One of the most effective tools available to online retailers are email marketing campaigns. It’s easy to see why: email marketing allows you to stay connected with your customers and keep bringing them back to your eCommerce shop. It’s versatile too. From Welcome Emails to end-of-season sales to Cart Abandonment Emails, email marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal. It’s a cost-effective strategy that drives results. In fact, this past year online marketers saw email engagement jump 78%.
Below we’ve covered the basic best practices of running email marketing campaigns, as well as some specific email marketing campaigns that you might find helpful.
Good Email Marketing Starts With a Good Subscriber List
The great thing about email marketing is that it’s direct. When you run an email marketing campaign, you’re speaking to your customer base directly. This is why it’s so important to develop, maintain, and segment a list of email subscribers.
Make sure your online store is optimized with a popup to collect an email address. Additionally, make sure you have forms elsewhere (either in the site header or footer) that allows shoppers to subscriber to your marketing emails. For the best results, incentivize signups with something like free shipping or a certain percentage off the first order.
From there, your list will just require a little maintenance. Keep it clean of bad and unresponsive emails to keep your emails out of the Spam Box. When you’re ready, start segmenting it so you can send more personalized emails. Personalized emails tend to perform much better than generic ones.
And lastly: NEVER, EVER PURCHASE A LIST OF EMAIL ADDRESSES.
Effective Email Marketing Campaigns for Online Retailers
As mentioned, there are a wide variety of email marketing campaigns you should be running. These campaigns have strong track records of delivering high engagement and more revenue to online retailers.
Welcome Emails
When a new subscriber opts into your marketing emails, they’re expecting a welcome email within minutes of signing up. A concise, great-looking welcome email goes a long way in endearing new subscribers to your brand.
On top of that, this is one of the times that new customers are at their most engaged with your brand. This is why we recommend you incentivize the process. Thanking them for subscribing, and offering a deal for signing up, is a great way to introduce shoppers to your brand. The best part? You can fully automate this entire process, and never have to worry about playing catchup with new subscribers.
Cart Abandonment
Sometimes, customers will begin the checkout process but leave without completing it. This is known as cart abandonment, and it sometimes all it takes to finalize the sale is a small nudge. And this small nudge is important, because cart abandonment emails can save up to 60% of otherwise lost sales.
Having a cart abandonment email marketing campaign setup is exactly that nudge. And just like Welcome Emails, this message type can be automated as well. All you need to do is build the email and setup how long after abandonment the email will deploy, and the automation will take care of itself.
Back-in-Stock Email
(Spoiler up front: this one can be automated as well.)
Have you ever gone to purchase something from an online store, only to be disappointed to discover it’s sold out? You’re not alone. Thousands upon thousands of shoppers run into this issue. But there is a way you, as an online seller, can benefit from this.
A back-in-stock automation can help you create a simple email marketing campaign. Set up fields on sold out items that collect email addresses, then send a message letting shoppers know they’re on the list. Once the item is stocked, the campaign will generate another email letting subscribers know.
No heavy lifting from you and all the reward. You get to collect email addresses from new customers and generate some revenue from the sales that roll in once an item is back in stock.
Post-Purchase Message
After a customer has bought something from your store, obviously you want to send them their receipt. However, this process generates an opportunity for you to send them a post-purchase email.
What is a post-purchase email? Rather than just strictly business email showing the details of the purchase, a post-purchase email can be turned into a mini-experience. Along with all the pertinent information, include some popular purchases that the shopper might be interested in. You can go a step further and show items that people also bought with the product shopper just purchased. This is also an opportunity to build your subscriber list. Include a field for shoppers to fill out in the event they’re brand new to your brand.
And, yep, this email type can be fully automated.
Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns
With the Springbot platform, you can fully automate all of the above email marketing campaigns. And not just that: Springbot is a paid advertising platform as well. Bring new traffic to your site using online ads, then communicate with shoppers at every point of the customer journey.
If you’d like to try our platform out for free, sign up for your 14-day trial here. Or schedule a walkthrough of the platform with one of our eCommerce experts here.
