Why Use Email Marketing for Ecommerce?

Question: Why use email marketing for ecommerce?

Are you trying to develop an e-commerce business strategy? You should add email marketing to the mix. Why is this important?

To answer this question, you need to first look at the success rate of emails in digital marketing. People often consider emails to be old-fashioned but they have proven to be among the most effective digital marketing methods.

You can use emails to boost user engagement, dispense useful information, build customer loyalty, and announce promotions, among others.

Using email marketing for e-commerce is very effective as it promotes your products or services to potential and existing customers. This post will show you the importance of e-commerce email marketing and show you how to go about the process.

The Importance of Email Marketing in Ecommerce

Email marketing in e-commerce is essential as it presents you with a lot more opportunities for success. There are so many benefits of incorporating email marketing into e-commerce.

Some of the benefits include building credibility, establishing trustworthy customer relationships, and developing brand awareness. It also helps to drive sales, boost website traffic, and generate leads.

Below are some of the latest statistics to show you why use email marketing in ecommerce is important to your e-commerce campaigns:

About 99 percent of consumers go through their email inboxes daily.
80 percent of retailers see email marketing as the best way to achieve customer retention.
There are over 5.6 billion active email accounts globally.
42 percent of Americans are willing to subscribe to marketing emails because of special offers and discounts.
59 percent of consumers agree that marketing emails are strong enough to influence their decisions to purchase products or subscribe to services.
About 300 billion emails are sent daily.

From these statistics, you will agree that email marketing is very important to e-commerce.

What is E-commerce Email Marketing?

E-commerce email marketing uses emails to reach out to new customers to promote products or services. Experts believe that e-commerce email marketing helps to increase user engagement and helps businesses to build brand loyalty.

It also serves as a means to provide email recipients with information about promotions, discounts, and special offers. All of these contribute to higher sales over a period.

You must understand the difference between traditional email marketing and e-commerce email marketing. While regular email marketing uses promotional emails, e-commerce email marketing adds transactional emails to the mix. This makes e-commerce email marketing more wholesome and presents a better chance of success.

How to do E-commerce Email Marketing

E-commerce email marketing may seem complicated but it doesn’t have to be. All you need to do is understand the essential elements of this type of marketing. Below are the key elements of e-commerce email marketing:

Email list

The first step to successful e-commerce email marketing is building an email list. This list comprises active email addresses of individuals that have shown interest in receiving correspondence from your brand.

Several businesses struggle with building their email lists. There are several simple ways to build your list organically. Among these simple methods is using lead magnets.

This is simply presenting your target audience with an offer that they are interested in while they give you their email addresses in return. Examples of email addresses include free ebooks, coupons, and access to important information resources.

Choose your email service provider

After building your email list, you need to find an efficient email service provider. This is also known as an “email marketing platform” and it is software that assists you with managing your email list among other functions. The platform allows you to design emails and execute your email marketing campaigns.

One of the biggest benefits of using email service providers is automation. You can set up the provider to send emails based on certain triggers resulting from your subscribers’ behaviors.

With this, you personalize your interaction with each subscriber. This translates to more engagement and higher conversion rates.

State specific goals

E-commerce email marketing can help you achieve so many goals. Despite being so powerful, it can be your undoing if you don’t set specific goals. Decide what goals you want each campaign to achieve before execution. Some of the possible goals include:

Improve brand identity and awareness.
Boost customer engagement.
Increase customer loyalty.
Drive sales.
Ensures customer lifetime value.

Note that your email list, email service provider, and campaign goals should align for you to get the best results. Other things you need to do include:

Segment your email list based on subscriber actions or demographics.
Add a call to action to each email.
Personalize your emails.
Track analytics using your email service provider.

E-commerce Email Marketing Strategy

To succeed in e-commerce email marketing, you need to employ certain strategies. This section will reveal some of the most potent e-commerce email marketing strategies you can employ to attract customers, boost sales, and improve engagements.

User onboarding

You don’t get two chances to make a first impression. Sending a welcome email shows your subscribers that you care. Statistics show that about 33 percent of all customers say they get more engaged with a brand after receiving a welcome email.

You can make your welcome emails more enticing by adding unique first-time-visitor discounts. Use your onboarding emails to ease your users into a smooth start with your brand. You can prepare between two and three emails for this purpose.

Lead nurturing

Every successful marketer works out a plan to retain leads and nurture them until they become loyal customers. One of the easiest ways to do this is to present helpful educational content.

Analytics also reveal reasons why some of your leads drop off. Use this information to create content that will retain and nurture other leads.

Email list segmentation

Personalization is a very important aspect of e-commerce email marketing. The easiest way to achieve this is through segmentation. Different users have their preferences and understanding each one gives you an edge.

