eCommerce Email Marketing : The Comprehensive Guide

We have divided the Complete Email Marketing Guide into 10 sections :

1. What is Email Marketing ?

2. Benefits of Email Marketing to eCommerce

3. How to Start An Email Marketing ?

4. How to Increase your Email Marketing list

5. How to segment the list for better result

6. Write Engaging Email Content

7. Conversion Optimization in Email Marketing

8. Email Automation Saves Your Time

9. Email Analytics and Tracking

10. Email Marketing Best Practices (Stats & Data)

 

Bonus For Getting Successful With Email Marketings

10 Hacks For Effective Email Marketing

100+ Samples To Start Email Marketing

 

This guide aims to help the "Average Joe" understand Email Marketing better, start utilizing and get succeed.

 

1.What is Email Marketing?

Nowadays, there are countless channels of communication that you can incorporate into your digital marketing strategy, and which will give you favorable results for your eCommerce business, one of them is email marketing.

In the past years, it has established itself as an important means of communication, which also creates a significant and rapid link with the user or potential client and the business owner.

Email marketing refers to the sending of emails to a database or contacts, such as your potential customers or leads. It is considered a digital communication strategy and falls within one of the actions of direct marketing.

It focuses on sending a message in order to create loyalty, interact with customers, increase sales, build trust towards a service or product, and confirm a purchase order, among other objectives.

It reaches easily and effectively to potential customers. Not only to the input trays, but directly to the customer's hand, thanks to mobile devices. Many users have personal and professional mail configured on their smartphone or tablet. Nearly half of the emails are open from a mobile phone and this forces us to make their designs responsive.

To think nowadays in email marketing is to think in mobile format, if we do not do so, our message will be dead even before it reaches the consumer. Hence, it is often said that the evolution of email marketing is mobile email marketing.

This guide talks extensively about email marketing, the benefits, starting, building and increasing your list, and conversion optimization in Email marketing amongst other things.

2.Benefits of Email Marketing to eCommerce

In recent times, social networks have gained visibility in digital marketing. However, email marketing can also be a great option for those who collect email addresses and want to increase the relevance of your brand among these contacts. Here are some benefits and reasons you should get into email marketing as soon as possible:

Powerful

According to published research, in 2015 there were 2.5 billion email users, and the trend is for that number to reach 2.9 billion in 2019. That number represents more than a third of the world's population!

Our email address concentrates all the actions we do in other channels. Every time we create a login on any site, for example, we use the email address. Thus, it is an essential part of the activities of a user on the Internet.

Expected reach

When a company makes a post on a social network, such as Facebook, not all the people who follow your page will see your message. This occurs due to the algorithms that determine which messages are most relevant to each user.

For this reason, the reach of posts on social networks is not predictable. That is, you have no control over how many people actually see your post.

In email marketing, the same thing does not happen. One of the great advantages of this channel is its predictable reach. This means that if you select 100 email addresses to send your message, all 100 will receive your email in the inbox (unless there is a technical problem, but we will deal with this matter later).

Flexible format

The email is the blank screen that every digital marketing professional looks for. Messages sent by email do not have character limits, may contain images and even GIF.

An email can be made with templates and include graphic elements, or it can contain only text, as if you were writing personal messages for all your contacts.

Through it, you can communicate short messages, include several links to web pages, or tell a long story. Therefore, the email can have the format you want!

Obviously, there are good practices to follow when writing and designing an email. But we will address this matter a little later!

You can segment the databases

One of the main benefits of email marketing for an eCommerce is the possibility of relevant segmentation of the database. In fact, all the previous work of capturing quality leads to build a foundation database serves precisely for this aspect. And it is important for any campaign to achieve its objectives.

A segmented database helps optimize results. Thus, the results of a company can be improved by up to 50%. This is because messages reach customers better, which affects an increase in openings, clicks and final conversions.

Personalization

Email is the means of communication with the greatest capacity for personalization

And, as such, the one that gets the most results. In fact, the brands that carry out processes and exhaustive analysis to improve the personalization of their emails get twice as many conversions as those that do not.

