In e-commerce, you can either spend all your time and energy selling to one-time customers, or you can invest your time and energy into establishing and nurturing relationships that drive brand loyalty and repeat purchases.
Most e-commerce business owners prefer the latter option, so the question is, what can you do to transform one-time customers into lifelong brand loyal customers who buy from you over and over again?
One of the easiest and most effective ways to do it is with email. Despite the popularity of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, email remains one of the best tools you can use to effectively communicate messages, engage with your customers and would-be customers, and drive more sales.
Want to make sure you’re crushing email marketing for your e-commerce business? Use our top 6 tips to increase e-mail sales.
1. Identify Your Goals
Before you get too far into testing tools, creating opt-in forms, and putting together your email marketing strategy, it’s important to first think about your goals. You should ask yourself what you’re hoping to achieve by investing in email marketing.
Goal setting is crucial to email marketing success. Defining your email marketing campaign goals helps guide the direction of your campaign, and makes it easier to measure the success of your efforts. It also helps prevent batch-and-blasting and sending an email just because.
2. Choose the Right Tools
The next step in building an effective email marketing strategy for your e-commerce business involves testing and using tools that can ultimately help you automate processes and make your efforts more scalable over time.
- Security & infrastructure – Ensure you the platform you choose is reliable because your clients will perceive it as an extension – even a product – of your business. If it’s unstable, it makes your business look unreliable. So, what exactly constitutes “reliable?” As a reference point, Campaign Monitor has a 99.9% uptime.
- Support – Occasionally even world-class email marketing solutions don’t work exactly as you might expect them to, so it’s important to assess the vendor’s support offering to make sure you have support when you need it. But what’s the standard of support you should be looking for? Campaign Monitor offers 24/7 email support and Phone support options. It’s worth considering whether anything less than this could be a hindrance down the road.
- Deliverability – Your team may be design experts, but you likely don’t have a team dedicated to understanding deliverability laws. Find an email marketing tool that will worry about that for you and ensure your clients’ emails always land in the inbox.
3. Make it Easy for People to Join
In order for email marketing to work, you need to be actively collecting email addresses from the people who land on your website. At one point it might have been enough to simply include one opt-in form at the footer of your website, but these days if you want to connect with the right leads, you need to include opt-in forms in a variety of places throughout your website.
4. Share Enticing Offers
Once you have a steady stream of new email subscribers coming in, your next step it to start nurturing them and moving them closer to the sale. One of the easiest and most effective ways to start doing it right away is by sharing enticing offers with your list. There are a number of offers you can create and send to your list using one of the email marketing automation software tools mentioned above.
5. Test, Optimize, and Analyze
At the end of the day, you can’t make improvements to your campaigns and overall strategy if you’re not testing, optimizing, and identifying opportunities. To be a successful email marketer, you need to be willing to spend time and money on tools that allow you to test everything in your emails—from subject lines and delivery timing to email length, body structure, images, links, call-to-actions, offers, and anything else you can think.
The purpose of testing and optimizing your email campaigns is to ultimately zero in on the best and most effective tactics as fast as possible in order to drive more traffic and conversions in less time. We’ve tested the 6 best Shopify apps to help you increase sales here.
6. Show Them That You Care
The best way to be successful when it comes to email marketing is to show your subscribers that you actually care about them. It’s a big deal to give a company your email address—don’t make people regret their decision. When in doubt, always focus on providing value to people.
Help them understand who you are, why you do what you do, and how your products can make their lives better. Finally, don’t come across like a robot—be real with people.
Internet Marketer, Sales Manager, eCommerce Expert, and Community Manager at – Ecomhunt