Collect subscriber data using a subscription form then split them into segments based on their behavior on your website. Doing this allows you to create personalized emails.

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Re-engagement of passive users

This email strategy comes in handy when you have clients that are losing interest in your brand. Re-engagement emails allow you to attract the attention of such customers to products or services again. Present them with your latest discounts and promotions and you will have them return to your website.

Upselling

Upselling is a perfect strategy for e-commerce email marketing. It involves presenting your customers with new options or models carrying advanced features after their latest purchase. Customers are likely to go for these offers when you properly highlight the value they will enjoy.

Overall, here are some best practices you can employ for e-commerce email marketing:

Implement a referral system.
Craft behavioral emails.
Send your loyal customers extra discount emails.
Work with highly responsive templates.
Use eye-catching designs.

At this point, you must have known why use of email marketing in ecommerce. Let’s look at the next section, which is the email marketing platform or software.

Best E-commerce Email Marketing Software

This section will introduce to you some of the best e-commerce email marketing software on the planet. We have chosen the platforms on our list based on features, customer reviews, ease of use, pricing, and delivery rates.

MailChimp

This platform is arguably the most popular e-commerce email marketing platform in the work. More than 14 million customers have subscribed to MailChimp, most of which are small and medium business owners.

This platform is renowned for its beautiful email templates, opt-in forms, drag-and-drop editor, and ease of use.

It also integrates seamlessly with a plethora of third-party apps and several e-commerce platforms like Magento and Spotify.

MailChimp is pretty affordable as its free plan allows you to send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers monthly. You get to pay about $5 for every 500 subscribers to add to your list. Alternatively, you can opt for the enterprise plan that offers more features at $199 per month.

Klaviyo

Most email server platforms are used to send emails. However, Klaviyo captures consumer data from several e-commerce websites they leverage it for creating personalized email marketing campaigns.

This platform integrates with standard CRM and e-commerce platforms to help the user maximize lead generation. Klaviyo offers you a complete suite of automated marketing features including ads and emails.

It comes with highly customizable templates that allow for targeted segmentation. You can get all of this with $25 monthly to send at most 3,000 emails to 500 subscribers.

Active Campaign

This is a multi-faceted platform that allows you to send content to segmented lists easily. One of the biggest advantages of using Active Campaign is that the platform offers unlimited personalization. Every new field you create becomes a personalization tag automatically.

Active Campaign presents you with 15 tools, which include CRM tools, email analytics, SMS and onsite messaging, and an extensive site.

It has a sliding scale tool that displays the pricing of the services based on volume. The Lite plan begins at $69 monthly and migration to other platforms is free.

AWeber

This platform is very similar to MailChimp in terms of integration with other e-commerce platforms. It was among the first email marketing platforms so you can count on the quality of delivery.

AWeber offers users a comprehensive solution to their email marketing needs. Subscribing to their service means that you gain access to loads of training materials and top-notch support.

It integrates with Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce among other e-commerce platforms. You can send emails to 500 subscribers at $19 per month.

If you have a subscriber base that is higher than 25,000, then you can choose any of the custom plans. The good news is that you can test the waters with their 30-day free trial.

Hubspot

Hubspot presents an all-in-one solution for digital marketing, with its email marketing tool as a major part. You can access everything you need including blog content management, lead analytics, social media management, and email marketing solutions.

Hubspot has an intuitive platform with loads of features so it is great for bigger businesses. Basic plans begin from $200 monthly and they require that your yearly contracts must be prepaid.

If you have an extensive email list, you should consider any of the enterprise plans that begin from $2,400 monthly. There is a free plan but it doesn’t include email marketing.

E-commerce Email Open Rate

What does the email open rate mean? It is one of the most important email marketing metrics to measure when running marketing campaigns. This metric reveals the rate at which the emails you send are opened.

While the email open rate is one of the indicators of the effectiveness of subject lines, it can be quite misleading for e-commerce marketers.

There has been much controversy about what a good e-commerce email open rate should be. A study by Mailchimp shows that the rates fall between 15 percent and 30 percent across several industries.

You don’t have to push excessively to increase your open rates above the average in your industry. However, if your email open rates have been low, here is a few things you can do:

Get rid of hard bounces: Hard bounces are emails that you send to addresses that are no longer in existence. They decrease your email open rates artificially. Sanitize your email lists regularly to expunge these non-existent email addresses.
Make your emails responsive: Most individuals check their emails via their smartphones. As such, you should ensure that every email you send is mobile-friendly.
Work with focus lists: Personalization is a key aspect of e-commerce email marketing. You can achieve personalization with focus lists. Personalized emails have a higher chance of getting opened.