Also, if you did not know, users like the personal, the exclusive. As a client, you will also like brands to communicate in a personalized way. Therefore, the most effective way to offer this exclusivity is through email marketing. Its ability to personalize is one of its most powerful features.

The personalized message, directly dedicated to a specific user, will facilitate the process of approaching the brand. And, above all, it will give rise to your services being used.

You save a lot of time thanks to the automation

Automating emails has a fundamental advantage for an eCommerce: Its opening rates far exceed normal emails. That is, you make sure that the recipient reads the content of the message.

Automating emails does not only provide better results, but also the users read them repeatedly and generate more income. If you are aware that users are waiting for your messages and that they also read them, do not settle for standard emails. Work them properly.

You can recover abandoned shopping carts

When a customer enters your physical store and leaves without buying, there is nothing you can do. You do not know what he liked, what he did not, what his budget is or what he needs.

However, email marketing for an eCommerce has all the solutions to these dilemmas. Emails to retrieve abandoned carts are automated reminders that are usually accompanied by special promotions.

This will incite the user to contact the brand again and thanks to this email, go back to the web page to see everything the company offers at that moment. A good way to recover all those lost customers.

You can retain clients

Most emails are aimed at existing customers. In this way, you can announce new products and launch promotions. But if you are an intelligent marketing manager you will know that it is much easier to address a user who is already a customer than to start the process with a new one.

Email marketing for an eCommerce is very important precisely because it allows you to launch all kinds of impacts so that the user stays with you.

You can measure the results of any campaign

And with very specific metrics. The most traditional advertising media, such as television, radio or mail, among others, are made en masse. That is, if you have a sports clothing store, your ad will only interest those people who practice a sport. But if you are guided by the audience that your ad has had on television at that moment, it will not do you much good.

However, if this happens in email marketing, you will not only send that promotion to your customers who practice sports, but also women will receive specific emails and other men. Or you could segment it into clothing for soccer, basketball, tennis, etc. That is, each user will receive precisely the impact he needs.

And, in addition, you will be able to measure everything: Who has opened your email, where did you click, how many of those emails have not arrived, who has marked you as spam, etc.

3. How to Start an Email Marketing Campaign

When planning your strategy you have to specify 2 types of objectives:

General objective of the campaign.

Specific objective to each email.

For example, imagine that you want to create a campaign to sell your new eBook.

For that, you create a post in which you approach the subject on which the infoproduct will address. And in that post you put a form that triggers an auto response.

Although your ultimate goal is to sell, each mail in the sequence will have an individual goal. Examples of sequence:

Email 1: Present yourself and your project. Objective: to generate trust.

Email 2: Link to different posts of your blog in which you also talk about that topic. Objective: to add value, increase your authority and create a need for the product.

Email 3: Deeper content in relation to your eBook. If you have them, the data and statistics work very well. Objective: gain authority and create need for the product.

Email 4: Success story and introduction to the product. Objective: prepare the user for the sale.

Email 5: Sales email. Objective: sell.

Knowing the objectives in your email marketing strategy is like having a compass that guides you to keep working.

4. How to Increase your Email Marketing List

If you see that your list does not grow, or worse, that your email database is decreasing, it may be time to review your contact acquisition strategy. This work is essential for an effective email marketing strategy, and it is something like a marathon in which the fastest winner does not win, but the one that has the most resistance.

Transform your visitors into subscribers

Do all the visitors of your website subscribe to your newsletter? Unfortunately, surely this is not the case. The real question is: can your visitors easily subscribe to your marketing communications? If they visit your website, it means that they already have an interest in your company and what it offers even if they are not ready to buy.

Take advantage of that interest to encourage them to join your email database, which will allow you to create a relationship with that "cold" prospect and to remember you when they are ready to buy. For this, here are some ideas you can try.

