Email marketing is sending messages via email designed to educate your audience, encourage them to buy from you, or build loyalty. As such, it’s a critical tool for businesses, and email marketing for e-commerce businesses is essential!
With a solely online business, you rely on digital means to get your message to your audience. Not only that, as essentially all forms of communication with your audience are electronic, the quality of the message being sent is critical. Every part, from cohesive branding, font choice, language style, and tone, contributes to your audience building their view of your company.
The great thing about email marketing, as opposed to other forms of digital marketing, such as social media, is that it’s an ‘owned’ marketing channel: you control the content entirely as well as the distribution. With Facebook, for example, Meta controls the algorithm that dictates who your posts are served to. Email marketing is all yours: you decide what to send, who to send it to and when to send it.
Email marketing requires an email marketing platform for you to optimise this channel. There are many out there, so select one with features designed and tailored towards an e-commerce business. Platforms such as Klaviyo offer direct online store integration, workflows (automated emails triggered by the actions of a customer), different templates, personalisation, contact segmentation (so you can be targeted in your messaging), customer relationship management (CRM), and comprehensive analytics and reporting. SMS marketing is also incorporated into the platform, offering further flexibility and opportunity to your marketing efforts.
Whichever email marketing platform you opt for, all e-commerce enterprises need to make sure they’re using this valuable channel to the max by incorporating a series of emails:
- Welcome series – when new or potential customers sign up for your emails, send them a series that welcomes them, introduces them to your brand, products, and services, and starts to engage their sense of brand loyalty.
- Transactional emails – functional messages sent during checkout to confirm order details, order receipt, shipping details, order confirmation, shipping confirmation, etc. They can also be used to upsell related items, entice further orders with discount codes or offers, or potentially introduce them to a community you’re building.
- Promotional emails – do you have a specific deal or launching a new product? Perhaps it’s something specific to the season, like Christmas or Black Friday. Perhaps it’s a clearance sale after Easter or Valentine’s. Whatever it is, email is a great way to tell your audience!
- Ask for feedback – offer incentives to complete reviews on your products and their experience with your brand.
- Thank you emails – people like it when you recognise their loyalty by saying ‘thank you’. It gets you into their inbox one more time, helping to keep you ‘top of mind’, and you can use the opportunity to reward them with further incentives to buy again.
- Upsell/cross-sell emails – you bought a new shirt? Perhaps you’d like these cufflinks/socks /ties to go with?
- Abandoned cart – when someone’s been browsing and put items into their shopping basket but left without buying, an email reminding them what they’ve left in their basket can prompt them to return. You can always offer an incentive to get them to complete the transaction and make it time-limited so they buy sooner rather than later.
There are many more examples of the types of emails you can send to keep your customers coming back, and these examples highlight how email is a more effective channel to do this than social media. It’s the only medium that enables you to get up close and personal, which is why, £ for £, it delivers the highest return on investment.
…email marketing that delivers!
Shaun Reynolds has been specialising in email marketing since 2005 and, in February 2019, launched Email-Postman. Since then, we’ve helped over 100 clients across a range of industries and sectors build successful email marketing campaigns across various email marketing platforms. For further information or to discuss getting help with your email marketing, you can arrange a free call-back today by clicking here!
