Email marketing is one of the most powerful channels of marketing a brand can utilize. If you have a decent email list, there are so many different strategies you can use to achieve different goals that will generate results for your brand.
In this post, we’ll go over the top 10 email marketing strategies that you can implement today with your eCommerce.
Why Email Marketing Is So Important
Email marketing is essential for brands to thrive – especially e-commerce brands. Email marketing allows you to communicate with your customers, and communication is key when it comes to building customer relationships.
If you want your customers to keep coming back, you need to get your message in front of them outside of your website.
E-commerce Email Marketing Strategy: Essential Email to Send
What types of emails should absolutely not be missing from your e-commerce marketing strategy? Here’s a quick rundown:
Promotional Emails
Whenever your brand is having some sort of sale or promotion, it’s a great time to capture your customers’ attention. People love getting great deals, but it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with every sale that’s going on these days.
Whenever you have a promotion going on, it’s crucial to get that discount in front of your customers and build that sense of urgency.
Cross-Selling
Cross-selling is an important part of increasing Average Order Value and Purchase Frequency. When someone makes a purchase on your website and they get their confirmation email, it’s a great opportunity to push additional products towards them.
Right when they get the email, you can recommend accessories and relevant products, and offer a discount if they buy it before their order ships out.
If they don’t end up buying extra items after that first email, you still have other chances. Sometimes, customers aren’t ready to immediately buy accessories, or maybe they don’t see the need for them until they actually receive the product.
That’s why you should send another cross-selling email after they receive their order.
Upselling
Upselling is another strategy that can be used to increase AOV in ecommerce email marketing strategies. These emails will work similarly to the cross-selling email where you send it out before their order ships.
In this period of time, they have a chance to upgrade their order if upgrades are something you offer.
Win-Back Emails
Win-back emails are meant to bring back customers that have previously purchased from you but haven’t placed an order recently. To send these emails, you first need to identify this segment, which requires you to do some RFM Analysis.
Once you can identify customers you’ve lost, or are about to lose, you can send them an offer in hopes of winning them back and rebuilding that relationship.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are one of the best strategies you can implement for customer retention. Customers who sign up for these programs are incentivized to purchase with rewards, which will increase purchase frequency.
Because loyalty programs are so effective, you want to push this on as many customers as you can, and what better way is there to do this than email marketing?
Customer Surveys
If you’re running an e-commerce store understanding your customers and learning who buys from you is one of the most important steps you can take. Knowing these things allows you to make adjustments to your messaging and who you target.
To actually uncover this information, you’ll need to send out customer surveys via email. These surveys should consist of questions that not only ask for basic demographics like age but should also dig deeper and ask questions like, “Why did you buy from us” or “How did you hear about us”. When you get feedback like this, you’ll find out a lot more than you could from something like Google Analytics.
Replenishment Emails
If you sell consumable products that require replenishment, then you should be sending emails that remind customers to replenish their supply. It can be easy for customers to forget they need to purchase more of something, which is why it helps if you can automate these reminders for them.
Subscriptions are a great way to automate these recurring purchases, but not everyone wants to sign up for one, so the next best thing you can do is send them reminders.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Frequently, customers tend to add products to their shopping cart but ultimately abandon checkout for various reasons. A considerable number of these customers do not return to complete their purchase; however, one measure you can take to reduce this is sending abandoned cart emails.
If you have the customer’s email, you can send them emails that remind them to complete their purchase if they abandon checkout. You can even take it a step further and provide them with a coupon offering a discount or free shipping to increase the chances of them placing an order.
User Experience and NPS Emails
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the best ways you can measure customer experience. NPS surveys ask customers how likely they are to share your brand on a scale of 1-10. If someone scores high, then you know they had a positive customer experience. If they score low, then you know they had a negative experience, and you need to check up on them and resolve any issues you can.
On top of these NPS score surveys, you should also send user experience surveys that ask what they did or didn’t like about their interaction with your brand, and these surveys should vary based on their NPS score. This is a great way to gauge how your brand performs beyond metrics, and these surveys can reveal a lot of important information.
Back-in-Stock Emails
If you’re an e-commerce brand, sometimes, you run out of stock. For some, it may not happen often, but it’s bound to occur at some point. When that time comes, there’s going to be customers looking at those products that you don’t have.
Sometimes, customers may just go to a competitor if they need it right away, but if that’s not the case and they don’t mind waiting, you want to be able to send them notifications for when it’s back in stock.
You can do this by adding a feature on your product pages that gives customers the option to be notified when something comes back in stock. This way, you don’t miss out on potential sales because of inventory issues.
Conclusion
If done right, email marketing can help your brand to reach its full potential and maximize the Customer Lifetime Value of your store. Following this guide and implementing these email marketing strategies are sure to help you grow. Ready to skyrocket your email marketing results?
Tanner Scott
Founder & CEO – Ranskey Digital Marketing
Tanner is the founder and CEO of Ranksey Digital Marketing, a digital agency that specializes in helping e-commerce brands scale by optimizing customer acquisition costs and maximizing customer lifetime value.