Despite all the new digital marketing platforms coming out, email remains a valuable, effective and inexpensive tool. In fact, email marketing can play a significant role in the success of ecommerce businesses.
Essentially, email marketing is a direct marketing channel. It enables businesses to share new products, sales and/or other updates and content with their contact list. Once viewed (and treated) as a one-size-fits-all mass messaging tactic, email marketing has evolved to focus more on relevant content, segmentation and personalization so that the right message is targeted to the right person at the right time.
With the right strategy, ecommerce businesses that invest in email marketing efforts can generate an average return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent.
Still not convinced? The following are six benefits of email marketing for ecommerce businesses, which face strong competition in a big marketplace.
Boost customer retention (and sales)
Regardless of how long your ecommerce company has been in business, customer retention should be a priority.
The cost of losing one customer equates to seven times the resources used to convert them. Customer retention is about maintaining your current customer base and increasing loyalty by offering better products or services and other benefits. Customer retention tactics include loyalty programs, discounts, special offers and targeted marketing campaigns.
Simply put, just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit. More returning customers translates into more sales.
With email marketing, you can create campaigns that remind customers that you haven’t forgotten about them by sharing great content (such as tips) and offers. Doing so helps you stay top of mind when they are shopping for a product that you offer.
Check out our six tips to improve your customer retention rate.
Lead nurturing via email can make leads ready to buy
Email marketing offers the ability to nurture your leads over a period of time. The intention is to build a trusting relationship that warms them up for purchasing from you.
Specifically, lead nurturing can be defined as the process of building relationships with potential customers in order to help them move forward in your sales funnel.
In other words, you’re educating uncertain leads about your brand and the value of your products over time. Then, when you do incentivize them to make a purchase, they are more likely to do so.
Email marketing can support your ecommerce business with the popular approach of email drip campaigns. Email drip campaigns are a type of time-release email marketing tactic. Think drip irrigation systems. Drip emails are intended to land with purposeful timing and targeting with minimal waste (and technically minimal effort once set up to run automatically).
Think about it like a conversation that you’re building upon along the way.
They can be daily reminders, weekly specials, monthly updates, yearly renewal notices or anything in between, depending on your intention and goals. The idea is that while each email in a drip campaign should stand alone, they also should build upon past messages and even set the stage for future messaging.
Check out our 14 best practices for email drip campaigns.
Increase your landing page conversion rate
Landing pages are incredibly valuable for ecommerce businesses. They’re where you can promote products, increase brand awareness and host transactional features that make purchasing from your company secure and easy.
But landing pages also can be hard for the average consumer to find.
Enter email marketing, where you can leverage the offerings (and link) of your landing page(s) to increase your landing page traffic and ultimately sales conversions.
Remember that a landing page can be as specific as you want it to be, but it should work hand in hand with the email promotion behind it. It’s a place where interested consumers can learn more and dive deeper into your promoted product(s). Include clear call-to-actions not just in your email, but on your landing page, too.
DailyStory is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that includes the ability to create and host landing pages.
Deliver better customer service
Customer service can make or break your ecommerce business. About 73 percent of customers become loyal to a brand because of great customer service experiences.
When something goes wrong with a purchase, payment method, shipping or anything else, you must be ready to receive those inquiries and offer quick solutions.
About 54 percent of customers prefer email customer service channels over other methods of communication.
Leverage your email marketing to be more than just a broadcasting medium. Be ready to help your customers through email as well, and make it easy for them to reach you via email.
Check out our five ways to improve your overall customer service for your ecommerce business.
Recover those abandoned shopping carts
Abandoned shopping carts are one of the biggest challenges for ecommerce businesses.
About 70 percent of online shopping carts were abandoned in 2019. That’s lost revenue that you’re missing out on.
Email automation, which is a series of emails you automatically send to your prospects or customers, can help with abandoned shopping carts. Using a tool, such as DailyStory, you can schedule emails to send based on your audience’s interactions with your business.
Unlike email newsletters and one-off campaigns, email automation allows you to create a campaign one time and then automatically reach individuals when certain triggers are hit. That means emails will continue to send long after you set up that automated campaign without you lifting another finger.
That means that an abandoned shopping cart can trigger an email to that customer reminding him or her of what was left behind and potentially offering an incentive to complete the purchase. This is huge for your ecommerce business.
Learn more about what email automation is, why it matters and 14 examples to inspire you.
Support your ecommerce sales experience
Email marketing isn’t just about selling your products to consumers or reminding them that your brand exists. It’s actually a powerful tool to support your customers’ purchasing experience every step of the way as well.
You can use email to keep in touch with your customers about their orders. Do this by sending order confirmations, shipment tracking numbers, thank you messages, product review requests and more.
Optimizing your customer experience through email can boost your ecommerce sales.
In conclusion
Embracing email marketing for your ecommerce business is both cost-effective and can boost your revenue. Make sure that you leverage segmentation and personalization to achieve your email marketing goals.
Check out our 11 do’s and don’ts of email marketing, as well as 16 email marketing best practices that can make an impact.
As you’re evaluating how email marketing can benefit your ecommerce business, consider optimizing your overall digital marketing process. This includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email and text message marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.
