How do you view eCommerce email marketing? Does it come off as a fad that has passed its prime or an evergreen strategy that animates your marketing effort at the proper speed?
Regardless of how you view eCommerce email marketing, one thing is certain; having an effective email marketing strategy in the eCommerce space can help you track and sell to existing customers while at the same time helping you gather information about prospective customers at low cost.
In this article, you will learn all there is to know about eCommerce email marketing, plus strategies and tips for building authority in your niche.
What is eCommerce email marketing?
eCommerce email marketing is a marketing strategy that supports emails to promote and sell products online to existing and potential customers. With emails, eCommerce marketers can easily notify new customers about new products, hot deals, trendy items, latest offers, etc.
Steps to Create an Effective Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaign
It’s cheap and easy to reach consumers with emails, but your email’s open rate will only skyrocket if you take the time to create a strategy that subverts the timeline noise. Here are a few steps to follow;
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Build Your Email Marketing Strategy
Strategy runs the gamut in email marketing for eCommerce businesses. If you have a good strategy, you will easily scale. To build a strategy, you need a clear idea of what you want to achieve with email marketing efforts.
Building an eCommerce email marketing strategy involves goal setting and strategic planning. To ensure you’re on the right track when building your strategy, analyze the following questions;
- What does email marketing mean for you and your business?
- How are you currently attracting visitors?
- Do you view email marketing as a method to build trust and credibility or as a way of increasing customer retention and improving sales? (it does both, but perspective matters)
- Do you intend to make your email marketing intertwine with other marketing channels or work as a standalone strategy?
When you have the answers to these questions, set S.M.A.R.T. – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals, then figure out what it’s going to cost.
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Build a List of Willing Subscribers
In email marketing, permission is everything. If you send emails to consumers without their explicit permission, your email will land in their spam folder, or they will delete it without taking a second look or second-guessing their decision.
Cultivating the right ecommerce email marketing list requires serious time and commitment. The easiest way to go about it’s by using lead magnets.
A lead magnet is any material, information, or freebies you give to prospective customers or already existing customers in exchange for their personal information.
If you already have a list, you can, for this time only, send unsolicited emails explaining to your customers that you want to start a newsletter or run a campaign that might excite them. Include a sign-up form with fields to enter the necessary details and wait for their response.
NB: Try to be specific with the information you collect—the success of your email marketing campaign relies deeply on how well you make use of the gathered data. The best practice is to work with an email service provider to automate the list segmentation process.
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Plan Your Content
Don’t engage in email marketing if you don’t have anything of value to say. Yes, we know it’s tempting to want to speedily set up an email campaign when the competition seems to be thriving on it. Don’t fall for that. If you have nothing of importance to share, invest in other ecommerce marketing strategies.
Before kickstarting your email marketing endeavors, create a content plan for your first two months. This way, you can begin with the confidence that you won’t run out of content ideas anytime soon. Plus, it allows you to iterate and make changes as you go.
Another thing, while many eCommerce marketers create their emails themselves, it’s not something we’d advise. Don’t go about email marketing in eCommerce with a do-it-yourself {DIY} approach—it might prove to be less expensive in the short term, but from experience, we tell you it will cost more in the long run.
Work with a copywriter, skilled email marketers, and experienced graphic designers.
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Keep Track of the Metrics
At this stage, your ecommerce email marketing campaign should be up and running. Congrats! But don’t get too excited; this is just the beginning of a long and tough yet extremely lucrative journey.
It’s time to analyze the metrics and make changes as you deem fit. For instance, let’s say you started creating reams of content; check the metrics to see whether consumers spend as much time on your emails as needed to consume such an amount of content. If yes, Kudos! You’re on the right track. Otherwise, make the required changes.
Keeping track of the metrics is a sure-fire way to ensure that you are putting out the right content in front of the right people at the right time.
Tips to Building Authority with Ecommerce Email Marketing
Building trust amongst subscribers is a tough row to hoe. Still, if you can put in the effort by providing useful content, not just the latest deals, your audience will become comfortable taking anything you say as fact.
Before we take off, let’s set this straight. In the real world, it’s okay to view experts as authorities, but in the world of online marketing, they are not the same.
Experts are folks who know a lot about your niche, while authority is the person everyone, including the experts, agrees is the first stop for information. That means experts are experts because they say they are, but authority is not a self-proclaimed title; they’re authorities because people listen when they make declarations about their niche.
Now, you can use email marketing to build authority in your eCommerce niche by establishing ethos, nurturing pathos, and sealing the deal with logos. Let’s explain.
Ethos: building credibility in your niche. Involves sharing information that helps consumers and prospects view you as a reliable source.
Logos: Create hypothetical situations that allow subscribers to deduce the conclusion you want them to reach based on the information you provide.
Pathos: This is a result of logos. Trust happens if the hypothetical situation you created is legit and subscribers agree with the deduced conclusion. Pathos involves swaying emotions and making customers make decisions based on existing trust.
In essence, if you can create content consumers find valuable and agree with, they would trust you, and when they trust you, you will become their go-to brand when in need of products or services in your niche.
To Become an Authority, Trust is Key
People won’t see you or your eCommerce store as an authority figure if you act trustworthy when it suits and flow with the crowd when it doesn’t.
That means you can’t send out valuable newsletters within your first two months in business, then reduce quality and expect consumers to trust you for life—no, it doesn’t happen that way.
To gain the trust and respect of consumers and niche experts, you must provide high-value content consistently. And yes, while it takes time to build trust, it takes less than a Nano-second to lose it.
For instance, if, after years of offering quality content in your newsletter, you make the mistake of opting for cheap profit by offering an overhyped product and making consumers waste their funds, you will lose credibility and, at the same time, lose the trust you spent months or years building.
So hey! When you cultivate trust, hold it sacrosanct above everything else.
Final Thoughts
eCommerce email marketing is not all that complex. An effective subject line and a distinctive voice can win you thousands of paying customers. However, if you can’t make subscribers view you as an authority in your niche, you can readily find your emails in spam folders.
If you want to win the email marketing game, you must learn to use multiple marketing channels. Find your audience on social media platforms and build your voice, study your niche and promote thought leadership content, and most importantly, plan your content and intertwine your email marketing strategies. Good Luck!
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About the Author:
Skirmantas Venckus is a writer by day and reader by night. He hates talking about himself in the third person. He is also the growth hacker at Sender.net – the email marketing provider that is focused on user-friendliness, affordability, and utility.