1. Include subscription forms in your key pages

Surely you've seen it on many websites. Adding subscription forms to your strategic pages is a fundamental part of the strategy of acquiring contacts. Some email providers allow you to design subscription widgets to add to your websites and increase your email database.

Although each Internet site has its peculiarities, the pages on which the subscription forms traditionally work best are the home page, the navigation bar and the blog articles.

2. Use pop-ups to capture your users

You can also use tools dedicated to collecting email addresses in parallel. For example, some free tools allow you to incorporate a pop-up window, or pop up, that includes a subscription form to your newsletter when the visitor is about to leave your site.

To obtain the best results, the key is to try several positions, designs and texts, in order to determine the best place to place it. Remember, the key will be to find the site with the greatest conversion potential, without degrading the user's experience.

3. Remind your readers of the value of your newsletter on the blog

If your newsletter is the way you share the contents of your blog, do not pass the opportunity to remind your users of the added value of your weekly newsletters. Take advantage to include banners between your content and explicit references to articles or tips shared through the newsletter.

5. How to Segment The List For Better Result

What exactly is the advantage of segmenting a list of subscribers? Would it not be easier and more practical to send the same campaign to everyone? No way! While in principle this can save you time and effort, segmenting your campaigns has great advantages.

The segmentation in Email Marketing can be implemented in different ways and can even be combined with each other. Here are the 3 main criteria you can use to segment your campaign.

Segment by Demographic Profile

The demographic segmentation is one of the most basic ways to segment your list. The age, sex, marital status, place of residence, income etc. they are data from which you can adapt your campaigns and improve your ratios.

Do not waste them! This information can be obtained by different means such as subscription forms to your campaign or physical location, events in which your brand has participated or even in other instances of interaction with your target.

Segment by Behavior

This type of segmentation refers to the creation of groups within your subscriber list based on the analysis of their interaction with your brand. In this sense, You can get valuable information about:

Web interaction

Activity at the point of sale.

eCommerce statistic.

Analyzing this information, you will be able to identify those clients with the highest degree of interest for a certain product or content and create for them email campaigns that respond specifically to their needs.

Segment by Performance

The metrics of your previous Email Marketing campaigns are another great source of information to segment and improve our future campaigns. From the results obtained, you can analyze what type of content and offers are more successful and identify for example who are the contacts that are most likely to purchase with their clicks. This will allow you to segment your next shipments based on this information.

6. Writing Engaging Email Content

It is not enough to gather a list of leads, it is also very important that we write the right copies to them. A good product without a good sales copy will not produce good results. Here are some tips to consider when writing Email content:

1. Be clear about the recipient

First, who is the recipient? What is their age group? What are you selling? Once you answer these questions, you will be to ascertain the best tone to use in the Email.

2. Use a single issue in the email

To properly write an engaging email, one of the main fields that you will have to fill in is the "Subject". We recommend sending an email with a single subject. In addition, it is important that you do not write the text in capital letters, because although you want to draw attention, the only thing we will achieve is that your message is aggressive to the eye. It is also essential that the title refers to the main information!

3. Always use a Text Editor

Your ally should be the proofreader. Many times we write Emails by impulse without realizing we commit a lot of spelling mistakes. This harms our image especially if it is a work email. Therefore, the best way to write correctly and without misspellings an email is to activate the corrector before hitting the submit button.

4. Clear and concise message

When writing an engaging email, you should always write a clear and concise message. Avoid the use of big jargons to impress your audience; the most important is to ensure that there is a clear communication. Likewise, it is ok to use the bold letters to highlight the most important information.

5. Visually attractive message

Let's talk about the design! It is important that the receiver finds a visually attractive message, but do not include color and images that are not necessary, as this will confuse the person who receives it.

6. Ask for a reply or include a call to action

One of the ways to end an engaging mail is to ask for feedback from the audience using call to actions. You can ask them to click a link to know more, call you or reply as the case may be. Of course, always with kindness ... Do not forget the Please and thank you!

7. Conversion Optimization in Email Marketing

How to optimize your messages for maximum results

Personalize the message.

