Proven Tips for Successful Ecommerce Email Marketing

Building and running a successful ecommerce business is not easy and without an email marketing strategy to go with it, you risk not building meaningful, long lasting relationships with your customers. 

It’s an integral mechanism for how you will increase the lifetime value of a customer.

Thankfully, you don’t need to come up with these ideas on your own. This article will lay out the tips for building a successful ecommerce email marketing strategy. 

Why Email Marketing Is Such A Powerful Tool For An Online Store

Email marketing is an important part of any ecommerce business. It allows you to attract new customers and also retain existing ones. 

Here are just a few reasons why email marketing is powerful for any online business:

• Everyone uses email. Numerous research reports indicate that the most loved form of communication from a business is via email. 
• They are relatively cheaper than other marketing activities and are also easy to design. This makes email a low risk, low cost solution.
• Emails can drive serious traffic to your website and increase sales. Especially when timed right, an email can make all the difference between no sale and a surge in sales.
• Emails nurture existing customers and prospects into different stages of the funnel which leads to the desired action more easily than other forms of marketing

Top Tips

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to an ecommerce marketing strategy. Millions of brands have already learned through trial and error. 

Let’s take a page out of their book and look at the top tips for running successful email marketing campaigns for an online store.

Check Out The Competition

Keeping an eye on the competition and the strategies they are using is important. 

Sign up to their mailing lists using a personal email or one unrelated to your company to start receiving their promotional emails. 

Keep track of the different strategies, content, language, layouts, and other components they used. 

Why did you click on the email?

What did you like and not like about it? 

How could you optimize it?

 You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn by doing a little research, especially when it's worthy competition that knows what they are doing. 

Expand Your Sign-Up Horizon

Sign-up emails are a great way to first engage with your potential customers. In general, no one likes to be bombarded by emails and people love options. 

Your customers and prospects want the ability to customize their communication with you and the sign up period is a great time to accomplish this.

When they are able to customize the type of emails they will be receiving from you as well as the frequency, you’ll be able to retain them much better and they are less likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Milestone Emails

Sending a milestone email is an art. When done correctly, deciding which milestones deserve emails as well as crafting and timing the message can increase the value of a customer. 

It can make all the difference between a sale or an unsubscribe. 

It not only reminds of them of the value you're providing them, whether it be a product or service, but it also increases the chance that they will make a purchase at some point in the future.

Examples of milestone emails can be a welcome email when users first sign up on your site. 

You can welcome them to your website and even suggest items they would be interested in purchasing or highlight current sales. 

Another example is when someone abandons a cart. This occurs when they add items to their shopping cart but don’t follow through on the purchase. 

Why not send them a friendly email reminder?

Don't Forget Inactives

As the saying goes, a bird in the bag is worth two in the bush. Bringing inactive subscribers back into the fold is actually easier than acquiring new leads.

They are an important part of any successful ecommerce email marketing strategy.

It's important to first map out these inactive subscribers and the different segments they fall into based on email activity, website behavior, and past purchases. 

Once you do this, you can then build email cadences and nurture flows that respond to and address their different needs and preferences. Highly tailored emails sent at the right time are key to success. 

Evaluation And Assessment

The first step towards optimizing any ecommerce email marketing strategy is to evaluate where you currently stand. 

Ask yourself questions like: 

• where are the weaknesses in communication? 
• Where are potential buyers dropping off? 
• Why are customers not opening specific emails? 
• Are there issues with the delivery rate or sender reputation? 

You’ll need to get a lay of the land and clear overview of the performance of your email marketing efforts. 

Guessing which emails to send and not diving into the data can result in a poorly-executed strategy that leaves money on the table. 

Bottom Line

As you can see, defining a successful email marketing strategy is extremely important and not for the faint of heart. However, if you take inventory and put the right best practices in place, you’ll be able to maximize the lifetime value of your existing and potential customers.