Email marketing is your leg up against competitors. It helps you increase customer lifetime values and predict the direction of your business. The strategies you use with email marketing are essential. Remember that you’re building a relationship. You are providing new touchpoints that someone not on the list isn’t getting.
Tips to Beat Email Marketing Benchmarks and Increase Sales
Ecommerce email marketing is both a science and an art. You can review metrics and find several areas to a/b test. When engaging with your list, no one method trumps others.
Many newsletters are too sales-oriented, which is a weird experience for the user who will most likely read that content while not in a purchasing mindset.
Instead, I would focus on building a long-term relationship with the user and optimize the content for high open and sharing rates rather than just the CTR. Before any of this, you must have verified emails in your list. Use an email finder tool to verify those emails.
1. Start With a Welcome Series
Start with a welcome email series to generate the best impression with subscribers. Let’s say you have coworking space software, and people signed up for your newsletter. What will you tell them? Tell them how your company started and the space crunch issues it solves.
This helps you tell your brand story, showcase your best products, offer discounts, and drive sales.
A welcome series is excellent for generating engagement. With an average open rate of 68.59% and a click-through rate of 16.05%, a welcome series can be baked into a more extensive email marketing campaign.
Why?
A welcome series is more than one email. Two or three emails are also acceptable, but beyond that, sending these emails raises a stink and is seen as spammy, and could potentially scare off new subscribers.
With two emails, you welcome your customers and build a connection with them.
Here’s an example from an online pharmacy.
Whether you send one email or two, you must include key elements in each email. A welcome series can help you get more loyal customers if you’re running a headless eCommerce marketplace.
The initial welcome email should thank the subscriber, welcome them to the brand and tell them what they can expect in future emails.
It’s the best place to advertise a business be it a simple SEO service or a professional SEO service.
If you promised them something when they signed up, like a discount, include that as well.
The second welcome email should then:
- Give subscribers a way to connect through the mobile app or social media channels you’re active on
- Focus on the value you or your products can provide them with
- Tell them why they should purchase
2. Be Sure to Include a Clear Call to Action
Ask what you want subscribers to do. Let’s say you are running a job portal that helps people run job searches. So your CTA button should explain that well.
Chargebackhit, for instance, leads with the promise of reducing your chargebacks by 90%.
Be it reading the blog post, watching a promo video, or buying your latest product, tell customers what you want. They also advise buyers on how to improve their chargeback rates.
A call to action button is an essential puzzle that helps you bridge the gap. Let’s say you booked a meeting with your subscriber, and they canceled the appointment. You can include a new call to action focusing on securing the license with you again, highlighting what they lost the first time.
This prompts the action described in newsletters, websites, or videos. The prompt helps them achieve what they started to do.
One clear CTA in emails boosts clicks by 371%. For effective CTAs being clear and concise is the choice you have.
Create a compelling call to action for your email marketing campaigns. You can always use Grammarly or another AI tool to create those CTAs.
- Know the end goal
- Use action-oriented end goal
- Address the audience in the first person
- Keeping the message short and snappy
- Adopt conversational tone
A/B tests your call-to-action buttons with reasonable frequency.
Test variations of your most used calls to action to understand the elements that users respond to best. This includes verbs, shapes, buttons, colors, length, word order, and word discount.
Unbounce saw an increase of 90% in the click-through rate when they changed their CTA text from Start your free trial to Start my free trial.
3. Use Personalization to Segment Your List
When did you last receive an extremely personalized to you? If you are like most, the email offered a compelling CTA for you to act on.
Personalized promotional emails lift transaction rates and revenue to six times higher than non-personalized emails.
Personalized marketing falls into demographic, psychographic, and behavioral categories:
- Contextual personalization uses the point in the customer journey where he’s at. They may be just beginning to research the topic or preparing to make buying decisions.
- Demographic personalization uses information like age, gender, location, and more data. You can use advanced jquery plugins to pull all this data dynamically.
- Behavioral personalization uses past purchases or website behavior like abandoned carts.
