Today email marketing ecommerce is the most profitable online promotion method. According to the official figures, each dollar invested demonstrates a giddy return on investment: at least 38 bucks, and if you try hard, you can earn $ 44.5.
If you are a novice, after reading the first paragraph, you will probably decide that email marketing is the fastest way to get value. Everything that’s needed:
- prepare a client base (buy or download from open sources);
- write the first letter containing a discount offer or a gift;
- make a campaign and analyze the results.
But, there will be nothing to analyze, because, in fact, such an algorithm of actions will give the opposite effect: the letters will end up in the spam folder, and the dialogue with the audience will end before it has begun. You are likely to give up and email marketing will not seem to be such a profitable digital strategy tool.
Therefore, for those who are going on a voyage called “How I Made Money and Promoted Business Through Email Marketing”, we decided to make a guide with 5 simple tips. Believe me, you will collect a database, set up a mailing list, and start selling successfully very soon!
How to Start
Newsletters are only effective when they provide value to recipients. This thought should be your cornerstone in your email marketing business. Thus, under no circumstances use someone else’s subscription databases. Let your contact list be small, but each entry is self-obtained. So, the person making the decision to subscribe to the newsletter knows what you do, what your product is, and how it can be useful. Your name will be familiar. So, the chance of getting into spam is minimal. And to make your subscribers look forward to your emails, provide exclusive content that will be interesting and worth-while to them. Promise more than open-source sources, and keep your word.
If you are not using the welcome email series yet, start doing it. Such a trifle becomes an important step in creating relationships with customers. Here are 4 reasons for them:
- open rates – over 85%;
- clicks – 196% more than other mailings;
- transactions – thanks to welcome emails there are 336% more of them;
- revenue – 320% more than from regular promotional campaigns.
You have several options for welcome-campaigns: one of them involves putting all information about you in one letter, the other is a series of letters, where you gradually “reveal”. In any case, by providing information about yourself, you will increase user confidence in you and the product, the speed of the process “lead – the potential customer – the buyer – regular customer” will increase.
What Can You do to Improve Your Skills
Like any other promotional tool, ecommerce email marketing requires daily hard work, flexibility, and the ability to continually learn. The thing is that the algorithms that affect the profitability of the business are changing as well as the market laws in the field of postal commerce. That’s why you should always be competitive. To do this, work on the value of your proposal.
To understand whether your letter is essential, we recommend re-reading the message and answering the following questions: is my letter valuable, is it new or useful, necessary, adequate? If so, then you can send it. At the same time, if you do not see responses to your mailings, it is possible that you made a mistake in the strategy or chose the incorrect scheme at all. Maybe there is something wrong with the content and it should be improved. Accordingly, you need to send 1 valuable letter once a month than a thoughtless message repeated every week.
Mailings should be regular, but their number must be dosed: rare letters will contribute to the fact that they begin to forget you. Too frequent ones will cause irritation and unsubscription. What’s worse, you may be sent to the ban list. For all businesses there is an optimal mailing frequency: once or twice a week, but there are exceptions, for example, for urgent news, reminders, etc.
Useful Features
In such a business as ecommerce email, it is important to know and be able to use various tools, each of which is aimed at improving individual components of the letter:
- Subject – At least 60% of subscribers will not open an email if the subject line is not interesting to them. Therefore, the headlines should be intriguing like “Do you want to know?”, for a selection like “10 secrets”, status “Choice of the successful”, selling “Brand discount”, in the form of the slogan “It’s not too late to learn”.
- Content – Users are looking for opinion authority and expert view, making life easier, proof, communication, surprises, the freshest and the newest, research (effective for the B2B sector), contests, free samples, discounts, and sales.
- Design – Beautiful, structured writing works better than the most delicious text. We select the letter head, divide the text into blocks, use the CTA buttons, use high-quality images, corporate colors, and logo. Don’t forget about responsive design so that your newsletters are great on all electronic devices, especially mobile phones.
- Sending – the optimal sending time should be determined based on the following indicators: from 8.00 to 9.00 most people check their mail on their way to work or school, from 12.00 to 14.00 most of the users have lunch and look through their mail, from 17.00 to 19.00 – another mailbox check on the way home, from 23.00 to 00.00 – mail is analyzed to plan the next working day.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! Your task is to find the optimal ratio of all components that meets the specifics of the business and meets the needs of the audience.
Common Mistakes (Avoid mistakes and get rid of bad habits!)
The very first and fatal mistake novice marketers make is buying a ready-made subscriber base. Just give up on the idea, no matter how tempting it seems. Mailing to addresses from such a list will not bring anything good. At least you will not send a single letter. As a result, the service that provides email distribution services will be blocked. The maximum you will be blacklisted by mail providers with all the consequences: blocking mailbox, IP address, and domain.
This sad outcome can be caused not only by the purchased database but also by the one that you collected yourself. But it is either outdated, or no one has been checking the data. Hence, there’s the second inexcusable mistake of amateur marketers: to send mailings to a database that has not been verified. To do this, we recommend using the Proofy online validator, which will quickly identify invalid, that is, inactive, dead, temporary, or fake accounts, clear the list and make your campaigns much more effective.
Use Automated Tools for Successful Ecommerce Email Marketing
Automation of email marketing for ecommerce is a cool thing that will save you from a huge range of routine work. It will allow you to direct potential and resources in a different, more priority direction than solving everyday typical tasks. With the help of the automation mechanism, you can plan everything: from the time of sending to the type of message needed in one case or another. Moreover, you will have metrics and detailed reports as well as effective suggestions for optimizing business processes. Such a thing as email marketing automation will give you an opportunity to keep everything always under control and achieve more over and over again.
