Have an online business but don’t know how to go about reaching your target audience? Well, don’t break a sweat because that’s where the marketing gurus come in! In this day and age of digital overload, you need to know exactly how to make your presence felt.
While Facebook and Google ads are all the rage, it is email marketing that rules over all others. You might think that email marketing is quite dated, and you are right, but no one can take away from the fact that it is still the most powerful way of marketing to your target audience.
Email Marketing: What’s so special about it?
Do I need to explain what email marketing is? The name describes itself – marketing through emails. It is the most effective method of reaching directly to your customers.
Email marketing can help you increase your revenue, generate more customers, decrease your cart abandonment rate, or simply reach out to the world with your story. In any case, a successful email marketing campaign is bound to reap benefits for you in one way or another.
“So how do you start your email marketing campaign? Do you do it yourself or are there software available that’ll take it off your plate? Can you combine this with other forms of digital marketing? How much will it cost you?”
I’m going to take you through all this and much more in this article. Let’s go!
Design an Email Marketing Campaign
The first rule of marketing is to design a plan of action. There are a number of marketing automation services available that can help you design and implement the perfect email campaigns for your store. eSputnik is one such automation platform that provides solutions for your entire range of bulk marketing campaigns, especially for online stores and ecommerce platforms.
Now coming to what needs to be in place before your first step into email marketing:
- Define your target audience – You need to be clear about who your potential customers are and which segment they belong to. Get this right and half your work is done!
- Chalk out what you want to convey through your emails – Are you sending them blog articles, product information, sale reminders or just about everything there is to your platform?
- Decide on the frequency of emails – How often do you want to show up in your customers’ inbox? Though you might be tempted to say “as often as possible”, there are strong chances it will backfire. You don’t want to end up being irritating instead of being attractive.
Brainstorm with your marketing team and come up with answers to these questions.
Your First Email
You know what they say, your first impression is the last! Although it may not be entirely true, the first impression definitely makes a lasting impact.
In most instances, your first email to a customer will be triggered by either a sign up to your platform, or a subscription to your email list. This gives you the perfect opening to present yourself just as you want. Make sure your email sums up all about your store in a smart and attractive manner.
Compiling a series of welcome emails can do wonders for your customer engagement. Research suggests that sending up to 3 mails as a welcome campaign increases the curiosity of your subscribers and they tend to engage more.
Include small snippets about your store, place “calls-to-action” effectively and see the traffic to your store go up manifold.
Personalize Your Mails
Unless your product comes under a niche category, chances are that your target audience belongs to more than a particular segment. As you get to know more about your audience, use that knowledge to target each segment differently.
That’s where personalization becomes important. Most marketing automation platforms already have such a structure in place. You just need to feed in the data.
Using a personalized approach is powerful in many ways. One, everyone loves to feel important. Your personalized email shows that you know exactly what your audience loves. Secondly, targeting your subscribers with what interests them increases the chances of them visiting your store, and in turn increases your sales.
Rewards, Re-engagement and Referrals – Remember the 3 R’s
Once you’ve created a network of subscribers, it is important to retain them as customers. Your email marketing campaign gives you a direct way of doing that. Introduce loyalty programs for your frequent customers, make them feel how valued they are with rewards on purchases, as well as referrals.
Pro Tip – Your loyal customers are your best brand ambassadors! Use them to your advantage by offering attractive rewards for social media posts and referrals – this will bring in more first-time users than probably your entire social media marketing campaigns!
Email campaigns also come in handy when you need to reach out to idle shoppers – customers who have added products in their cart and left without purchasing. Design re-engagement emails for them which will encourage them to complete the purchase (price drops are often the most effective way).
Keep Track Of Feedback
The biggest advantage of using marketing automation for your email campaigns is that you get a constant flow of feedback – whether your emails are really working or is all your effort going in vain.
These automation platforms can give you the exact data about how many times is your audience opening your mails, what is the engagement rate, whether your emails are targeting the correct audience, etc. All of this information is important so that you can tweak your campaign accordingly in order for it to be effective.
Attractive Subject Lines
In order to avoid getting lost in the deluge of emails that we now receive every day, make sure that your emails have really catchy subject lines that will instantly attract your subscribers and prompt them to take a look.
Take a cue from newspapers and magazines, and understand how they attract eyeballs with their headlines (don’t be misleading though, that’s a foolproof way to lose customers!) Just like any other email, your subject line should convey exactly what the content of your email is, in a crisp fashion. Using emojis in subject lines is the new rage, and is proving to be a cool way to draw attention.
Pro Tip – Since most of your emails are likely to be opened on mobile phones, make you’re your emails have mobile-friendly email structures so that your audience doesn’t have a hard time figuring it out, and you don’t lose out on potential sales.
Don’t Go Overboard
The temptation to always be in the mind of your audience is understandable, but also potentially backfiring if you bombard them with emails. Nobody likes to be constantly pounded with emails, and chances are your emails will start being irrelevant to the subscribers after a point.
Time your emails strategically – increase the frequency when you have offers or discount seasons coming up, at other times, focus on building a relationship with your audience through trivia, blog articles or any other relevant topics. Remember, your email marketing campaigns are not just to drive up sales, but also to build a loyal and happy network of customers.
Ask For Reviews
Feedback is important for any business to grow in the right direction, especially online stores. This is because most buyers first check for online reviews before purchasing any products.
Hence, asking your customers for reviews is essential. It also gives users the reassurance that you are eager to hear from them and that their opinions are valued. However, make sure that your emails take users directly to the review section. If it’s too complicated, most customers will back out without posting their review.
These were some of the tips and tricks that will come in handy when you design your own email marketing campaign. We believe in practising what we preach, so if there’s something you liked or disliked here, do tell us in the comment section!
