If you have an ecommerce store, it goes without saying that promoting it and increasing the number of visitors and customers is your primary goal. There are many ways to do this, including using email marketing campaigns to deliver messages to a targeted audience.
According to Exact Target, leading provider of email marketing solutions and a Miva Merchant developer partner, email outnumbers phone and other methods of communication 3 to 1 among consumers. What this statistic means for you as an ecommerce merchant is that if used correctly, email can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. Here are five crucial email marketing tips to help you get started.
1. Define Your Goals And Set Calls To Action
What is the focus of your email marketing campaign? Are you promoting new products, internal company events, a sale, or something else? If your campaign email lacks a clear focus, customers who receive it won’t know which actions they are supposed to take. A clear CTA or call to action that corresponds with the goal of the campaign should be developed early on.
Simply saying "Buy Now" or "Shop Today" probably won’t be effective or compelling enough, and runs the risk of sounding like a command rather than a request. Tell them exactly what to do, i.e. "Use this coupon to save 20% on select styles of our best-selling fragrances," or "Place your orders now: free shipping ends on Tuesday."
2. Use A Template
Email marketing experts recommend that businesses use templates for their email marketing campaigns for a variety of reasons. Developing and using a template that uses the same colors, fonts, and graphics as your main site will help customers to associate the email with your business. Templates also allow you to modify the layout to accommodate different types of messages while keeping the overall look and feel of the email consistent.
Most of the popular email service providers like Exact Target offer templates as part of their package. It’s one of the many reasons why it’s better to use a company that specializes in email instead of trying to send from your own server or home computer.
3. Customize
One of the most important thing that online businesses can do is to establish lasting relationships with loyal customers. The ability to communicate via email can be a big help with this. If a customer on your email list has shown interest in, or better yet ordered items identical or similar to items mentioned in your marketing email, consider including a short personal message with the email such as "Dear John Smith, Since you’ve ordered items like this in the past, we’d thought you’d be interested in the following promotion."
4. Be Timely
Ecommerce stores should take a tip from their brick-and-mortar counterparts and update the photos, rotate the products, and add seasonal themes to their sites whenever possible to keep their stores looking fresh. The same can be said for email marketing campaigns. Depending on the types of products you sell, certain items will be more in demand at certain times of the year than others. Capitalize on this fact and tailor your marketing emails to fit.
5. Follow Up
If a customer ends up making a purchase as a result of your marketing efforts, take the time to send a quick personalized email thanking them. You may want to consider offering a special coupon code or other promotion to the first people who purchase items as a result of a marketing email, just to help ensure that you are able to both expand and retain your customer base.
It’s also a great idea to send emails to those people who started to check out, put in an email address and then abandoned before checkout. A simple reminder often times increases sales and you can experiment with adding different special offers to see which works best for your business. Emporium Plus’ Restock Shelves Module will do this for you automatically.
6. Use A Professional Email Service Provider
It’s natural as a small business owner to be very mindful of how you spend your hard earned dollars. It’s not uncommon at all to hear about small online retailers who in a drive to save some money each month attempt to use either their home ISP or webhosting servers to send out large amounts of email. It seems like a no-brainer, why pay for something you can do for free?
There's a lot of great reasons to pay a professional service provider to send your emails, here are the top 3:
- They'll keep you compliant with the CAN-SPAM act and all other legislation regarding email marketing.
- They will generally have much higher deliverability rates than you can get on your own, and you want to maximize the number of people who see and read your emails.
- Most importantly they will keep you from being labeled as a spammer by your ISP and losing access to your email completely.
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