How To Incorporate Email Marketing With Ecommerce

Ecommerce has dominated the goods and services business sector throughout the 21st century, and will continue to do so as we progress and innovate the technology backing it. Shopify only launched 16 years ago in 2006 and continues to innovate on the Ecommerce sector.

Email Marketing, which you should still be using, and Ecommerce are complements of each other. As an Ecommerce business owner, here are some tips on how to increase your sales revenue and customer loyalty through your email marketing campaigns.

Incentivize Conversions

Email Marketing has solidified its place in the ECommerce product funnel and converting customers. Emails are used to create accounts on merchant websites, track orders from purchase to delivery, and even speak to Customer Service representatives concerning issues with an order. From a consumer standpoint, email is the main platform that connects consumers and businesses.

However, as Ecommerce continues to grow as an industry, the marketing tools available to business owners also continue to grow. Through platforms such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact, business have access to more in-depth features such as:

Loyalty Programs

Enter Your Email for a Chance to Get 10% Off Your Order!

This is a very common pop-up that you can use to incentivize customers to opt-in for your company’s email marketing. Once opted-in, you can continue to provide that consumer any upcoming coupon codes or sales! If you’re looking to reward that individual customer, implement a unique one time generated coupon code! Doing so will prevent coupon sharing among consumers and require customers to opt in for their unique coupon.

If you’d like to go the extra mile, create an entire loyalty program per customer, allowing them to accumulate “loyalty points” where they can be rewarded for continuing to purchase from you. The possibilities are truly endless in how you reward your customers.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Did You Forget Something In Your Cart? Here’s 15% Off to Finish Your Purchase!

Abandoned Cart Recovery (ACR) is a recent sales acquisition strategy that was developed with the goal of reminding customers that they have left an item / service in their cart. The end goal is to persuade the potential customer to complete their purchase.

Using ACR in your email marketing allows you full control over your customer journey. The rate at which ACR emails are sent are fully determined by you. Generally, sending an ACR email within ~30 minutes delay of a customer not completing check out can be effective. After the initial email, sending another email after 1 day, 3 days, and then 1 week afterwards only increase the amount of touch points you have to close your sale. Fro an even more effective measure, try to incorporate SMS marketing alongside your ACR emails!

Customer Segmentation and Attribution

This is an advanced approach used by many businesses and marketing companies alike. Customer segmentation and tagging answers the following question:

How do I reward the customers who consistently engage with my Emails as opposed to those who never open them?

Tagging customers and segmenting your list into “highly engaged” vs “not engaged” allows you to integrate A/B testing into your email list. If a portion of your email list is not engaged and generally opens 15% of your emails, why not offer a 25% discount as opposed to the standard 15% everyone is getting?

Adding this dataset to your email list allows you to experiment on granular levels with your customers that isn’t available to other forms of marketing such as print advertisements, bilboards, or even mailers.

Create a Marketing Funnel

The best forms of marketing are developed when multiple outlets encourage clickthroughs to others.

For example, your company just released a new YouTube video. A simple funnel would be announcing the newly uploaded video via an email campaign to your subscriber list. The goal is to incentivize your email subscribers to open your email, and then clickthrough to your YouTube video. By doing this, you are funneling an audience to convert into an action of your choice. In this case, the conversion metric is how many views your video gained from your email announcement.

You can continue to develop this marketing funnel, incorporating other silos of your business: Blog posts, newly launched products, sales, etc.

Email marketing has become integral for Ecommerce based businesses. A consumer’s email acts as their main point of contact to receive updates about their order, learn about your company, and more importantly act as the gateway businesses can use for marketing and solicitation purposes.