Despite the fact that the latest iOS update from Apple has made changes that could affect email marketing, it’s still a useful tool that e-commerce brands should utilise for their customers – to convert prospective customers and re-engage loyal ones.
Why Should You Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing delivers a message to your customers and subscribers which allows them to read it at a time it’s convenient for them. It drops right into their inbox for easy reading, targeted messaging and return on investment (ROI).
Here are some of the benefits of email marketing for your brand:
- Easy to set up and (usually) easy to integrate with ecommerce platforms
- Allows you to contact lots of people at once
- Lets you communicate at different points in the customer journey
- Can be automated
- Relatively inexpensive compared to other types of marketing
- Allows for personalised messaging, segmentation and individual discounts to convert loyalty
- Detailed analytics
- Ability to test different types of copy and messaging
- Can write in advance and send later
Thousands of e-commerce brands around the world use email marketing as a key part of their marketing strategy. You can too.
How To Use Email Marketing
Email marketing can be used to drive sales, share discounts/offers, push other content to your subscribers, share news and cross promote other channels.
The first step is ensuring that you have subscribers. This can be done by offering an incentive (like a prize draw, discount or useful information) and through awareness of the newsletter sign up. Some brands even pay to promote newsletter sign up across their social media as they recognise the value of the platform.
Some brands set up an automated set of emails (known as an ’email funnel’) that drip-feeds a pre-determined set of emails aimed to drive certain actions. Others send out regular newsletters with a round up of news and information. Other brands do something that’s somewhere in between.
The key thing with email marketing is: your emails need to add value.
We all get loads of emails into our inbox, but how many do we actually open? You need to offer a reason for your subscribers and customers to actually want to read and take action.
The clickthrough rate for emails is relatively low (check out some average clickthrough rates by industry) but the volume of people you can send your content out to at once makes it worth it.
Need some inspiration, or not sure what to right about? This site is great for email marketing inspo and shares email campaigns from thousands of brands.
How Do You Set Your Email Campaigns Up?
One of the easiest ways to set up email campaigns is by using a specialist online email marketing service. These usually integrate with your website and existing customer details to build email lists that you can segment and target with messaging.
Building the email themselves are usually drag-and-drop where you can build emails by pulling info, products and discounts from your website, personalised information from your customer database and images/graphics from your existing galleries.
Some of the most popular email marketing tools include:
Some, like MailChimp, are free up to a certain number of subscribers. After that, they scale up and you pay depending on how many subscribers you have. They’re all pretty intuitive and easy to set up.
9 Email Marketing Tips To Get You Started
Part of email marketing is an element of trial-and-error (aka A/B testing) as you discover what works best for your audience and helps you to hit your email and sales goals.
Here are a few of the email marketing tips I wish I’d understood when I first started out creating brand emails:
Your Subject Line Matters
The subject line you use in your email is what’s going to grab your audience’s attention and make them open your email rather than the 50 others in their inbox. It’s important, and you need to get it right.
Experiment, test, personalise and use emojis (if that fits with your audience) in your subject line and look at which emails get the most opens and conversions as a result. Make it exciting, engaging and valuable – most email platforms will allow you to add personalisation options, which is great for conversion.
Which would you rather open?
“January Newsletter”
“Lucy, say goodbye to the January blues with our new year offers! 👋”
Keep It Short and Concise
If you want to make sure that your emails encourage people to head to your site, don’t just copy and paste entire chunks of content into your email newsletters. Use snippets, highlights, exciting headings and shorter excerpts to signpost to the full content on your site.
Make your content interesting and make sure that your energy and brand tone of voice show through on every one of your communication channels. Speak to your subscribers like they’re human and demonstrate that you understand what they want and how your product or service can help to solve their problems.
Long-winded (boring) emails aren’t going to engage your audience. Neither are text-heavy chunks without any images, links or calls to action in there. Not sure where to get images from? Read this to find out more about where to get royalty-free images.
Proofread, Preview and Check for Mistakes
If you’re in a hurry, it’s easy to make content mistakes. Dead links, merge fields that play up, typos and formatting errors can ruin all your hard work and mean that you miss opportunities.
Where possible, take the time to proofread, preview and check every part of your email to make sure it’s doing the most for you. If you find proofreading to be hard work, enlist the help of someone to read through – sometimes it’s tough spotting mistakes in your own work, especially if yo feel like you’ve read through it 100 times already.
Understand Data Protection and Privacy Law
Depending on where you are in the world, where your email marketing provider is based and where your customers are there will be data protection and privacy laws in place. It’s not the sexiest topic you’ll ever spend time on but it is important.
This relates to how you use and process subscriber and customer data (so you should be aware of this anyway if you have an e-commerce site) as well as how you handle requests to remove data from your email lists. Most email marketing platforms will make this pretty straightforward for you.
Keep It Clean
This is really niche, but worth knowing! If you copy and paste anything into your email platform, you should “clean” it first. Email templates can be a bit all over the place with formatting.
Sometimes it just takes one wonky bit of HTML to throw it all off. Copy and paste your text into something like notepad first to get rid of any old formatting, then drop the new text into your email.
Segment Your Customers
Your customers will all be different and will have different needs and reasons to buy from you. Start as you mean to go on and segment your email lists so that you can easily send out targeted, relevant emails to the different segments of customers that you have.
This goes back to the personalisation and conversion I mentioned earlier, which can mean your open rates grow significantly. Take a look at some segmentation ideas that go further than geographical location and birthdays.
Plan Out Your Content
I promise you that life is easier when you plan content (and marketing activity) in advance. It takes the pressure off you to come up with ideas on the hop, means you can plan and prepare properly, avoids mistakes and helps you to see where your email marketing activity fits in with the rest of your marketing strategy.
It can also mean that you don’t miss amazing opportunities to reach your target audience. Creating content in advance means you can be more reactive to new trends and focus your attention elsewhere as needed.
Cross Promote
Use email to cross-promote to your other channels – encourage your audience to follow you on Insta, share your latest TikTok content, signpost them to influencer content and tutorials. This takes the hard work out of always having to create new content specifically for email communications and also means existing content works harder for you.
In the same vein, use your other channels to encourage email marketing newsletter sign ups so that you can target them even more effectively and share personalised offers and deals.
Check Your Analytics
For more people this isn’t the most exciting part of the day but checking your email analytics is essential to work out click-through rates, sales and return on investment. It can also help you to work out the subject lines, content and segments that work best for your audience.
Take what’s in your analytics and put it to good use. One of the huge plus points of e-commerce and digital marketing is the amount of insights you can gather quickly and easily, allowing you to pivot if you need to or keep up the good work if you don’t.