Email marketing is a component of online marketing that can be very useful when it comes to growing your brand and your store. Sadly, it’s also the one part of online marketing that gets overlooked or rushed through. When done correctly and tested constantly, email marketing especially for e-commerce brands can grow your sales and engage customers who would have otherwise ignored your brand.
That’s why we’ve put together these 6 things to help you improve your email marketing.
Number 1: Email Automation
Email automation is a fancy way of saying that email marketing can be easy. These emails are things like welcoming new subscribers, or thanking new customers for purchasing, or walking a potential lead through the process of how your product works and why they should buy it. Each email is set on a trigger action by a subscriber. This makes it very important to setup and keep personalized, but easy to manage because you’re only setting it up once.
Number 2: List Segments
List segmenting is important for targeting your customers and sending email campaigns to only the ones that will react well to the data of that campaign. For example, you can segment your lists based on customers who interact with your campaigns and customers who have been more hesitant. Then send a personalized campaign to each with different content, and a different call to action. List segments are powerful and oftentimes overwhelming – because it depends on your store, size of list, customer base, etc. But when tested and used properly can increase your open and click rates substantially and your customers will notice they’re being sent information that only pertains to their interests.
Number 3: Attention to Details
It’s the little things in emails that can trigger a conversion or an archive, paying attention to those details is important, especially when email marketing plays a big role in your online marketing efforts. Little things like creating a unique but relevant reply-to email address. Something simple like hello@… or wereactuallypeople@… these addresses will be noticed and help humanize your brand in a highly technological world.
The preview text is another very, very, very important feature. This is the small string of text that either gets ignored by companies or something vague is used. But it’s the second line of text all of your subscribers will see and read, especially on mobile it’s the subject line and preview text that shows up for that first impression to subscribers – so make it good.
Number 4: A/B Campaigns
When you have a larger list of subscribers using some A/B campaigns and tests can help improve your open and click rate. A/B campaigns give you the chance to create two layouts, or have two subject lines and to send these emails to your list in three chunks. The first two chunks of your list each get one version of the campaign and then depending on which campaign performed better the remainder of the list is then sent that style.
Another powerful use for A/B campaigns is to segment your list (remember, from number 2) into warm subscribers and cold subscribers. (The difference being those who interact with your brand and those who don’t) and to create different designed campaigns for each group and then send out the designs to the highly targeted groups.
Number 5: Make It Fun
Everyone gets email. That’s just a fact, and so why not make your email stand out by making it fun. Email doesn’t have to be boring or something that people dread to sort through. As a matter of fact, making your email engaging, personalized, and even interactive at times can help give your brand the “wow” factor it needs. Most people expect emails from businesses to all be full of words, trying to sell something, and generic – and while some of that is a huge part in email marketing, it doesn’t have to be every email you send. For example, if you’re looking for more information about who your customers are but don’t know how to get that data create a fun quiz or survey and send it out in the email. Just as easy as that, no sales, no gimmicks, just plain old I’m a person type stuff. It’s a balance between sales and non-sales emails – but understanding that there not all emails have to sell something is what’s important.
Number 6: The Final Touches – time of day, and day of week, frequency at least once per month
Now that you’ve got all the pieces together for what you’re sending in your email, who you’re sending them to, and how you’re segmenting your lists let’s talk about that send button. This is the most important part of an entire email campaign. Send it at the wrong time and all you’ll get is ignored; but send your email at the right time and it’s amazing.
The frequency is also important, you want to focus on being top of mind with your subscribers, so don’t wait 4 months to send them one campaign or they’ll forget why they subscribed to your list in the first place and ignore you, or worse – mark your message as spam. So it’s recommended by many sources to send campaigns at least once per month – but this depends more on your brand.
The time of day and specific day you send your messages can make a difference too. Specific holiday or themed emails are exempt from this rule – but it’s typically encouraged that you send emails on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. People are too busy on Mondays to pay attention to your content and Fridays all they are thinking about is the weekend – so stick with mid-week until you learn your customers more. Next, it’ll take some testing and then some more testing – but typically sending emails early in the morning is best for results. Between 4am and 6am. If you missed that hour sometimes sending right before lunch also works – but still test it and see what works. And then test it some more.
What works for you? What parts of email marketing have you tried that worked? We’d love to hear about it – leave us a message in the comments.
Managing Email Marketing
Setting up email marketing and managing it can be a challenging task to undertake, especially with all the other tasks of running a store. That’s where we can help you along any step of the way or just take care of everything for you. We work with email marketing and optimizing daily and would love to chat with you about getting your brand recognized and appreciated. Let us know in the comments below – or shoot us a message at [email protected].