How many of you use email when it comes to ecommerce marketing?
I’m curious, if you do, what are your results? I’m breaking down here the seven tactics, and if you use these, your numbers will go up.
Tactic number one, scrub your list. The reason I say scrub your list, too many people have e-commerce email marketing out there and they’re just like, yeah, my list is huge, I’m at 100,000, I’m at 200,000, and I’m going to keep emailing everyone. Well, what you’ll find is your email’s going to the promotions tab. Why is it going to the promotions tab? It’s ’cause you keep emailing people that aren’t opening up your emails. If you scrub your list, only email the people that are opening it, your deliver ability rates go up, you get into the inbox, and your open rates go up, your clicks go up, your sales go up. Scrub your list. If you’re using a good email provider like Convert Kit, they automatically do it for you. Some email providers like Mail chimp, they may eventually end up changing it, they don’t like it when people scrub their list ’cause it makes their revenue go down, but if you don’t scrub the list you’ll notice that your emails will go more into the promotions tab and you won’t do as well.
Number two, you want to make sure you do trigger-based emails. If someone is on your email list, they add stuff to their cart, but they don’t complete their checkout, what should your email be to them? It should be how they can complete that checkout for those products. Heck, you can even put reviews in that email to show what it’s like if they bought your product or service, more so product, ’cause this is e-commerce. That’s super effective. When someone goes to their checkout they have these products and they don’t checkout, but then, you shoot ’email being like, check out our e-commerce store, here’s all these products that we sell. Well, that’s a terrible email. They already added the ones that they want to buy, but they just need that push over the edge. Maybe some testimonials, whatever maybe to get them over the edge, that will help a lot, and you’ll notice a ton of sales from that.
The third thing that you need to do is time-based emails. Everyone’s like, yeah,you send out an email, people open it up whenever they do. If you have a ton of unopened emails in your inbox, what happens? You’ll find that you’re less likely to go through all the ones that are at the bottom and open up. People get lazy, it’s not just you, it’s everyone. So you want to look at what time that person came to your site and put in their email. That’s when you should be sending them email. I try to stick within that time frame, usually within an hour, versus sending it whenever it’s my convenience.
The fourth thing you want to do is promotional-based emails. I know discounts and servicing is not necessarily the best thing to do, but in e-commerce when you do things like Cyber Monday or Black Friday sales or a Christmas special or New Year’s special, you’ll see a whole slew of sales come in. So you want to make your campaign set up in advance. You don’t want to be at the last minute writing these emails. If you can go and write them in advance and you leverage these promotional-based periods, you’ll notice a ton of sales. What we’ve seen in e-commerce is during these peak holiday seasons you can typically get 25, 30% of your sales. That’s a lot from a holiday season, even though there’s a whole 12 months in a year.
The fifth tip for you is keep your emails short, to the point, and try to use text-based emails. Most e-commerce companies love using image-based emails. Do you know what happens with image-based emails? They get pushed in the promotions tab. Google and Gmail and Outlook, they all know that when someone sends you an email with a ton of images, it’s usually a promotion versus when someone sends you a text-based email, it’s typically a friend, hence, you want to use text-based emails.
The sixth tactic is up sells and down sells. Typically, when someone buys from your e-commerce product you’re going to have up sells and down sells on the checkout page. If you don’t, make sure you add. But here’s the thing. Most of your audience will not buy the up sells and down sells right then and there, so what you want to do is look at the products people are buying, and then, send them those up sells and down sells in email. Sure, you want to still have on the checkout page right after they purchase, but you also want to follow up through email for all the people that don’t buy your up sells and down sells. On the thank you page, where you have these up sells and down sells, usually they’re short and to the point. Through email they can be much more in-depth, longer, and you want to space it out. If they don’t buy right away, you don’t want to hit the next day with an email being like, buy this up sell, buy this down sell. You want to give it a week or two after they receive the product, they get to use it. You want to follow up with all the other things that they can buy that can make that experience even better. It’s very important to get the timing right. The moment you get the timing wrong, that’s when you’ll see that those emails won’t convert at all.
And last but not least, when you’re doing email marketing, it’s not just about email. It’s very similar to email about the tactics that going to break down. It’s push notifications, use email combined with push notifications. So when someone subscribes through tools like Subscribers, let him know and send him through their browser; hey, here are the products that you could end up buying. Hey, these products are now going on sale. Or hey, your cart isn’t complete. Click here to finish the checkout process. And yeah, you’re not going to get a ton of sales through this, but all these little things add up. If you leverage each of the seven tactics combined, you’ll start seeing your sales go up, that’ll allow you to spend more money on your Facebook ads, your Google AdWords, more on SEO or content marketing. And overall, email marketing, especially when it comes to your e-commerce site, will be much more effective.
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