Email Marketing Magic. Making the Most of Your Newsletter

If you visit any forum topic dedicated to eCommerce, you’ll definitely find a question like: “Which is the most powerful marketing tool?” Those guys who ask this question don’t understand that the answer is right before their faces. Time to give a detailed response to this question and list all the right reasons in favor of email marketing.

If you're using GMail, probably you’re getting Google Account Activity Report. It shows you all your activities for the last month around your Google accounts. There you can find email statistics of your GMail account. It shows how many emails you have sent and received. I bet that greater amount from that number are companies’ newsletters and some pseudo-marketing junk.

If we take a look at stats provided by analytics companies like SeeWhy, we’ll find lots of really interesting information. The latest research was based on more than 60000 purchases made on different sites and here are the results:

• most effective was e-mail marketing – more than 56.8% of all purchases were made due to newsletters;
• 17.9% are on the part of referral traffic;
• 10.3% of shoppers were “organic”;
• 4.8% were driven by ads;
• social media networks enabled 4.3% of sales.

This is quite interesting that email marketing gave most impressive figures. Time for you, my friend, to write some emails to your subscribers.

Don't Ever Spam! Ever...

The whole point is in differentiation of email marketing from spam. Spam is an unexpected guest. Email marketing is its antipode.

If a user is subscribed to the newsletter, then he/she needs it and is waiting for it. This all leads to conversion of subscribers into buyers. If compared to organic traffic, a bunch of people accidentally visited your site and are likely to leave it right away. Actually email marketing is not that good for luring new customers, but it’s perfect when you want to get returning customers.

Abracadabra...Now You're a Returning Customer

Imagine, someone bought a DSLR, this guy or girl learns how to make awesome shots, and sometime later finds great photos of landscaped that are shot with polarizing filter. And this very day this photographer-newbie gets a newsletter e-mail (from the same store) with a discount valid for all DSLR accessories…and this is how a returning customer is created.

This is not the end of email marketing. One can share via newsletter lots of interesting info about most popular products. If those are DSLRs, some tricks about artistic, creative, fantasy or whichever else photography will be definitely useful for the newbies.

25 Most Impressive Email Marketing Stats

Check out this presentation since it has lots of valuable information for the marketer.

by Salesforce

Have you noticed how many times the 'Subject Line' was mentioned? Actually 5, and there is number of good reasons for that.

According to numerous studies, about 70% of newsletter subscribers make a decision to open letter or not based on the headline. To achieve the goal (make your user open the letter) you should arouse their interests. It’s really important not to overdo with promotional offers. Basic rules for writing headlines can be outlined in several points:

• You need to create title as short and descriptive as possible. Long promotional offers are quite unnecessary, and it’s not the right place for branding and advertising. So you need to remove all mentions of your brand and leave only the essence of a promotional offer, expressed in 5-6 words.
• Point out the promise of the title to your audience: for women and men, as well as for users of certain regions. And the most important thing, don’t forget to segment your subscribers. Segmentation is a best friend of “open rate”. Each segment should receive separate newsletter content with different subjects.
• There is one thing which is quite typical for compiling headers of targeted emails. It is extremely important for a newsletter not to get into the spam folder, that's why you need to make the title least risky. In this article you can find out how to avoid spam filters.
• Use various signs and symbols to give specifics and weight to the header. Subject line that indicates specific discounts or price differences between old and new is more convincing than just the word “discount”.
• Use psychological techniques that help increase open rate. Ask questions that are most frequently asked by your customers. If you guess the question and give a detailed response in the letter, the probability that user will buy something increases significantly. Also you need to spell the issues that concern people and offer solutions.
• All hail the A/B testing! Make a few titles, send emails to the same target group and associate data based on the open rate. After that, you'll get valuable data and will be able to make your own recommendations about writing headlines for newsletter.

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Having the ability to connect directly to your clients is huge. Think of a situation where your website goes down...How do you contact your people and let them know what happened? Tweet? Nope. Create Facebook post? Nope again, not everyone uses Facebook. But if you have an email list you can contact your clients/customers and let them know what have happened. Consider email marketing as your and your clients mutual friend.

SPEAK UP!

That's it. Now it's your turn folks to share your expertise about email marketing. Are there any interesting techniques you might be using to keep your customer interested?