Ecommerce brands need to build relationships with their customers and nurture them for success in the long term. Brands should add value to customers in order for them to remain your customers and build trust with them.
What better marketing channel than Email to meet your business objectives?
Statistics from various surveys show Email will always provide a higher ROI than any other channel in Marketing. With email marketing, you can create promotional offers for your brand for certain demographic markets and analyze the results of what works.
Amazon, Flipkart, and Walmart set the bar for ecommerce experience, leaving room for improvement among competitors striving for conversions.
All the more so, Email is undergoing a renaissance-like period of continuous evolution, and new technologies like AMP will change email as you have ever known before.
To not have an email address is the digital equivalent of being homeless. Without it you can’t shop online, bank online or engage with social media. ~ Dela Quist
This guide provides database segmentation strategies, recommended campaigns, and conversion tricks for mastering Email Marketing. We shall also talk about new email technology called AMP for Email plus how to use these to get conversions.
In creating an efficient email program for ecommerce, consider the user’s life cycle journey for impactful engagement and conversions. Tailor your email program to customer personas, delivering targeted content aligning with their position in the buyer’s life-cycle journey.
There are 3 stages of the customer life cycle on your ecommerce platform that we have identified and analyzed to provide an invincible Email Program to execute them in chronological order. The stages are:
- Attract
- Engage
- Reactivate
Attract
The priority is to entice new customers to your website and reach out with information on what problem you solve. This stage consists of displaying your uniqueness and something different you offer so that they can stay for the long term.
Welcome them with an impact
Welcome Mailers survey says that 74.4% of customers expect a welcome mailer to sign up.
We recommend that you have an opt-in verification for your sign-up process on the website. The welcome mailer should ideally have an email verification link to click on and confirm your details. Or there should be a Google or social signup to your website. It should talk about your brand in a broad way and provide an incentive for the user to click on.
Collect the interests and preferences of the users when they are signing up with a preference center for products interested, mailing frequency, etc. This would help you target first time users with an offer on their product of choice in the welcome mailer.
Leverage Website popups
Website Popups offer a creative way of collecting details of website browsers and thus increasing your user base. When a new user enters your website and browses for at least 5 minutes, you can trigger a website popup to collect their details.
Send non-subscribers a mailer featuring a best-selling offer, encouraging them to subscribe and engage with your website’s content.
Talk about your product and benefits
Send new subscribers a mailer with informative content showcasing brand values and offerings to deepen engagement and connection.
Eg: You are a retail brand with a specialty in stocking high-quality jeans. Then your content should talk about Jeans as a selling point.
This can include how Jeans were discovered, how they came into vogue, what are the different types of jeans available. A little background on your products will pique that interest in your subscribers.
Include a flat 50% off offer in the mailer to educate customers about your brand and encourage their initial purchase.
Engage
At this stage, buyers either have already purchased once from your store or shown interest in your products.
The further leap now is to get them to transact more often and start engaging them with an eye on retaining them as long term customers. Create targeted communication opportunities to retain customers, avoiding batch-and-blast campaigns for better engagement and retention.
Don’t make this mistake. Large outreach doesn’t always guarantee large conversions. Send targeted product recommendations post-welcome or purchase emails, running time-sensitive campaigns for enhanced engagement and conversions.
This campaign can be sent 2 days before the offer on the product expires. Target users based on their interests or past purchases, recommending product categories aligned with their preferences for increased engagement.
Send a final mailer to users on the offer expiry day, encouraging to grab the discounted product before it expires.
Segmented campaigns are a winner
Organize your campaign calendar based on the user base, targeting specific days to experiment and observe the impact on sales. Eg: – Sending mailers to Men/Women categories separately. – New subscribers in last 1 month who have visited your online store. – Users who have bought products from a particular category like shoes, dresses, trousers, etc.
Make these campaigns highly personalized with creative subject lines and content.
These campaigns ensure high engagement, encouraging customers to revisit your store and make additional transactions. It’s a sure-shot way of retaining your customers and amazing them with your targeted content.
Design Transactional Campaigns wisely
Introduce promotional themes in the order confirmation and abandon cart mailers to enhance engagement and drive additional sales. User engagement is typically high for your transactional type mailers which often land in primary tab of Gmail . They provide an average of 30-40% of open rates and high click rates of 5% plus.
