Effective Email Marketing Tactics to Boost E-Commerce Business

Pawan Sahu

7 years ago

If you have shopped from e-commerce sites such as Amazon, you may have received emails from them informing you about a sale or the new arrivals in the market. Marketers use different Omni-channels to generate business leads. But one of the commonly used channels is email marketing. Email marketing enables the businesses to create a different set of target audience and sends them customized emails accordingly. For instance, there could be a separate email sent to customers who have not shopped from the website for more than a year updating them on what have they missed, and another one for customers who are regular customers. Whatever the message may be, the key is to convert leads into sales.

There are several email-marketing tools available to help you segment your audience and send personalized messages to them. So, all you need to do is, select the right website builder and the email templates and you are all set to boost your business.

While choosing the right marketing automation tool is essential, here are few tactics that you must follow to boost your e-commerce business.

# 1 – Personalized messaging = Better click through rate

Who doesn’t like a personalized message?

Show your customers that you care for them and they will come back to you always. From customizing the subject line to start the email by addressing them with their first name, marketing automation tools help you to customize the message for every subscriber. In fact, data suggests that personalized messaging improves the click-through rate by 14% and conversion rate by 10%. Cool, isn’t it? So, try to customize your messages and increase the chance of improving your sales. However, as we mentioned earlier, to send the right message to the right person, you have to segment your subscribers based on different parameters such as – the demography, income, frequency of visiting and shopping from your website, etc. You can use market automation to do that.

# 2 – Cross-check several times before sending the email

Imagine sending an email to your customer with a link to add a product to the cart and then giving them a shock of their life by directing them to a non-existent page on your website. You don’t want to break the trust of your customer right? Your emails are an opportunity to boost sales, so make sure they have complete and correct information, images that load quickly, and that all the links are leading to the right pages before sending the email. You can create a test group in the automation mail to test the email before you send it to everyone.

# 3 – Remind your customer about the items in the cart

Sometimes we tend to add items to the cart and completely forget about it, only to come back to see a cart with items that are either out of stock or whose prices have increased. As an e-commerce company, it is your responsibility to remind the customer of the items pending in their cart. Now, chances are people may not check the website every time, so an email with the link to the cart can be the best way to direct them to your site and complete the order.

# 4 – Seek opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell your other products

So, your customer has bought a mobile phone but has not purchased a mobile case cover? Or they had purchased a particular version of Kindle, and you want them to buy the next version, which is better than the previous one. How do you convince them to buy it? Well, it’s simple – you can send them an email with the benefits of purchasing the product and provide a link to obtain it. It will give the customer a small push to buy the product.

A friendly tip: When you try to upsell a product, ensure that the price gap between the new product and the one that they are using currently is not too large. Often, people prefer buying products that belong to the similar price range. So, a significant gap in the price range could dissuade them from purchasing the product.

# 5 – Keep your potential customers close, loyal customers closer

It takes years to build a trustworthy relationship with a customer. So, if there are customers who have been faithful to your brand, show them that you care for them. From sending an email with loyalty points and cash back offers to make them feel special by giving them access to preview your new collection before other customers, every small benefit that you give your customer will help in building a long-term association with them. If you are wondering how to gauge if the customer is loyal or not, there are two parameters to determine their loyalty – you can estimate by the number of purchases they make on your website, or by the frequency at which they visit your site.

# 6 – Repeat purchases = more sales

This tactic is especially useful if your business has scope for repeat purchases. For instance, e-commerce businesses that deal with grocery delivery send emails to the customers few days before the monthly quota of the product gets over. It allows the customer to order the product immediately, thus saving them from the last minute purchases and increasing customer satisfaction. Repeat purchases are the best way to retain customers and boost sales. So, if there is a potential to enable repeat sales for your products, email marketing is the best marketing strategy to use.

In conclusion

Email marketing is a relatively new marketing strategy that requires expertise regarding analyzing the opening rate, click rate, and conversion rate, and experimenting with the content, subject lines, and even designs to appeal to the customers. Thus, it requires marketing team and copywriters to work together to make the entire email marketing exercise successful. However, with several email marketing tools such as MailChimp, concrete sales objectives, and the few easy tactics mentioned above, email marketing can help you boost your e-commerce sales.