4 Best Practices to Expand Your Business!
Email marketing for ecommerce is one of the most cost-efficient ways to expand a business. If you’re using an email marketing platform, the process is quick, automated, and relatively cheap.
Having said that, email marketing is only truly helpful for an eCommerce business when it’s done right. So how can you make sure you’re using email marketing to its full potential?
There are a few best practices you can follow to make sure your email marketing is up to scratch. In this article, we outline the 4 most important email marketing practices for your eCommerce business to make sure that you’re using it to its full capacity. Let’s get to it!
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1. Think About the Bigger Picture
For most, email marketing is a quick and easy way to increase sales. Emails go out, web traffic goes up, and product sales increase – or at least you hope they do. That’s pretty much the thick of it. And ultimately as an eCommerce business, your end goal is to increase sales, right?
Of course! But email marketing isn’t all about sales. It’s an opportunity to make an impression on your audience. It’s about improving brand perception, gaining a competitive advantage, and positioning your products in the right way.
Yes, product sales are incredibly important for an eCommerce business – we’re not denying that. But why settle for crumbs when you could get the whole cake? Getting bogged down by your desire to increase sales can limit your ability to utilize email marketing to its full potential. You need to think about the bigger picture.
So how can you do that? Well, before you do anything else, ask yourself this: Why am I using email marketing?
Is the goal simply to increase sales? Or would you also like to raise brand awareness, or even change your brand’s perception? Do you want to entice previous customers to return, or engage with potential customers?
Think about your reasons for email marketing before you start. The bigger picture will give you a much better direction, and allow you to create measurable and relevant goals and benchmarks once you get started.
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2. Make Use of Automation
First things first, let’s talk about what automation is in relation to email marketing.
To put it simply, email automation allows you to send emails to the right people at the right time – but without having to create the email yourself every time. It’s a great way to save yourself time while you’re working on other things – like growing and developing your business.
So how does it work? Well, to use email automation, you need an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp, Smartlead, Hubspot, or GetResponse – and these are just to name a few. There’s a real variety of email marketing software out there, with some of the lowest plans starting at just $10.50 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers:
Some platforms offer free trials too – up to a limit, of course. But free trials are a good way to test which platform works best for your eCommerce business.
When you’ve decided on a platform, you can link the software to your website analytics, allowing you to target people based on their behavior and preferences. For example, you can send automatic emails when users fulfill a specific action such as cart abandonment, downloading a pdf, buying a product, or leaving a review.
Without automation, it’s pretty tricky to scale your eCommerce business effectively. It’ll be a big job to write and send all these emails yourself when your customer base starts to grow!
Using automation is a really efficient way to save time when it comes to email marketing. So, if you want to spend less time managing your email marketing and more time on growing your eCommerce business, automation is the way to go.
3. Learn from Your Results
Email marketing gives you a wealth of data. But it’s no use having access to this information if you don’t use it to understand your customers and improve your email marketing.
As an eCommerce business, you’ll know first-hand how important it is to understand what makes your customers tick. Email marketing is a great way to do exactly that.
So what results can you actually see? Here are a few things that you’ll find:
- How many people open your emails
- How many people click-through to a product or website
- How many of the clicks lead to sales
- Which products get the most clicks
- What time people open your emails
- How many unsubscribers you get
- The average revenue per email and per campaign
And from this information, you might start to think about why certain customer segments have higher click-through rates than others, or why certain times of year are more popular than others. Or perhaps the results tell you that you’re being too pushy, or that you need to send more images and less text. Every email is a chance to learn more about your customers, and how to improve your email marketing.
The data you receive from email marketing can also be useful in other parts of your eCommerce business and can be used to feed into your overall marketing activity. Remember: always think about the bigger picture if you want to see your eCommerce business grow!
4. Clean Your Contact List
Perhaps not the most exciting task, but an important one nonetheless.
Cleaning your contact list ensures that you get accurate data from your emails. So, if 30% of your emails are bouncing when they’re sent out, your data will show a lower open rate. But this isn’t a true representation of the open rate. You want those bounced emails removed from your list pronto.
If you use email marketing software, it’ll be pretty straightforward to clear any bounced emails from your list and keep your results as close to accurate as possible. But what do you do about those who never engage with your emails at all? Well, it’s down to you to find who they are and take them out of your list.
Sounds like a big job, right? It can be, but it’s really important that you do. Why? Well, sending emails to unresponsive recipients can have a detrimental effect on your email marketing.
Email providers are smart, and they start to notice your emails aren’t being opened. They think your emails are spam, and send them straight to the junk pile, engaged audience members miss out on your emails because they get sent straight to their junk folder. So you can see why cleaning your list is pretty important!
Cleaning your audience list is also a good chance to review your audience segmentation. For example, if you’ve been sending emails for 6 months, you probably have enough information to identify new stages in your customer journey and create new customer segments.
Segmenting your audience is a great way to ensure that the emails you’re sending are relevant and tailored to the people receiving them. In fact, businesses that use segmented campaigns have seen a 760% increase in their email revenue.
So, What Now?
There were 3.9 billion email users across the world in 2019, and that number is expected to grow to 4.48 billion in 2024. So it’s pretty clear that email is here to stay!
As an eCommerce business, email marketing is a pretty reliable way to increase your sales with minimal time and money. Automation makes the process much more streamlined and gives you access to data and information that can better inform your marketing activity and business direction. It’s also a great way to build relationships with existing customers, engage with new ones, and get your products out there for people to see.
So make sure you hop on the bandwagon and put these best practices into action to make the most out of your email marketing.
🔥 Hey, before you leave, why don’t you check out our top 10 Best Ecommerce Platforms in 2022?
Author Bio
Joanne Camarce is a digital marketing expert specializing in SEO, eCommerce, and social media. She loves meeting new people and embraces challenges. When she’s not wearing her marketing hat, you’ll find Joanne fine-tuning her art and music skills.