You know that email marketing is important for your campaigns, but do you actually know why it’s so crucial?
According to Radicati Group, more than half of the world’s population uses email in 2022. And this number is expected to increase to 4.7 billion by 2026. Data from Pew Research also shows that 92% of adults in the United States use email. And 61% of these email users are checking and sending emails every single day.
In order to tackle this huge market, we wanted to come up with strategies to optimize each one of your email marketing tactics. Email is a powerful channel, and by using the strategies listed below, you’ll be able to drive more customers to your store and boost your sales.
In this article, we share 9 email marketing strategies that you can use to grow your store. Read on to find out more!
1. Optimize your welcome email
Take a look at your welcome email. Chances are, it says something generic and boring, like: Welcome to BrandName, we’re excited to have you here!
What ecommerce marketers don’t realize is that your welcome email doesn’t have to just be an introductory email. You can also use it to do other things, like segment your customers and drive sales.
Think about it, your welcome email lands in your subscriber’s inbox as soon as they subscribe. At this point, they’re at a state where they’re engaged and ready to interact with your brand.
One way of optimizing your welcome email is to use it to segment your customers. For instance, if you run an ecommerce store selling golf gear, you could use your welcome email to ask your customers how far along they are in their golf journeys. EWhether they’re a beginner, intermediate, or pro.
Based on what your subscribers answer, you can then categorize them into different segments, and share more tailored newsletter content with them.
That aside, you can also use your welcome email to drive sales. To do this, share a promo code with your subscribers (consider having a short expiry date, so that this motivates them to make a purchase quickly), and feature your best-selling products in your email.
2. Get specific with your CTAs
Here’s the golden rule of Calls to Action (CTAs): use only one CTA per email.
When you have one CTA that you reinforce throughout the email, this makes your content more convincing and compelling, and encourages your subscribers to take action.
If you have multiple CTAs, on the other hand, this confuses subscribers, dilutes your messaging, and reduces the chances of them taking action.
So, think about what’s the one most valuable action you want your subscriber to take, and go ahead and emphasize that.
3. Set up different drip campaigns
In our first tip, we mentioned how you can categorize your subscribers into different segments, so that you can serve them with tailored content.
How exactly do you go about doing this? Simple. Set up an automated or drip campaign for each segment that you have. This campaign should be tailored to your segment and consist of only promotions and content that’s relevant to them.
Once that’s done, set up a workflow that will trigger the right campaign for your subscriber, based on their answer to your segmentation question.
Here’s an example of different campaigns that you might set up for different customer segments:
The more relevant your email content, the more likely that your subscriber will engage with it or click through to your website and make a purchase.
4. Optimize transactional emails
It’s a known fact that in the world of ecommerce emails, transactional emails have the highest open rates.
If you see a transactional email with your name on it in your inbox (say, a purchase confirmation email), you’re probably going to open it. This lets you ensure that your order went through properly, and you can also check your items’ estimated arrival date.
Here, you can apply the same strategies that you’ve done with your welcome email. Take the chance to optimize your transactional emails and use them to upsell your customers as well.
There are several ways of doing this. One popular way is to add a product recommendation widget at the bottom that says “Other customers who purchased this also purchased these other products…”
This increases product discovery and increases your chance of making another sale.
5. Employ abandoned cart emails
Abandoned cart emails are pretty self-explanatory, they’re emails that you send to potential customers who have added items to their cart, but then abandoned it instead of completing their purchase.
If you reach out to someone who had purchasing intent and remind them of the items that they’ve got in their cart, they may very well return to your site, and complete their purchase.
One thing to keep in mind with these emails? Make it easy for your customers to return and continue from where they’ve left off.
To do this, make sure you link to their checkout page, rather than the front page of your store.
6. Use win back emails
Win back emails are less well-known than abandoned cart emails, but they’re nevertheless an important component that you can use to beef up your email campaign.
A good win back email should be able to re-engage inactive customers, and ideally convince them to make another purchase from you.
Well, the answer to inactive customers lies in their data. Take a look at all the past transactions. How many purchases do your customers make on average?
Let’s say the average customer orders three times in their entire lifecycle, while your most committed customers order up to fifty times.
With that in mind, after each subscriber makes their third order, you should hit them up with a win back email in order to keep your brand top-of-mind and keep them engaged.
7. Promote back-in-stock emails
What happens when a customer wants to purchase an item from you, but it’s out of stock?
Most ecommerce platforms will have a waiting list feature that you can toggle on. Once you update your inventory and list the previously out of stock item as now back in stock, the platform will trigger an email to the relevant customers.
Once that happens, they can return to your store and make their purchase, generating more revenue for you!
8. Keep an eye on your email deliverability
What is email deliverability? It’s the percentage of your emails that actually get delivered versus those that bounce or end up in your recipients’ spam folder.
It’s important to ensure that there are no issues with your email deliverability. If the majority of your emails aren’t getting delivered, they can’t get opened and clicked on, either.
Now, there are many different factors that influence email deliverability, but one key factor is image-to-text ratio.
How does it work? Essentially, the more images and less text the content shows, the more likely it is that your email will get flagged as spam.
Be mindful of your email layouts and you may see deliverability skyrocket.
9. A/B test your email campaigns
Our very last tip is for you to continuously optimize your campaigns, by A/B testing them.
If you’re new to A/B testing, this basically means that you test two versions of something (in this case, your emails) to figure out which gives you higher conversion rates.
Now, the one thing that you need to keep in mind here is that you’re only changing one variable at a time. This makes it possible to attribute your success (or lack of success) to that particular variable.
A/B testing is all about isolating individual elements and testing them, one at a time. Here are some examples of what you can test:
- Subject line: long vs short
- Subject line: emojis vs no emojis
- Subject line: different benefits in subject line
- Email copy: long vs short
- Email copy: formal tone vs informal tone
- Email copy: different benefits in copy
- Images: number of images used
- Images: type of images used
- Send time: morning vs afternoon vs evening
Finally, in terms of technical setup, pretty much all email marketing tools come with A/B testing capabilities these days.
The exact methods differ from tool to tool, but generally speaking, you just create two versions of the same email, and you’ll be able to use your tool to allocate traffic and set up the test.
A final word on email marketing
The way we see it, email marketing campaigns will always be a work-in-progress.
That’s the beauty of it. You don’t get to a point, declare your emails perfect, and conclude that you’re done. There’s always more to optimize.
Now, how should you prioritize this?
First, work on segmenting your customers, and setting up the different drip campaigns to cater to each segment. This will act as a foundation for you to build upon.
Once that’s done, the next step is to make sure your email campaign is as comprehensive as possible. If you haven’t already done so, add win back emails, cart abandonment emails, and back-in-stock emails to your repertoire.
Finally, start optimizing your emails. There are two separate pieces here:
- Optimize each individual email (e.g., optimize your transactional emails, and use them to upsell your customers)
- Optimize your overall email strategy, then apply your learnings to each individual email (e.g., figure out whether long vs short headlines work best, then apply this to each email)
Remember: it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. All the best with your email marketing strategy!