You connect to people more when you use their names at the beginning of your mail. It gives confidence to the potential recipients that they can trust you.

For example, putting a person's name instead of the name of a company can increase your opening rate by 5.5%

Improve the visibility and effectiveness of the Email "subject"

The subject accounts for a larger percentage of the action as to whether or not the mail will be opened by the recipient. How to make the header more engaging:

- Personalize it with the recipient's name

- Be effective, attract attention, encourage them to open the email

Be transparent and give confidence.

You explain to your subscribers how and why you are contacting them at the beginning of the email: "you are receiving this message because you have subscribed to...".

In the email, be clear and concise; concentrate on the essence of your message on the top of the email.

Enter call-to-action buttons (use famous call-to-action). Be explicit! These buttons will trigger the desired action (access to a page, etc.).

It is good to know that the users, most of the time, click on the textual links and not on the advertising banners or the visuals contained in the email. Therefore, take care of the links and, think about tracking them!!

Make sure you have entered a link to unsubscribe. It is mandatory! This way you will avoid problems with the justice and you will avoid the dissatisfaction of your clients.

8. Email Automation Saves Your Time

The current technology allows us to automate a large part of the email marketing actions on our users. The more automated we have the communication flows with our users, as well as the management of HTML content, the more effective the actions will be and the greater the savings in time and costs .

To automate an email marketing program, we will need, first of all, to define business rules that will set the pattern of the events that follow. Let's see it with a simple example.

We can design a welcome pack (welcome program) that runs automatically every time a user registers in our email marketing program. Automatically, once registration has taken place, the user can receive a welcome email in which part of the content has been customized based on the variable "sex" that has been captured in the registration form.

If he is a man, he will receive a content addressed to this type of audience, and if she is a woman, he will receive the pertinent content.

We can sophisticate contact scenarios as much as we want. For example, we can place an annual minimum expenditure threshold that, if exceeded, gives the right to an extra benefit (for example, a discount voucher in the next purchase). To the extent that we have in our database the transactional information of our users, at the moment the circumstance that gives right to the benefit occurs, an event consisting of the sending of a personalized email can automatically be triggered.

This idea of ​​automation can be extended to any event that we consider significant for our user and we can create sequences and contact flows as elaborate as we wish.

From an operational point of view, which ensures the efficient use of resources, process automation must be pursued at all levels. The less time we dedicate to the execution of the actions and more to the analysis of the results, the optimization and the elaboration of winning strategies, the greater return we will obtain from our investment in marketing.

9.Email Analytics and Tracking

Email marketing newsletters are an invaluable resource for your Internet marketing campaign. You can promote your brand, your company and product to a wide audience every week with a simple email. But how do you know if your email campaign is effective? That's where the email analysis comes from.

Email analysis, or email metrics, will allow you to track who opens your email, which links are the most effective and if people join your site through your email. If you want to really fine-tune what works with your target audience, analysis is the way to go. Here are some of the things that you should follow up on your emails:

Social Networks Activity

If you are going to include shared social links in your email (which you must do), you can use email analysis to find out who is clicking on which shared social link. This means that every time someone "likes" your email on Facebook or starts following it on Twitter, you will know it. The most obvious advantage is knowing that the emails you send inspires people to click on the "Share" button, allowing you to repeat that success.

Video Reproductions

This does not differ from the whole that by using an email analytics to gather information about your shared social links. If you are using videos in your campaign you can use email analytics to find out which videos are working with your campaign and which are not. You can do this in Benchmark by attaching the video through a link or insert and track the clicks of the only users.

If you add a video and realize that your audience is not watching it, you have the opportunity to change the video in the following email or remove the video completely.

Call to Action

As a general rule, it is best to vary your call to action from email to email. If you keep the same action call in all emails (for example, "click here to read more!"), you risk losing the attention of your audience.

Reactions to Contents

Attractive content is the most important aspect of any email marketing campaign. A strong creative content is based on consumption and keeps your brand fresh in mind even after you have closed your email. Your audience prefers images or text? Video testimonials or polls and surveys? Email analysis can help determine what type of content your audience responds to best.

