In this comprehensive guide, we cover actionable steps to optimize your ecommerce email marketing strategy, increase brand awareness and drive conversions.
What is Ecommerce Email Marketing?
Ecommerce email marketing is the art and science of using email to generate sales for your store. It can be simple, such as emailing people who abandon their shopping carts.
At the end of the day, when you look at the promotions, offers, free shipping coupons, and lead nurturing emails. Email marketing is about building relationships.
There are four fundamental aspects of a successful foundation:
- Build your contact list
- Understand your contact list
- Determine a cadence and frequency
- Choose the right technologies
Building Your Email List
The first step to a successful ecommerce email marketing strategy is growing an email list. To do this, brands must attract customers to their websites and capture their email addresses.
Lead Capture
We often recommend a lead capture tool for eCommerce businesses. That helps brands easily build high-performing and aesthetically pleasing pop-ups. Successful pop-ups typically include:
- Marketing copy
- Imagery
- Branding
- CTA (Call to Action)
- Value Proposition
Transferring Your List to An Email Marketing eCommerce Tool
Every eCommerce platform collects customer data after purchase. This information can include product orders, cost, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. To full advantage of this information, businesses need to transfer customer purchase data into a marketing automation tool, like HubSpot.
Understanding Your Contact List
Before you can succeed with email marketing, you must understand your customer’s needs. This starts by evaluating information like customer demographics and purchase history.
Determining a Cadence and Frequency
Finding the right cadence for your business is more complex than it may appear. Yet it is one of the most important email marketing strategies. Email frequencies vary based on a company’s objectives and needs. Unfortunately, we don’t have a universal recommendation to share. However, we can offer some sound advice on how to figure out what the best fit is for your business.
Start by identifying your email goals before adjusting your cadence and ask yourself:
- Why am I sending emails in the first place?
- Am I trying to close deals, get online purchases, or drive website readers to convert?
Types of Emails
First, it’s important to consider the different email techniques businesses can use to reach subscribers. There are three main eCommerce email marketing categories:
Blogs and Helpful Content
Blogs and content help customers build trust in your business. Whether you send a monthly newsletter, downloadable content, or blogs. This content helps nurture your list and reminds them that you aren’t just here to sell them things. Rather, you’re a resource here to help them solve a problem.
Abandoned Carts
There are many reasons why customers leave items in online shopping carts. Factors like competitive prices, lack of trust, and uncertainty about your store can easily lead to forgotten products.
Regardless of the reason, abandoned carts will happen no matter how hard you try to prevent them. By taking the time to set up abandoned cart email workflows. You’re giving your business a second chance at recovering potential lost sales.
Promotions and Offers
Incorporating discounts and promotions in your ecommerce email marketing strategy can help recapture a potential lost customer’s attention. However, we want to stress that there are right and wrong ways to use them.
