Running an e-commerce store has so many benefits, but the success of the store is dependent on how well you promote it. With an online store, you don’t just set it up and forget about it; if you want to be the best seller, you have to market your store and products continually. Continual marketing is something you can achieve by using email and other marketing channels. This article highlights some of the key ways entrepreneurs can use email marketing to boost the success of their online stores.
Have a Welcome Series
The first way to promote a business with email is to ensure you have a welcome series. You can have two segments; one for the people who just signed up without buying anything, and another for those who sign up after buying something from your store. A welcome series is the first step you should take if you want to have good relationships with your new customer or subscriber. And the good thing with welcome emails is that many people expect them after signing up, and thus the open rate for such mail tends to be higher compared to other business emails.
On your welcome series, welcome the subscriber to your business, remind them of the benefits they will get as your subscribers, tell them of more benefits, give them directions on how to explore more, and guide them if there are extra steps they need to take, for instance verifying some info or choosing email frequency. This article on the Inc highlights 7 awesome things you should do when writing your welcome emails. They include – be recognizable, remind them, be consistent, have some fun, link more detail, set expectations and get social.
Use Email for Promotions
After establishing a good relationship with your new subscribers, you can then proceed to send them promotional emails. However, don’t send promotional emails every day or send too many of them at once. Doing so brings you out as someone who is pushy or desperate, and customers don’t like this.
When sending promotional emails, do some segmentation to ensure you are recommending the right product to the right person. Don’t recommend one product to everyone. Offer recommendations based on browsing and purchase history and demographics. When you segment, the open and click through rates will be higher. Also, instead of recommending a product so directly, you can start your email as a story, a customer success story, or a product review by a customer. Sharing some changes that you have made to the product can also make your promotional emails sound less promotional. Don’t forget about coupons, great discounts for new subscribers and your loyal customers. For your existing customers, you could also consider cross-sell and upsell emails.
Email to Solve Cart Abandonment
Having potential customers browse through an online store and even put something in their carts but leave before they checkout is a huge challenge that many e-commerce businesses face. There are so many reasons for cart abandonment. Some of them include lack of trust, unexpected charges, complex checkout process, lack of their preferred payment option, no return policy, and distractions among many others. This statistic on Statista shows there is a 69.57% worldwide cart abandonment rate in 2019. It is evident that more than half of the consumers who do their shopping online end up leaving without completing the purchase.
Thankfully, you can get back those sales if you reach out to the potential customers soon, before they forget about your business or make the purchase somewhere else. Sending an email is one of the steps you can take to win the customer back. Send your first cart abandonment email as soon as the customer leaves your site. This will increase your chances of winning them back. When sending cart abandonment emails, check when and why the customer left so that you can offer them the ideal solution or incentive.
Email Customers Review Requests
As an online store owner, you require tons of reviews. Reviews are a great asset and can drive sales for your business. This is because many online shoppers will look for reviews about a product or retailer when deciding where and what to buy. Therefore, you should make it easy for customers to leave reviews after making a purchase. Better still, remind them by sending review requests via email. You can set up your platform in such a way that the email is sent automatically a few days, weeks or months after the purchase. This article on the Sendinblue blog expounds more on automated emails, the benefits, and setup process. The blog offers resources on marketing automation, email, CRM and more. Sendinblue is a company offering cloud-based tools for small and medium-sized businesses.
There is so much that email can do for your e-commerce business. In addition to the above, you could also consider email for promoting your e-commerce blog, a monthly newsletter, birthday wishes, and reengagement.
Image Credits: Bruce Mars
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