In the end, the analysis increases your knowledge about the behavior of your target market and allows you to use that information to improve the power of your email marketing newsletters.

10.Email Marketing Best Practices(Stats & Data)

Email Marketing is the Online Marketing channel that, when done properly, has the highest ROI (or return on investment) of all.

Doing things well, with the sending of newsletters you can achieve all the objectives outlined in a simple and very economical way. A good email marketing strategy is what you need to boost your business.

Here are some email marketing best practices:

1. Segment subscribers

Having a list with many followers is something we all want. But for our Email Marketing strategies to work perfectly, we need to divide this list into much smaller segments.

You must segment your subscribers according to different criteria. So you can send much more personalized content to each of the segments, increasing the rate of opening, click and conversion.

Segment your list by criteria of: subject, periodicity of shipment, age, location, etc. The more segmented you are, the better.

2. Customize to the fullest

Although Email Marketing is a technique of mass delivery to a group of subscribers (as we have seen, the more segmented this group is, the greater the chances of achieving high conversion rates), this does not mean that we cannot personalize our newsletters.

Everyone likes to feel special. It is not the same to receive an email that says "dear client" than another that says "hello, John".

Personalize your newsletters to the maximum to create a greater engagement with your subscribers:

Whenever you can, add the name of the user in the subject and / or start of the email.

Do not send an email saying "good morning" to users who are located on the other side of the world (for them it would be "good night")

When necessary, send two different emails to women and men, customizing each one with the appropriate gender. The same applies to age groups: it does not have to be the same as an email for 18-year-olds than for adults over 65.

3. Responsive design

This good practice of Email Marketing would not have to name it at this point, but we still find newsletters that do not adapt to mobile phones or tablets.

Make sure all your emails can be seen perfectly on all devices. Most email providers that exist (such as MailChimp or MailRelay) already have a responsive design in their templates, so this practice will surely follow it.

Of course, even if your email provider has a responsive design, always do tests (sending the newsletters to you before) both on computer, mobile and tablet, to ensure you see perfectly on all devices.

Pay attention to the matter (on mobile the visible matter is much shorter than on computers), on the images and buttons with calls to action.

4. Less is more

In most cases, the simplest newsletters work much better than those that are full of images, different colors, and complicated designs.

Your email has to be simple. The less it looks like the typical newsletters (those that are made up of different columns, full of huge images or with headlines), much better.

We are used to relating SPAM with "well-designed" newsletters. Therefore, interestingly, a newsletter that looks like a "normal" email (the one that a friend would send us), usually has better results.

Keep it simple, stupid (KISS).

5. Avoid SPAM words

Currently, email providers have anti-spam filters to prevent us from receiving junk mail in our inbox.

It is very positive for all of us (it is horrible to receive SPAM every day, right?) But it is also a challenge that all of us who dedicate ourselves to Email Marketing must overcome.

It is very likely that our newsletters end up in the SPAM folder if we are not careful. And, if this happens, every time we send an email from our server, it will go directly to the SPAM folder of our user.

There are different factors that email providers have in mind to place an email in the SPAM tray or not. One of them, are the words considered SPAM.

If you want your email to have a green flag, avoid words like: free, gift, best price, special promotion, discount, discounts, offer, click here, earn money, purchase, best price, lowest price, by only, free call, investment , 50% less, why pay more ?, eliminate your debt, already, do it now, start today, for a limited time, seen on TV, lose weight, etc.

6. Include a link to unsubscribe

All your emails must include a link so that subscribers can unsubscribe whenever they want.

It is necessary that your subscribers can stop receiving your newsletter, easily. And even if it hurts in your soul every time you see that a person has unsubscribed. In each and every one of the emails that you send, it includes a button or link so that you can unsubscribe.

 

Bonus For Getting Successful With Email Marketings

10 Hacks For Effective Email Marketing

100+ Email Subject Ideas for eCommerce Email Marketing