With the ascendance of new marketing tools, email marketing may not resemble the most effective technology out there. But looking at the statistics, we see that launching email newsletters alone, for both customer acquisition and retention, generates surprising results.
Up to 300 billion emails are sent every day, and this suggests that our inboxes are busy with all sorts of emails, from friends to Facebook. The ones cutting through the noise certainly provide value and reach us in ways we choose to continue to open future messages.
When a campaign fails to compel us, it gives a reason to disengage with the message and the brand. This emphasizes how important it is for brands to create a solid strategy for delivering compelling content and maintaining an engaged email audience.
From a wide range of email marketing strategies available, we’ve selected 4 actionable pieces of advice to grow e-commerce sales with purposeful and timely email newsletters. Some of these strategies are the industry leaders’ status quo, and some are the fruit of mere email marketing common sense.
Here are 4 initial steps to boost e-commerce sales with an email newsletter.
1. Have an audience and a purpose in mind
To grow e-commerce sales with an email newsletter, we must begin by understanding our marketing purpose and target audience. A compelling message is best shared when the sender understands the reader enough to provide seamless incentives for them to move along the buying cycle.
An e-commerce email newsletter connects us directly with a specific audience and allows us to transmit a surprising amount of useful resources and incentives through a channel that converts, what would otherwise be a dense and tiresome read, into an engaging and personal experience.
Without a doubt, audience-centered email newsletters for e-commerce can form significant and lasting connections for a brand, and contribute to a sustained exchange of value.
Actual innovative newsletter software can help us achieve consistency and relevancy with our email newsletters, by providing us with an interface to communicate value frequently and compellingly to a boundless audience at a relatively low cost.
2. Use strong and meaningful visual elements
Email is an inherently visual channel, so the design of our e-commerce email newsletter is as important in some ways as its purpose. A bold and creative first impression is a good start to engage the audience’s senses and encourage them to continue reading.
Typically, the first thing an audience sees before engaging with our message is the header, meaning that it sets the tone for the rest of the content in the newsletter. Being consistent at defining the right header takes practice and experimentation.
Images are also key, whereas a major porting of email subscribers prefer messages that contain interesting images. Adopting an image-to-text ratio of 60% text and 40% images is ideal for legibility.
The importance of including alt texts in an email newsletter shouldn’t be overlooked. Remember that a lot of our recipients, including visually impaired people, depend on alt text to visualize every email they receive.
Ideally, the visual elements of an email newsletter should be broken into sections, with the most important at the top, to help guide our recipients and allow them to explore all the content in the newsletter.
3. Include a welcoming and obvious CTA
When we send email newsletters to subscribers, it’s because we want them to take a particular action. So a simple principle to boost the performance of our e-commerce email newsletter is making it obvious by including visible and compelling calls to action (CTAs).
Whether we want the audience to buy a flash sale product or refer our e-commerce to a friend for a discount, we must minimize the effort of figuring out how they should proceed and make it visually compelling for them to follow the desired course of action.
This step is particularly important because as humans, we constantly try to save energy and time by rapidly looking for patterns and concepts that catch our eye. Therefore, we should keep in mind that our email newsletter recipients will spend as little time as possible to determine if our message is relevant to them, and what to do about it.
If we fail to clarify to the recipient what action they need to take to learn more about our offer, we may instantly lose them. So our recommendation for those creating an e-commerce email newsletter is to include a warm and noticeable CTA to the most important action.
4. Curate segments of subscribers
Creating and maintaining segments of recipients of our e-commerce newsletter is another high priority for us. Segmenting our newsletter campaigns alone can result in lower bounce rates and unsubscribes, and increased open rates and click-throughs.
Segmentation involves a careful and continuous monitorization of our email lists and the use of automation to reactivate or filter inactive subscribers. By doing this, we increase the deliverability of our email newsletter and engage better with our active subscribers.
For an e-commerce website, we can bring back inactive subscribers using personalization data to send a promotion or discount on a product similar to their last purchase after a certain period of inactivity. Ideally, our email newsletter should contain active customers only.
Wrapping up
With a 45-to-1 return on investment, email marketing in e-commerce is fundamentally a must-have. That’s why, when designing your first or next email newsletter, remember that every message should be driven by a purpose and value to a specific audience.
A newsletter is optimal for enhancing the customer experience with our e-commerce website, so making it easy for the subscriber to navigate and act on it is essential. Relevancy, urgency, and aesthetics are significant elements to the success of an email newsletter for e-commerce