That means the audience opening these mails is highly engaged and thus can be targeted for a promotional offer as well. Design your trigger campaigns by embedding a discount offer on your best selling product of that period. This will help generate more traction for those products on the website and boost your conversions by an extra 5%. The average cart abandonment rate is 67.91% in the E-commerce industry.
You can make use of the same technique to boost your cart abandoned conversions.
A good discount price can be offered to the customer who has that product in their cart. This will require a segmented trigger campaign that should help to convert the customer to purchase the product.
Send your Best Wishes with an Offer
Collect user birth dates to send exclusive birthday wish mailers with promotional offers, encouraging them to make a birthday purchase. Sending our personalized content with positive vibes and wishes will attract the user to your brand and raise the bar for your brand affinity.
Who knows? Maybe the user will buy their birthday surprise from your store. Sending out these feeler emails will definitely engage your users with your brand.
Product Survey campaigns
Get in touch with your online users. Your brand should care about the expectations and feedback of the customers. Run product survey campaigns after 2 days of shipping the product to the customer.
Run general feedback campaigns on their user experience and website/service experience to the entire user set to know more about how you can improve on your interactions.
This Myntra mailer for product feedback is the perfect way to show you care to your customers:
Bonus points for rating your service from your customers.
Reward your frequent shoppers
According to a popular survey, 80% of sales for Ecommerce are generated by 20% of users.
These include your frequently transacting , happy with your brand , loyal shoppers who you should be treating like royalty. These shoppers form 80% of your online revenue and they keep on coming back for more products, thus they need to be provided something special to continue the cycle.
Have exclusive deals designed just for your frequent transactors like Make My Trip has a MMT Black membership for privilege users.
Create a loyalty program for subscribers, offering weekly mailers with exclusive offers to encourage uninhibited purchases and build trust. Treat them well to keep them happy.
Brand Talk
For those customers who have not yet transacted with your brand, the idea should be to send them a mailer with benefits that they receive on buying from your brand. These could range from free shipping, COD option available, less delivery time, extra offers on E-wallet payments, cards etc.
Create content about your brand values and how you stick to them in the larger scheme of Ecommerce.
Eg: You don’t negotiate on your quality instead you use authenticity as a measure for customer success.
Customers are looking for benefits they can get to stick with your brand and need to be educated about your offers regularly.
Weekend Sale offers to boost reach and conversion
Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t reach out to the rest of the user base. Ofcourse, you should. When sale season comes in, you can send your entire mailing list attractive offers on all your products say twice a week and expand the reach of your audience.
You will gain new “openers” of your Email campaign and you can include these users in your stage wise Email Program as mentioned in the above points.
Make sure you are not “over sending” mailers to the entire set of users as majority of them could be inactive. They would require special campaigns to re-activate them, which brings us to the next point.
Community scoring and chat
Establish a scoring system for customers, rating them on factors like purchases and social media engagement. Users can redeem their scores for future discounts.
The community chat will enable the user to discuss your products and report any changes or improvements to your system rather than just leaving feedback.
This could also involve discussions on the latest trends in fashion and other products they wish to see on your website, which you should be stocking up on.
Reward Friend referrals with special offers and discounts.
Promote the app community chat across all channels. A good community outreach program will scale the brownie points on your brand’s popularity.
There will come a time when a part of your mailing list will stop responding to your offers. They can get cold and stop opening your targeted offer for them. Re-engage these users with the brand.
There are a set of campaigns you can run to re-activate these dormant users. Target users who have not opened their emails for more than 90 days.
An offer just because we miss you
You should up the effort when you are trying to design an Email Re-engagement campaign. It should have a “We have missed you” theme. You need to offer discounts which are bigger than the usual ones like 30-40% off on products so as to entice these users to click on links and get to the website.
This re-engagement mailer from Netflix does all the right things on reactivating the unsubscribed user to get them back to Netflix and chill:
Why did you stop responding?
You can send a mailer to your dormant users asking them the reason for the dried up interest in your mailers. It will be a simple text mail which can be replied to so as to collect feedback.
This could provide valuable insight into what your users want out of your campaigns.
You have been removed
If the subscribers still fail to respond to the above mailers then it is time to let go of them.
Send them an automated email saying that since they have been “quiet” since last 3 months, they will be removed from the mailing list or they can click on “Don’t Remove me” button to remain a subscriber and receive relevant offers.
