Email marketing can be one of the most vital aspects of your eCommerce company’s marketing strategies because it attracts new shoppers and keeps previous customers engaged with your brand. However, maintaining a successful email campaign requires a good deal of thought and effort.
With an increasing number of people using the internet on a daily basis, email is a great way to reach your target audience. If your business targets a younger demographic, email marketing may be even more important as HubSpot found that 73 percent of millennial-age shoppers favor email as the top form of business communication.
Not only does email marketing attract more business but many eCommerce store owners attribute it to increased customer retention as well, which is essential to every company’s growth. Without a base of loyal customers, your business will spend too much capital on customer acquisition without receiving the benefits of customer retention, such as higher customer LTV and increased revenue. Marketing Metrics found that businesses have a five to 20 percent chance of selling to a new customer while the odds of selling to a previous customer hovers between 60 to 70 percent.
1. Building a Strong Email List
The quality of your email subscribers is absolutely essential to the overall success of your email marketing campaigns. Even if you have a large list of subscribers, if the majority of the users are inactive, you’re wasting money on campaigns that are bringing in little revenue. In order to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, you want to pay attention to who is subscribing to your list and how they are interacting with your campaigns. Follow these steps to begin building and nurturing the right kind of email subscriber list.
2. Regularly Clean Out Your Email List
If you feel as though your email marketing campaigns are not getting enough engagement from your subscribers, one of the biggest issues may be that you haven’t cleaned out your subscriber list in a long time. You should try to analyze and refresh your list at least once each quarter.
Review which email addresses have been inactive and remove them from your list. If some of these addresses have only been inactive for a short time, you may want to try running a re-engagement campaign to attract these shoppers back to your store.
3. On-site Pop-ups
Building an email subscriber list requires eCommerce merchants to guide their potential customers towards a sign-up area. One of the most common and effective methods for this can be seen with on-site pop-ups. Encourage your customers to enter their email address by providing them with an incentive as to why they want to receive your emails, such as an exclusive discount code.
4. CTAs in Blog Content
Thanks to the success of SEO campaigns, many online shoppers discover new eCommerce sites via blogs. If your store is using content marketing in your blog, you should try to insert an email marketing CTA at the beginning or end of your articles to guide people towards your email marketing list and explain why being a part of the list is beneficial.
5. Three (3) Tried-and-True Email Campaigns to Try
- The Power of Subject Lines
In a world where people are inundated by emails at all hours of the day, creating eye-catching subject lines is vital to your email marketing campaign. According to Invesp, 47 percent of people open emails solely based on how the subject line reads. Think about your own email inbox. Do you quickly identify which emails you’re going to delete immediately? Don’t let your emails fall into this same pattern. Write witty, interesting subject lines that illustrate your brand voice and entice consumers to engage with your campaigns. - Personalization Is Important
The days of blanket email marketing campaigns are over, and personalization is king. People are more likely to respond well to email marketing campaigns that are tailored specifically to their interests. You can implement personalization into your email marketing in numerous ways—adding the customer’s name, sending discounts or free items for the shopper’s birthday or offering personalized product recommendations. - Lead Shoppers to a Specific Action
Even if your subscribers are opening and reading your emails, you may still notice a lack of engagement. This may be because your shoppers are unsure of what action they’re supposed to take from your email. To boost interactions with your marketing campaigns, guide your subscribers to the exact action you want them to complete. Running an annual sale? Include a link to the sale page. Announcing a new product line? Add a clickable photo or button that directs people to the products.
6. Continue to Grow Your Email Subscriber List
Once you’ve cleaned out your email subscriber list, you’ll want to continue growing your audience with high-quality consumers. Springbot Exchange is a unique marketing tool that allows you to compare your eCommerce store data with similar businesses to boost engagement. The Audience Expander feature included with Springbot Exchange can help you to create campaigns to grow your email marketing list and expand your business’s influence.