Congratulations on building an ecommerce website to showcase and sell your products! It’s now time to focus on marketing and driving sales. If you’re reading this to pick up cues for a store that’s taking shape, we hope this article serves you well.
A common question many small business owners have is this: “How am I going to promote my products, and how much should I invest to build a long-term marketing platform?” While the answer to the latter lies in what your end-goal and budget are, the clear answer to the former is email marketing.
Let’s look at how it can help meet your ecommerce marketing challenges in a time-effective manner.
Challenge 1: Converting visitors into contacts
If a person visits your online store while shopping for a watch, it’s unlikely they’d hit the “purchase” button right away. Generally, people have several boxes to tick off, and you’ll have to prove how your product can meet and hopefully surpass their needs. Put simply, you should establish a connection with them so you can nurture them to a point that they’re sales-ready. This connection will also prove valuable to retain them as customers.
Solution: Signup forms
This challenge is easily met with the help of signup forms available in email marketing software. The biggest advantage of signup forms is that you can embed them anywhere on your website.
Once embedded on your website, the signup forms act as a means to get your visitors’ consent and basic information so you can send them email promotions. You can add and mandate different information fields like name, email address, region, mobile/telephone number, and more. By design, these forms facilitate the double opt-in method (one of the standards of email marketing), ensuring you stay compliant with privacy laws.
Quick tip: Provide a one-time discount to those who sign up to your newsletters. This way, you’re doing good favor for your signup form and sales conversions.
Challenge 2: Creating attractive promotions
In the ecommerce arena, products are your biggest asset. And you were probably quite diligent in adding product images to your platform. The same amount of care and concern should go into the making of your promotional messages as well. Your message should appeal to the eyes of your audience while giving a nice feel for your products. However, it takes a lot of time to design your message and embed product images in it.
Solution: Predesigned templates
The free predesigned templates of email marketing software solutions can largely simplify your content design process. The HTML and CSS coding aspects are already taken care of, meaning you can just pick and use them like your most comfortable t-shirt. Better yet, you can place an “image card” component in the template that enables you to view and select a picture for your product from your store. Last but not least, you can choose from template categories like holidays, seasons, onboarding, birthdays, and more.
Quick tip: Before finalizing an email marketing platform, check whether or not the service provider offers exclusive ecommerce email marketing templates.
Challenge 3: Target marketing
If someone consecutively buys activity trackers and joggers, it likely means they’re interested in fitness-based products. Therefore, you should tailor your promotions for them around fitness accessories to hopefully lead to repeat sales. This is called target marketing. The same approach should be followed for every customer to give them a good reason to engage with your content. This form of marketing is catalyzed by data, and the challenges lie in accessing the data without much effort and time.
Solution: Integrate your marketing platform with your store
Integrating your marketing platform with your store easily solves this problem. However, the integration has to be tight and extensive. The easy-to-use nature of email marketing, thanks to smart software builds, allows you to (safely) leverage your store’s data to a great extent.
You can easily take that data and segment your user groups based on their behavior like this:
1. Total orders made
2. Date of last order
3. Items purchased and not purchased
4. Average amount spent
5. Average amount spent per order
6. Total amount spent
Quick tip: After segmenting your audience and crafting relevant content, schedule your emails based on your recipients’ time zone and optimal open time for maximum engagement.
Challenge 4: Recovering abandoned checkouts
This is one problem that has many ecommerce owners scratching their heads. However, businesses are increasingly using one-liner emails to remind people to revisit their shopping carts. Emails like this must arrive at your recipients’ inbox with the right elements (for example, an image of the abandoned product) at the right time to win their interest. Now, supposing your shop attracts more than 1000 visitors per month, how will you churn out effective reminders for everyone?
Solution: Drag-and-drop email workflows
While we can hear most of you saying “Automation might help me,” let’s look at how to effectively use automation to find a long-term solution.
Since you’ll be dealing with multiple abandoned carts at the same time, the idea is to build a one-size-fits-all workflow that automates your follow-ups. The good news is that most of the email marketing platforms can do this. In Zoho Campaigns, this feature is called “drag-and-drop email workflows.”
With workflows, you can visualize a follow-up strategy for your abandoned carts and build it in no time. Put simply, you can configure your follow-ups in sequential order (by defining the content and send time) and have them be completely automated. To make your follow-ups look more personalized, the image of the concerned product automatically gets added.
Quick tip: You can also add response components in your workflows that allow you to set up separate follow-up messages for opens, unopens, link clicks, multiple link clicks, and more.
Challenge 5: Purchase follow-ups
Aren’t people who choose you over numerous other businesses potentially your brand loyalists? Engaging your customers again at the right time is the best way to create a long-lasting relationship. However, monitoring every purchase and coming up with content eats into your time and energy.
Solution: Email automation
Enter email automation workflows again. If your email marketing runs in tandem with your store, the purchase data (date and time of order) is instantly and automatically synced, allowing you to trigger a workflow. You’ll just have to repeat the same steps we discussed for abandoned cart follow-ups.
Quick tip: Sending a thank you or acknowledgment email like “Yay! You’ve successfully bought this” moments after purchase can leave a nice impression.
We hope you got your questions answered! If you need an extensive demo on how to implement all the above-discussed pointers, we’d be happy to help. Please share your feedback in the comment box below.
Comments