Key Ingredients for Flawless Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is still the best digital marketing channel to pull best ROI. Stats say that if you spend $1 on email marketing campaigns, there are chances that you can $44 dollars back. If you own an ecommerce store, email marketing can be an effective tool to promote your business and communicate with the customers.

But like other digital marketing methods, email marketing as well should be done with planning and strategy. If your email campaigns are not generating any leads and sales, immediate attention is required.

What Makes a Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaign

A campaign can only deliver results if it’s taken up in right direction from start to finish. Following are a few sure shot tips that can give your email campaigns an edge over your competitors. These are ecommerce email marketing best practices for generating more leads, conversions, sales and revenue.

1: List Segmentation

You can’t simply blast an email to everyone in your list. It’s a practice that’s now obsolete, stale and irrelevant. Read a situation-

You have ERP software to sell. You blast an email campaign.

When checked the reports, you stunned to see 91% bounce rate, huge number of unsubscribe requests mass reporting against you. It was imminent to happen. The email was supposed to reach to the recipients who were known to ERP and can connect to a relevant offer.

Unfortunately, your list had a mix bag of recipients from all genres including those who were unknown to ERP software. Thus, as soon those uninterested people received your communication, they dumped it, marked it spam and deleted it. This happened to have an adverse impact on email open rate.

This means, we can’t send every email to everybody. We have to segment the list of recipients. Segmentation is the key of any email marketing campaign and helps to sort the recipient list on the basis of multiple matrices. With segmentation, you can ensure tailored, personalized relevant emails to the right people at the right time.

You might segment your list by:

• Gender/Age
• Location
• Buying preferences
• Purchase history
• Interests
• Favorites

The most important benefit of segmentation is that it makes you able to improve opens and reads. Along with that it also improves engagement and accelerates conversion rate.

2: Welcome Emails

As soon you start getting subscribers, you must greet them with welcome mails. Welcome emails can help you set the tone of your further communication. It’s recommended to greet them with different welcome mails. The purpose of these emails would be to thanking you them for subscribing and engaging them with relevant offers.

This is how you can schedule your welcome mails: -

Once the person signs up, send him/her a thank you email. The next day mail can be marked to brief him about what you are offering and other soft pitches. Later on you can send email to request him information, insights or asking them to take an action. Don’t forget to add a bit of customization to your emails and keep them quite informal.

3. Engaging Text

Most recipients receive tons of emails a single day with stale sales pitches. It’s intimidating. Customers trash them immediately. So, it would be a tough task for you to stand out. But, you can escape the embarrassment of being junked if you can narrate interesting stories to your audience.

Run a nurturing series. Tell your customers stories about how your products / services helped many in solving their problems. Share case studies that provide value to them, educate and inform them. You shouldn’t look like a brand that’s merely interested in selling, and selling. Instead tell them that you can offer a solution to their long standing problem.

Tell them a story that will induce positive emotions. At the bottom of the story, give them a way to take action. This call to action shouldn’t be a hard ‘BUY NOW’ or ‘SHOP NOW’. Instead, I recommend going with something like DISCOVER HOW. Taking customers through a journey will be rewarding. If they find it satisfying and worth considering, they will hit ‘buy’ button.

4. Calculated Frequency

You have made a great email marketing setup. You have written beautiful email content. You tested with a segmented email list. Despite all your efforts rightly aligned, the campaigned tanked. This happened because you didn’t work out the frequency of the emails sent. It’s annoying if email drops in mailboxes at wrong time. Even I won’t open them if I am heading to my gym or playing basketball with my kids.

Timing is important. Frequent emails and emails on wrong time are sheer waste of energy, resources and capital invested on the campaign. Keep your ecommerce email marketing communication balanced. In the very beginning, stick to just few emails over the course of the first week.

If you’re running some promotional campaigns to create outreach, send a few emails to inform customers and create traction. The number of emails to be sent is just adding up in the numbers with win-back emails, browsing abandonment, and cart abandonment emails keep slipping into inbox.

Besides taming the frequently of emails by your own IQ, you can give your subscribers / customers an option to specify how often they’d like to receive emails.

5. Sense of Curiosity

Incomplete Dots:

Incomplete dots have a strong appeal to curiosity. Incorporate this interrogative expression either in your title or else, drop it in the beginning of your email. Always keep in mind that you may trigger human interest and curiosity easily with an expression such as why can't....?, How to...?, etc. This is a very important aspect of writing emails for a successful email marketing campaign.

Opening with a question:

View things from your readers' perspective and start your email with a question that your readers are most likely to ask. The question will create the sense of curiosity and in order to settle this curiosity, your readers will feel tempted to go through email. As for instance, most of us would want to open and read a link that says '10 easy tips to lose weight'.

An offer/ free product:

News regarding various enticing aspects such as a free product, discounts and some really profitable benefits may also attract your subscribers to open your email. Incorporate this offer broadly in your subject line. Also, you may offer them with a way to provide handouts, there's nothing like a free sample. Not only they will go through mail but also have a way to try your product and might get the itch of buying it finally.

The objective of your email, should not be restricted to letting your readers know something about you, it should actually stretches upto the idea of creating curiosity and wanting them to know more and more about you. In sure to incorporate 'a call to action' in the content or in the subject line. However, your attempt will go in vain if you fail to clear their curiosity and you might end up with an agitated reader.

6: Wisely Timed

There are chances people don’t take the action you want. What may be the reason behind it, you need to be ready to strike back. Create a segment to record “unopened emails”. Resend those emails after a few days. It may be the case that some customers didn’t open and read due to time constraints. In this case he might open, read and take action. If still the recipient doesn’t open and transact, send one follow-up email to remind them with another call to action.

Likewise, you should consider sending re-engagement emails to the customers who have not engaged with you or purchased in a while. Similarly, mails should be sent for abandoned shopping carts to remind buyers of the pending products in the cart. These are five tested strategies to amplify you ecommerce email marketing strategy. It will help you engage more customers and sustain longer business relationships.

---