5 Tips to Build the Best Email Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce

In the world of Customer Empowerment in the 2020s, individuals now can have more power to control their own choices and decision-making by demonstrating their needs and demands with organizational bodies in the marketplace. 

This means that they can easily take control of their email inboxes than ever before, as a result, if they don’t like your ads, they can immediately kick you out with just one click or report your emails as spam.

So, what should you do to make your subscribers stay, and more importantly, make them continue to be your customers through emails? 

The answer is quite simple yet not easy to implement. The best email marketing strategy which makes you achieve your goals needs to focus all on helping subscribers achieve their own. If you don’t help them relevantly, your competitors will!

The following guideline and tips will point out what you should care most about email marketing strategy, how to optimize it appropriately in order to skyrocket the conversions of your eCommerce platform.

What to Do When You First Plan Your Email Marketing Strategy?

After identifying all types of emails, let’s start working on it by writing down all the following key bullet points.

Segment Subscribers

It has been proven by many savvy marketers that subscriber segmentation is the cornerstone of every winning email marketing plan as it causes approximately 760% growth in revenue. By segmenting your email subscribers into smaller groups, you can send relevant value content to those who can benefit from it the most. 

Here is the most typical segmentation to separate subscribers:

Draw Your Own Systematic Map of All Your Email Campaigns

First, look and uncomplicate your entire digital strategy, draw the map identifying systematically key touchpoints along your subscribers’ journey that they are most likely to abandon.

READ MORE Customer Journey Map: Definition, Templates, and Examples

Then, once the potential leads come to you, have a system in place that keeps nurturing them despite distractions or whatever else gets in that lead’s way to eventually convert them. 

It could be developing hyper-targeted, personalized email campaigns and plugging them into the map. It’s crystal clear and exactly what you need to do in order to convert your email subscribers.

5 Tips for Effective Email Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce

Here is some first-hand experience to apply in your email marketing strategy for a higher response rate:

#1 Do Research

Regardless of sending emails for outreach campaigns or encouraging customers to purchase your products/ services, you must get around to do your own research based on all their information, data collected from any tools, media channels, in order to truly understand and meet their expectations. Not only it’s foster your open/ click rate, but it also helps winning customers beforehand your competitors who are also seeking out the same potential leads as you.

Plenty of extensions on the web browser can show you what people are looking for on the Internet, what they most care about, what trend they are interested in. In addition, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the rich sources to dive into segmented groups, helps establish first connections and interactions with them.

Some tools such as FullStory, Smartlook, or Hotjar can make you surprise as they record all visitors’ digital actions, behaviors, and experience, from that you can even track their device’ locations, where they’re most likely to hover and take actions in your website’s interface, how they’re interested in your resources/ insights.

#2 Personalization

No savvy marketer wants to show up like a spambot. Personalization  allows you to treat customers like human beings, and not just because you know a customer’s name. Personalization is all about how to humanize your email effort. 

For example, when it comes to abandoned cart email, you can deliver rich email copy that is personalized with images of the products your customer abandoned. You can also add product recommendations that would show similar products based on the customer’s abandoned cart content.

Insert subscriber’s name right into the subject and the first sentence of your email. Those recipients have many new emails per day and no one has time to see mass mail with no stand-out content. Make your subscribers curious and feel like they’ll get something valuable from your email by calling their names and mentions their pain points, once they open your mail, you’ll get the chance to please them with solutions.

#3 Show Your Sense of Humor in Content

Funny emails are much more impressive and eye-catching as well as bring positive feelings for receivers. There are various ways to use humor in emails, from telling jokes, having funny pictures/ memes to witty wordplay. To stand out from thousands of formal and serious emails, making your email humourous could yield surprisingly successful results, consolidate the relationship bond with readers.

#4 Pay Attention to Email Design

When it comes to email design, having something that is visually easy to read and understand is crucial for your subscribers to take the next action with your brand. There are top three mistakes when designing your emails and how to avoid them:

• Mobile responsiveness: Over 60% of emails are read on phones, If you’re not designing an email for a phone and only on PC, you’re going to be missing that experience. Most email service providers such as Mailchimp, HubSpot usually have a preview window so you can see what email looks like. not only on PC but also on mobile devices. Make sure you utilize those features for amazing emails that can help to hook up readers.

• All images: Many emails contain only images that grab readers’ attention visually to bring them into the main content. However, you should not design the entire email in Canva/ Photoshop because not all email clients have images auto-enabled, so they won’t see anything at first when emails come in. Also, the more images you have, the slower it takes for your email to load. Make sure that the images are fully displayed immediately so that readers won’t have to lose their patience and miss your content.

#5 Use CTA buttons

Depending on what types of email, you could set up different CTA buttons leading to specific landing pages. Always try to include eye-catching buttons with text that give the audience more than one opportunity to interact. Even if recipients just skim or skip your body copy, they’ll still notice that big and bright button. 

READ MORE Call to Action 101: What is it and How can it benefit your online business?

If your email is well-focused with a key objective or purpose (like getting webinar signups or boosting product sales), the action that will lead to that result is best presented in a well-designed, standout button with powerful words to increase conversions such as: “Find out more, Demo for me, Yes I want to connect, Add to cart now...”

#6 Don't Forget A/B Testing

An analyst from Mailchimp said that “Ecommerce brands that A/B test their emails generate 20% more revenue on average.” When making the most of the A/B testing effort, it can help you uncover high-impact changes in your subject lines, email design, landing pages, and more.

First, have a clear and well-grounded hypothesis and give the A/B test enough time to produce valuable data. Also, don’t just reply all on tools or platforms, ask for feedback of change from the real users to deepen the reason why people take certain actions over others.

Some Email Marketing Strategy Examples to Follow

With B2C or E-commerce, crafting emails for a crisis also requires extreme caution and asks for an ‘emotionally intelligent’ approach. For more details, please see the following examples/ email templates for B2C businesses, and find your own ways to stay in touch with your dear subscribers.

Conclusion

Yes, it takes a long time to truly understand your customers before you can figure out what is the most effective customer-focused email marketing strategy that creates long-lasting relationships with them and nurturing potential leads. From that perspective, every email marketing message you send should focus on what readers/ subscribers’ pain points are, how your information solves their problems.

Especially in Covid 19 period, when things are still getting down, it's super essential for eCommerce businesses to keep their customers up-to-date with how this pandemic is impacting how they interact with your brand. If you haven't been actively engaging your audience through email, don’t try to send much notification about sales promotions or too many updates related to Covid 19 as it’s quite offensive.

Instead, let’s show more empathy, access their pain points people are currently experiencing, for example, offering ideas to work from home, stay focus with kids around, or how to have more joy when negative things happen.

Once you have built the right email marketing strategy, you are about to get more conversions!