually include a gift or an offer that rewards them for being a customer. The goal with customer delight emails is to boost loyalty among your clientele.

Comply With Email Regulations To Stay Out of Spam

spam

Even though you’re constructing beautiful and engaging email campaigns at your end, some recipients may still want to unsubscribe—an inbox is a clamorous place for most of the people! Although setting up an unsubscribe group or option might be considered a minor step, failing to ensure a way for your recipients to unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns can cause disastrous consequences for deliverability and your sender reputation if you ignore them.

Also, you can omit any unengaged subscribers from your email list. Simply having a big email marketing list won’t guarantee your success and if your list is full of unengaged recipients, it might be doing more harm than good.

Segment

As you begin building your email list, work to segment your subscribers. Doing so will assist you to send more targeted email campaigns within the future. Identify and differentiate your list by subscribers, customers, repeat customers, raving fans, abandoned cart leads, etc. When you spend tons of your time dreaming up the right email, you would like to form sure it hits the proper audience to be the foremost effective it is often. Take the time to urge to understand your subscribers. How you segment your lists totally depends on your business and your goals.

While email blasts that leave to your entire list could be relevant and helpful to some people, it won’t be to others and will cause confusion or frustration.

Personalize the user experience using information from the actions your customers have already taken, the forms they’ve filled out, what their personal preferences are, etc. In email marketing, you’ll personalize your recipients’ experience employing a little thing called list segmentation.

Measure Your Results

Once you’ve scheduled or sent your email marketing campaign, you’re likely feeling a wave of relief. But don’t forget to track performance in real-time and after your campaign has ended. Use these insights to form changes and enhancements to future campaigns. For every email you sendyou ought to be tracking open rates, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and overall ROI. These metrics will offer you a high-level view of how your emails are reaching customers and the way they’re receiving different emails. And don’t be afraid to take a few chances! Especially as you’re building your email marketing strategy, try new things and if they don’t work just advance to the subsequent idea. You never know what is going to hit your readers and make them want to urge engaged further.

Fortunately, email marketing campaigns produce mounds of knowledge that indicate the health of your email program. Some important metrics to note include:

  • Unique opens
  • Click-through rates
  • Unsubscribe rates
  • Spam complaints

Make sure you’re continuously monitoring the same 5 or 6 metrics for each campaign so you can capture a complete picture of how your email marketing campaigns are performing.

CTA

CTA buttons that aim to direct people back to other product pages. More brands are optimizing order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails during this way now than ever before. Regardless of what action you would like people to require in your email, your CTA must be prominent and purpose-driven. That means you would like to spend time crafting the proper message.

You also want to think about how you’re getting to display your CTA—will a link within the text be sufficient or does one got to create a CTA button to drive conversions

Email Marketing Automation

email marketing automation

Email marketing automation is the best way to shoot up your revenue. Not only does it make your organization more efficient, but it can improve email performance and ROI.

Your automated workflows are comprised of the lifecycle emails that you know you’re going to want to send to every customer who purchases a product from you. These are your optimized transactional emails as described above. Re-engagement emails and up-sell/cross-sell emails should also be included in your automated workflows. Think about the tools that you can use to automate your email marketing tasks. You’ll want to create out automated workflows that send emails to customers who supported certain transactional triggers.

With an automated email campaign, you can optimize when you send your emails and remarket to either site visitors or people who’ve previously purchased from you.

Templates

templates

The next step is to settle on an Email template. You have to now decide whether you’re getting to build one from the scratch or pick a pre-designed template. The latter option provides a uniform version of your email campaigns during a short amount of your time.

Unless you’ve got time and resources to create an email campaign whenever, consider the e-mail template as a go-to email design. You can buy, access free ones here, or work with an email designer and developer. Whatever you choose, gaining access to a template will make your life as an email marketer much easier.

And don’t stress—your email templates don’t need to be fancy or complicated. The more complicated you make the designs, the more you risk confusing your recipients and not allowing the important pieces of your email to have their own space.

A couple of design elements to think about during the planning phase are the header/footer and your use of white space throughout your email template.

I also like better to have more white space between sections of emails in order that things don’t blend together. It’s important to remember that many people scan websites and emails, cramming all of your content together makes it that much more difficult to scan and therefore harder for your recipient to seek out what could also be interesting to them.

Go Live With A/B Testing

Schedule and push out your first email campaigns. To get the foremost ROI from your efforts, consider fixing A/B tests. For example, you’ll test different subject lines, graphics, copy, and CTA buttons in every email you send. Doing so will teach you more about your customers and how they respond to different messages.

While it is often tempting to use your intuition to predict what subject line language will make people click on your emails, you ought to always A/B test your highest-stakes subject lines, and tweak the wording consistent with your results. What works best for your audience: Long or movie lines? Including numbers or not including numbers? Questions or statements?

While 82% of companies believe email marketing technology, but half email marketers use split testing in their email campaigns. A/B testing is critical if you would like to properly optimize your marketing efforts. Avoid sending emails at the highest of the hour. Sending at “off-hour” times like 8 or 22 minutes past the hour reduces the prospect of your emails becoming delayed if ISPs, like Gmail or Yahoo, need to process an overload

Takeaway

Whether you’re completely new email marketing or simply need a refresher before you begin your next big campaign, increasing email revenue may be a worthy goal. Fortunately, there are ways you can do it that don’t require an MBA. Review these takeaways to urge a thought of where to start:

  • Carefully analyze every component of your email. You want everything to count: subject line, preheader text, content, images, and your CTA.
  • Figure out the purpose of your email campaign. You can have a general sales goal or create a distinct segment goal around specific products or regions.
  • Use marketing automation to improve the performance of your email. You’ll generate more powerful campaigns if you use the right email tools

The more experience you gain building email marketing campaigns, the more efficient you’ll become and the more insight you’ll gain into what works best for your email program. 

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Pritika Dewan

Pritika Dewan

Pritika’s bio is short and sweet but is packed with interesting information. She is a Web Content Developer at Wigzo. However, when she isn’t reading or writing, she’s probably dancing, cooking Thai food or binge-watching her favorite shows.

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