How often do you get emails from your favourite brands? Everyday? Every Month? Every retailer, no matter the industry, has found themselves using email marketing to win over your purchasing decisions.
The ecommerce industry has grown tremendously over the last decade. Over 4 billion people were using email in 2021, and by 2024, that number is projected to increase to 4.5 billion (Statista, 2021)This directly impacts the amount of consumers who shop online and thus, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to customers to encourage them to purchase from your site. By sending emails to your subscribers, you can build relationships with them and provide valuable information about your brand.
The Importance of Email Marketing
With the continuing rise of ecommerce businesses, it has become imperative that you do everything you can to make your brand known, and retain the attention of your customers. There is a lot of competition out there! The internet is chock full of ecommerce businesses trying to sell their products online. If you don't use email marketing to get your message across to consumers, you are going to lose that sale to someone who does.
Email marketing has become one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to help leverage your audience and grow your business. Implementing a successful strategy will help you to land new customers by sending them offers and updates, while also helping to drive repeat customers back to your site. This cycle will help to capture attention and strengthen the relationships you have with your audience.
The best part is, there are many tools out there to help even a small business effectively reach their customers through email. Many of these platforms, such as Klaviyo, have pre-built templates for you to choose from if you need a place to start. Even if you lack a creative team, they make it very easy to start your journey into email marketing.
How to Build an Efficient Email List
For anyone new to email marketing, you may be thinking “How do I get customers to subscribe?”, or “How do I start building my email lists?”. List building can be done in a variety of ways such as putting a sign-up form on any of your website pages, creating a pop-up on your site, and even using your social media accounts to get users to input their email.
Growing this list of customers will become imperative to your business, as these customers are now a part of your “owned media”. This means that you have explicit permission from the users to advertise your business directly to their inbox and this cannot change unless they manually unsubscribe. This list will never be affected by a change in algorithm or iOS update, things that have drastically changed the paid media space in the last few years.
So what are the best ways to build this list?
1. Welcome Message & Website Pop Ups
Should the user find themselves on your site, invite them to join your mailing list via pop up. This is also a good opportunity to seal the deal by offering them a discount for signing up
2. Checkout Sign-up Checkbox
At checkout, always add a checkbox to ask the customer if they would like to be added to your mailing list. This particular client is a valuable lead as they have already made it to the checkout process and can possibly be a repeat customer if they are added to the list for you to contact again.
3. Invite your customers to sign up for notifications
Having a sale or pre-sale? Invite your customers to be the first to be notified about your upcoming sale or even have priority access to your sale before the general public.
4. Have “Sign Up” buttons on all social accounts
This should be standard across all your social media channels, and could be as simple as asking your audience if they would like to be informed on a regular basis about your company.
5. Lead form campaigns via Facebook or Google Ads
For the paid media enthusiasts, there is a dedicated campaign setting in both the Google and Facebook ad platforms that allows you to make the campaign goal “Lead Generating”. These campaigns are typically inexpensive and can generate great results!
BONUS: Social Media Giveaways!
By offering an incentive to your social audiences, such as a gift card to your store or a product from your site, you can gather a large amount of subscribers by first sending them to a landing page to sign up before they are able to enter your content. Just be wary of spam and scam accounts!
How to create a successful email campaign
So you have all these email addresses, now what’s the next step? Creating a successful email campaign will take hard work but you can be sure it will pay off in the long run.
To start there will be a lot of work to fully develop your strategy, but simply set aside some time on a regular basis to work on creating all these emails and soon enough the work will be done. Our email marketing partner Klaviyo has defined a well balanced 4 step process:
- Set up all vital email automations for the following: pre-purchase (welcome series, pop-ups, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, and abandoned cart) and post-purchase (thank-you email and post purchase onboarding), as well as transactional emails (order confirmations).
- Scale by increasing your subscribers. This could include Lead Gen campaigns or social media contests in order to acquire more leads faster.
- Segment all your lists and send separate pre-purchase and post-purchase email flows
- Optimize email subject lines, preview text, any call-to-action text (CTAs), landing pages, promotional emails, and even your creative for increased conversion rates.
To help develop your strategy further you should also be thinking about the tools you’ll need in order to send and create your emails. There are many different platforms out there like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, & Constant Contact (to name a few) that can help with collecting, sending and designing the emails. All of the mentioned platforms have templates that you can utilize to help get your message across with minimal design knowledge. That being said, the design of your emails should be a pivotal part of your strategy. The emails you send are a reflection of your brand and should cohesively integrate with the rest of your company.
Lastly, always be testing. Test subject lines, test copy (personalized vs general), and test creative (image vs gif vs minimal etc). With every email you send, you are not only speaking to your audience but you are also collecting valuable data from them. Whether or not they read the email or even open it is very important information. And by always testing you will eventually find trends among your audience which will in turn help to make your future emails more effective.
To Sum Up
- Ecommerce is on the rise (and slated to double over the next 4 years) which means you need to get eyes on your product in every possible way. If you’re not utilizing email marketing, your competitors are and will snatch your sales.
- Website Pop Ups, Paid Lead Gen, & Social Contests are some of the best ways to grow your email lists.
- Creating a successful email campaign is difficult but rewarding, and always be testing!
Email marketing is an important tool for your online store
Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to potential customers and build a solid foundational relationship with them. It is a great tool that on the outside can be daunting, but should not be overlooked when it comes to growing your sales and business.
There are many different facets of email marketing that can be explored and our email experts here at Shoelace are ready to help. Get in touch with us today to get started on growing your business with email marketing & Shoelace!