Effective Email Marketing Practices for Your E-Commerce Business
By: Seyi Tinubu
Tags: Email, Email Marketing, Ecommerce, Best Practices, Marketing

Over 34% of the global population uses email, and hundreds of thousands more join them each year. Based on the same report, it’s estimated that over 190 billion emails are sent daily, with over half of that relating to business.

Emails connect us, inform us, and inspire us. They are a massive part of our lives. Calling email a useful tool for marketers, in other words, is something of an understatement. With the help of a superpowered email marketing strategy in your business, effectively building relationships with customers becomes much easier — and higher profit margins are soon to follow.

Doing it the “right” way can be elusive, however. Follow these tips to build a solid foundation. (More experienced marketers and entrepreneurs should still take heed and be sure they are giving the basics their due diligence.)

1. Incorporate automation

Automation is one of the most significant elements of any marketing strategy today, and email is no exception.

People get enough promotional emails every day to ignore many of them. Personalized emails, then, make all the difference if you want to stand apart from your competitors doing. At the same time, personalization isn’t enough to get the most from your email strategy, as you’ll want to automate your emails to reach out to avoid wasting too much time on manual personalization.

By using automated personalized emails, you can segment emails into different groups depending on a specific demographic. Emails can cater to those with different behaviours, email preferences, interests, and other specifications.

In addition to segmentation, you can send automated emails to recipients based on specific behaviours using triggers. These emails could include receipts following purchases, order confirmations, or promotions based on customers’ particular interests.

2. Encourage more purchases with higher average order values

Once a customer has made a purchase, don’t stop! If you want to make more money from your e-commerce business, one of the best ways to do so is to entice customers to buy more and increase the average order value (AOV).

The AOV is used to indicate the average value of e-commerce transactions made through an online store. And one of the most effective ways to increase AOV is to offer special discounts on certain items with spend thresholds. For instance, a customer might receive a discount after spending a certain amount on your products or services.

Automated emails sent to your customers can be the key to getting those customers to return to your store and boost your AOV.

3. Develop a loyalty program email strategy

While you may be able to encourage new customers to return quickly with those appealing offers, you can further increase revenue by developing a loyalty program that prompts customers to stay loyal to your brand.

Through a loyalty program, you can implement a point system to reward customers for performing specific actions, from leaving reviews for your products and subscribing to your newsletter to spending more on specific items or over a certain amount.

The important thing is to make the steps in your loyalty program clear, to help members understand what they need to do to earn points. You should also have an email strategy in place to encourage customers to sign up in the first place.

4. Bring customers back with a retention strategy

It’s always simpler to sell to existing satisfied customers than to recruit new ones. And if you don’t have a retention strategy in place, you’re in danger of losing customers as they spend more time away from your store and eventually forget about your brand.

With a win-back email strategy, you can encourage those customers to come back with coupons or other offers, with messaging such as, “We miss you!” that appeals to their emotions.

Ultimately, the success of your email campaigns will depend on your creativity and consistency. You want to be creative in the way you communicate with your customers, and consistent in terms of how often you email them. Taking all these factors into consideration will drive sales and boosts customer loyalty in the long-term.