Email marketing, when done right, can be as exciting as it is effective. If email plays a big role in your ecommerce marketing strategy, it’s important to keep things fresh and interesting. Failing to do so could mean missing out on sales, increased brand awareness, and useful user-generated content. If you’re looking for inspiration, here are a few strategies you can apply to your next email marketing campaign.
Make It Personal
Everyone is familiar with the “Hey [FIRST NAME], how about 20% off everything?” breed of subject line. Love it or hate it, this kind of personalization isn’t going anywhere soon. Emails with personalized subject lines have been found to get 26% more opens than their less-familiar counterparts.
But what could happen if you took personalization a step further? If you’re not already using customer personas to inform your email strategy, consider focusing on them for a bit (this handy email marketing guide can help). Creating persona-specific campaigns and email sequences can help you hone in on the communication styles that are most effective for each of your customer personas.
Let Someone Else Do the Talking
While your brand is probably very charming, interesting, and endlessly entertaining, it might be time to mix things up a bit and let your trusted brand ambassadors take over. Create a campaign around your best reviews, testimonials, and social media shout-outs. Let your recipients see what their peers have to say about you—especially if it lends authority to your claims.
Follow Up on Cart Abandonment
Shoppers have lots of reasons for cart abandonment. While you may not be able to address all of them at once, what you can do is keep your store at top of mind with a friendly email reminder. Tools like Miva’s Abandoned Basket email templates can create, send, and measure the effectiveness of cart abandonment emails. You can use these emails to send your cart abandoners a discount, unique coupon code, or some other extra incentive to return to their shopping.
Find Your Message a Cool Best Friend
We’ve all received our fair share of emails that don’t really say anything. Anything interesting, that is. From an underwhelming promotion to that one dental office newsletter you keep forgetting to unsubscribe from, an email with nothing important to say is just begging to be flagged as spam. If you’re having a tough time coming up with something new or different to talk about, try looking outside your message for things to say. Choose something that appeals to your recipients—even if it’s not strictly related to your products—and incorporate it into your emails.
Even if the core of your message isn’t new to anyone, the topics you embellish it with may pique their interest enough to give it a better look.
Sneak Some Marketing Into Transactional Emails
For retailers, transactional emails can be a goldmine of marketing opportunities. They’re generally full of necessary information and are expected (sometimes even eagerly awaited) by customers. For these reasons, transactional emails tend to have insanely high open rates. Since you’ll already be sending these emails and their contents have a much better chance of being seen by your recipients, why not put a little something extra in there? It doesn’t have to be much—an invitation to connect on social or a link to some relevant content can prompt recipients to engage further with your brand.
Want to shake things up in your next email campaign? Check out our Revolutionary Guide to Ecommerce Email Marketing.
Miva