The Email Marketing Guide To Ecommerce Nirvana
Written by Franco Varriano.
1. Overview
Congratulations, you’re about to launch your online store. While doing your research, you read about the importance of email marketing and want to implement it as soon as possible. You’re on the right track, we wrote a little guide to help you implement an awesome email strategy from the start and reach ecommerce nirvana, also known as sales, as soon as possible.
2. The Goal
Since our goal is to reach ecommerce nirvana, the purpose of email marketing is to convert prospects into customers, then one-time buyer into repeat customers. Since you haven’t launch yet, you first need to build a list of prospects.
3. The Email Marketing Platform
For online stores, the right email marketing platform has to help you grow your business. We recommend ecommerce specific solutions as they often have features highly relevant to online stores.
We like to refer to those key feature as intelligence, basically the email marketing platform you choose should help you easily send beautifully crafted relevant content to your customers. Once you have a tool, take some time to fully understand it so you can optimize your campaigns.
Asking fellow entrepreneurs about the email marketing platform they use, can help you during the decision making process.
4. The List
While you are searching for the right tool, you also need to think about how you’ll acquire future customers’ emails. Here, a bit of hustle and social media saviness is more than welcome.
You can build your list by simply asking people to give you their emails, hence the hustle. We’ve seen many entrepreneurs build their lists through cool surveys shared on social media. A survey works particularly well when you’re getting started as you can also learn more about your ideal customers.
As you know, social media helps you build your audience. Assuming that you have a consumer facing product, you should use Twitter Card to embed your email sign up form in your twitter account (and pin it). You should also add your email sign up form to your Facebook page and promote your email form on Instagram with the classic link in the bio.
5. The First Email: Launching Soon
Now that your were able to create a list of prospect through social media, friends, family and surveys; you can now plan your first campaign. Interesting enough, your first email isn’t about sales per se. 14 to 7 days before launch, you should send your first “launching soon” email. Ideally, your launch date should be set so you can confidentiality announce a launch date in the email. Keep it short and sweet.
The content should ideally go from a thank you note (thank you so much for the support…)company updates (we’ve been busy working hard…) to company announcement (we’re finally launching in 2 weeks). Once sent, you should check your open rate to number of email sent ratio. The goal of the email is to create anticipation. Most people anticipate positive experiences and you want to add your store’s launch among those anticipated experiences.
6. The Second Email: Open For Business
Your second email should be sent on the opening day. You are officially in business and you should let your prospects know. If you’re selling more than one item, you should include 3 product recommendations in the email. If you’re selling a single item, make it highlight of your email (read design, design, design and more design). The key metrics you should analyze here are your open rate to number of email sent ratio, click-through percentage and of course, your conversion rate. If you’ve been following those steps, you’ve most likely made a sale on your first day. If you didn’t make a sale, jump for the third email below.
7. The Third Email: Great First Week
The third email is essentially a trick to increase your email opening rate by 30%.
7 days after sending your second email (open for business), you should create a second email with the exact same message as the first email but change the subject line. Send the second email to contacts that did not open the previous email. Enjoy the results.
8. Email Automation
You did okay during your first two weeks. The early “effortless sales” (they came from emails right? ) gave you even more confidence and you want to push for even better results. Welcome to the world of digital marketing and say hello to: social media 2.0 (a mix of organic and paid content), search engine optimization, blogging, contests and many more. It gets overwhelming quite fast…let’s get back to emails.
Email marketing automation will help you automate some operations so you can focus on other tasks. We separate automatic emails into two categories, Customer Success Email (CSE) which include:
- Welcome message for new subscriber email
- Order confirmation email after a purchase
- The classic shopping Cart Abandonment Email
- The shipping confirmation email
- Customer Feedback email
And the Revenue Generating Email (RGE) which include:
- Reward email
- Upsell after purchase emails
- Milestones emails (i.e: 10th purchase)
- Targeted campaigns
You might also have a general newsletter in which you add real value to your customers (via the wonderful blogs you’ve been so busy writing…). As you can see, we’ve listed more than 9 different types of email. Imagine receiving 9 emails from the same company within a couple of day…That’s correct, it is horrible (it doesn’t have to be). The truth is customers don’t mind customer success emails as they’ve become quite the norm, in fact you look unprofessional if you don’t send them.
But revenue generating emails can become annoying quite fast, especially when they’re full of irrelevant content. Like Dj Khaled would say: Relevance is the key to success in email marketing.
The age mass email era is done. We’re in the age personalized content and your customers have high expectation whenever you visit their inbox. The right email marketing tool should help you send personalized message to customers at the most appropriate time (the time when the customer is most likely to open the email).
Remember, you’re email is one of the hundred digital notifications fighting for your customers’ attention. Make it relevant and you might win the battle.
9. Ecommerce Nirvana
Are we there yet? Not quite, there is a lot more work ahead but we have to stay focus on the journey. Like the Dalai Lama said:
“If we only talk nirvana and philosophy, but do not bother much about day-to-day practice, then you may reach a strange nirvana, but will not reach the correct nirvana because your daily practice is nothing.”
By applying this knowledge and improving on it on a daily basis, you might reach your nirvana; the reason why you started your business in the first place. Thank you for reading, if you like the post, please pass it along to your friends so they too can find their nirvana ♥️.
10. Conclusion
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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