Email marketing is one thing you shouldn’t do without. You might as well let go of everything else, except blogging and active engagement on social media, if you just had to choose three things to do to promote your ecommerce store.
According to Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com, email marketing has an ROI of 4300% (not a typo).
Try and beat that.
Don’t theorize, and don’t take anything for granted
It’s easy – as a business owner – to decide on the basis of theories. They go something like this:
“ I know my end users well. They love the color orange. So, I’ll put orange buttons on my product pages or on the shopping cart”
“I sell products exclusively for women. So, I’ll use pink – varying shades — throughout”
When it comes to digital marketing, all theories are banned. The only thing that’s justified is testing.
This applies to email marketing too. It’s no easy task but there’s a reason why Corey Eridon of HubSpot insists on doing little experiments to test and validate decisions on using design elements, subject lines, send time optimization, frequency, or copy for emails.
Speaking of testing, see how William Harris realized that it’s better to use A/B test campaigns rather than spend tons of money on new sales teams or expensive advertising.
Don’t push. Please, Don’t Push
So, you have an ecommerce business and you have products or service to sell. When you send out emails, plan your campaigns in such a way that you don’t push, ever.
• Your newsletters should go out with nothing else in them except pure information. Add a product or two for display, but it’s “display” and not a “pitch”.
• Setup behavioral triggers. Have emails go out when a shopper reaches the checkout stage but doesn’t buy. A Separate email goes out for your customers who purchased only once from you (also applicable if your customer purchased products of total value less than X dollars).
• Transactional emails are simple, and critical. They inform your customers and usually contain important information (order confirmation, subscription reminders, shipping information, receipts, and alerts). You can test and then customize even transactional emails to add to your marketing juice.
Mark Macdonald of Shopify has a few helpful tips to optimize transactional emails along with Stephen Wheeler of Deliverability.com
You might also want to look at Campaign Monitor’s Email Planning Guide.
Don’t overdo anything
Simplicity often taunts us. As humans, we are almost always drawn to “more”. That’s why “less is more” suffers. As Luke Christison of Econsultancy.com advocates, make emails as simple as you can. Get your subject lines right (and short). Optimize your send time, avoid jarring visuals within your email, and as always: test.
Get cracking on your email marketing. Now.
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