Depending on the list size, you can combine different categories and create intersections. Try combining past purchases and location-based recommendations. You can also run offline campaigns to drive people to your site, like posters and other printed material. Always remember to add a QR code to your offline signs. People can scan it and visit your site.
As segmentation becomes more specific, you can tailor your marketing campaigns and make them more personalized and successful.
4. Automate What You Can
Automated emails create 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
Automated Email Drip Campaigns can add to your overall marketing strategy.
Starting from welcome series to cart abandonment to re-engagement campaigns, automated emails are how you level up your email marketing strategy. Let’s say you are promoting your new project management courses. A computerized drip campaign is the surest way to boost sales.
Any email marketing software has advice on how you can automate your emails.
5. Create a Dynamic Cart Abandonment Series
A cart abandonment email series can be one of the most profitable series you can run.
With an average open rate of 41.8% and click-through rates of 9.50%, abandonment emails offer a great chance of converting well.
Consider the following when you build one:
- The number of emails in series
- The frequency and intervals between each email. Try sending one email after an hour of cart abandonment.
- Discounts to offer: If you want a sale, offer a discount code on the products present in the cart.
- Subject lines: Subject lines can influence the CTR of your cart abandonment email series.
- Calls to action: Your CTA must convince prospective customers to return to carts.
6. Perform Split Testing
How to know when your email campaigns are effective? You can’t tell without split testing.
Split testing or A/B testing is a marketing strategy that tests two similar versions of an element against one another.
The goal is to find the best variations of common email elements to ensure your email shows the greatest return on investment. This results in conversion rates of 400%
- Subject lines
- Change the preview text
- Use different product images
- Use a different layout
- Use a different font size
- Use a different font color
- Use a different button color
- Day and time
- Copy
- Pricing and discounts
- Social media icons.
7. Use Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails
Abandoned cart emails can recover 15% of what would be lost revenue.
For example, Enjuku Racing recovered nearly $500,000 in lost sales using abandoned cart emails.
Research from Bluecore shows that cart abandonment emails have the highest conversion rate at 2.63%. And click to the conversion rate of 21.78%
There are two types of abandoned cart email options:
- Abandoned Cart Email: Encourage customers to complete the purchase if they leave items in the cart. This is usually sent within a day of the abandoned cart.
- Abandoned Cart Series: Encourage customers to complete their purchase with reminders if they leave items in the cart. This is an extension of the first abandoned cart email. And going series of automated emails leads to faster and higher value recoveries. Most retailers send follow-ups 4 to 5 days after an abandoned cart and offer a discounted rate.
Start a conversation in your email. Use psychological triggers to encourage conversions. Scarcity and social proof are used at this stage.
8. Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
Up-sell and cross-sell emails are sent to customers who bought something. The goal is to sell them more. These emails have a .55% conversion rate.
There are multiple ways you can do this:
- Any Product Follow-Up: Send a follow-up message after someone has purchased a product from your store. These emails include similar products or ones that are frequently brought together. Promote related items once someone has bought an item from a campaign.
- Category Follow-Up: Next, promote related items after someone purchases them from a campaign. If you bought an item from gifts for dad and they have a similar collection for mom.
- Receipt Follow-Up: Payment receipts from purchases have one of the highest open rates. More than 70% of customers open these emails.
- Do some legwork. Include offers discounts for recommending you to friends. Ask for reviews on a product when they get it.
9. Promotional Offer Emails
Promotional emails can be used in a variety of ways. You can offer site-wide discounts to share with customers. Offer special incentives during holidays and more.
Conversion rates for the different email types in the category vary. Price decrease is the most successful.
10. Customer Loyalty and Re-Engagement Emails
Customer loyalty and re-engagement emails focus on building a relationship between you and the customer.
With reciprocal link building, the emails focus on building a stronger bond with customers and winning back customers who haven’t purchased from your store within a given timeframe.
Conclusion
So these are just some of how you can drive higher conversions for your eCommerce site.
What do you think?