Quick Read: Benefits of using AMP in Email Marketing – Complete Guide
New Technologies that are Changing the Email Landscape
It is time to move on from static Email designs, which offered very little interactivity to Email users.
AMP is a technology to create a faster and more interactive way of rolling out web pages on mobile devices. AMP for Email – an expansion of the AMP project will include dynamic Emails. It will support useful and interactive content within Email to provide a refreshing and modern experience.
AMP-powered Emails will allow “rich engaging Emails, making modern app functionality available within Email.”
Here’s what your users would be able to do with AMP-powered Emails
- scroll image carousels
- add items to the shopping cart
- fill up a form or a questionnaire
- open a product card, choose and buy the products
- participate in surveys or polls right in the inbox
- reply to comments in an Email
AMP for Email will make dynamic content like videos, GIFs, and graphics available on your Email client in a moment to browse and interact with! With AMP operational, users can easily RSVP to an event, browse a catalog of an online store, and fill out a form without leaving your Email client.
The feature is being rolled out in the Gmail web client and will then be provided on mobile. With time, other ISPs like Yahoo, Outlook, and Mail.ru, etc. will also support it.
Ecommerce will be thus the industry that could benefit the most from AMP with the extent of interaction that the users will get to have on the Email client as stated above.
Thinking of How to Send AMP Emails?
Complete Guide – How to send AMP Emails
How will AMP Emails benefit Ecommerce Brands
A common notion is often seen and heard and probably questioned that AMP will benefit Ecommerce Brands. But, How? That is a big question!
Let’s have a look at how AMP Emails can benefit Ecommerce brands.
Dynamic and up-to-date automated and promotional content
With instant call to actions now feasible on AMP, you can get more creative with designing Email triggers fitting in your users in the various stages of the user life cycle journey.
How about reducing that cart abandonment activity and designing your Email in such a way that the user will be inclined to transact from his Email client itself without any fuss?
Better customer experience
The content of the web pages being dynamic & interactive will allure the users to act. The improved user experience would lead to an improved affinity for your brand. This should also reduce the traffic flow on the website which used to drop in terms of transactions/signups, as all this can be done easily hereupon in the Email itself.
After implementing AMP, Tokopedia – one of the largest Ecommerce brands in Indonesia, reached four important mobile milestones: a 5X jump in conversion rates, a 40% increase in organic traffic, 65% faster page load times, and a 60% lower bounce rate, which highlighted better engagement.
Hyper-personalization of content
Now is the era of hyper-personalization in Emails. With AMP for Email, this will be taken to the highest level, where your users’ choices can be met in the Email itself. That means subscribing to a service or agreeing to be part of an event or else choosing a product from a personally curated range of catalogs and transacting to secure the delivery.
This will empower Email marketers like you to design creatives in a more personalized way where a user can get everything done easily and quickly.
Better engaging emails
Till now ,the content of Emails has stayed static and small changes like introducing GIFs or videos inside the creative content have been limited. With AMP, the bar will be raised high in terms of the aesthetic value of the Email. The website will also need to feature more dynamic and visually actionable content to tempt the users to choose from the products offered.
Parting Thoughts
Thus, with all the above strategies mentioned, it all trickles down to targeting your users based on the customer life cycle stage that they are in at that time.
Email Marketing is just not about batching and blasting a campaign to your entire user list and expecting your business to grow. It is more about targeting your specific users with content and offers that they would like. Every campaign of yours should be designed with a goal of providing more value to your customer and letting them choose your brand than anyone else’s for purchase.
Thus the general layout of a good Email Program for Ecommerce websites will be comprised of:
Every stage of this life cycle will require your attention and efforts to build that trust with your subscribers and let your brand speak for itself.
New technology like AMP is going to fuel further demand on Ecommerce brands to flex their muscles in terms of attractive and dynamic content both transactional and promotional to lure their customers. With the advent of AMP , users will start spending more time on Email client and hence will require your campaigns to be innovative enough to hold their attention.
The ability to interact with cart and payment options, or provide feedback on the mail itself will prove game-changing for an Ecommerce brand as that will mean more conversions and smoother interactions with less drop-off points in the attract-to-purchase journey.
The main principle to follow for any Email Marketer is to send relevant content at right time to right audience. In addition to this, never stop talking about your brand in your Emails, and never stop selling!
#ForTheLoveOfEmails
