Basics of e-commerce" (part 3): Principles of effective email marketing

In the second part of our guide we talked about how to use SEO to generate traffic on our website. In the third article we would like to focus on e-mail marketing and its usefulness in transforming that traffic into implementation of specific business goals.

According to a studies made by Listrak, up to 72% of Internet users open and read the promotional e-mails that are sent by the sellers. Poland does not differ here from the rest of the world, because, according to the company GetResponse, 71% of users regularly read newsletters that they are subscribed to. For this reason, it is well-advised to pay attention to e-mail marketing and be sure that our messages are coherent with each other and well thought throught in all situations that we want to use them.

Before making a purchase:

Currently, the vast majority of online stores offers the chance to make purchase without the need of creating an account. It is a big convenience for many users, but it creates a new challenge for retailers. How to encourage users to set up an account and sign up for our mailing list if there is no necessity to do that? One of the possibilities is to offer a discount to people, who create an account on the site or sign up for a newsletter. Obtaining a real benefits will certainly encourage potential customer to make a purchase, and with that we can not only obtain user data, but also increase our sales.

It also happens that customer, who set up an account, does not make purchases in our store. There could be various reasons for this situation - it might be a problem with finding our store a second time, short memory or not saving the page address in the "Favorites" bookmark. These users should be sent an e-mail with a reminder that they created the account but have not yet purchased anything. To enhance the sale effect, we can (by using the mechanism of scarcity principle) inform the user that the account will expire within 30 days. Giving the impression of limited access to goods, we can increase desire to purchase the product, a great example of that can be an existence of limited series of products. In order to encourage potential buyers, we can also propose the usage of a discount code or simply provide them with information about advantages of our store - what distinguishes us from our competition or what is our safety policy. It also a good idea to give an example of social proof (informational social influence). The way of encouraging purchases should be selected through an analysis of our target group and buying factors, that are influencing the purchase decision.

After the first purchase:

With the completion of the first purchase, we can send a message to our customers, thanking them for buying our product(s), and with that collecting their feedback by adding a link to the survey. People, who take the responsibility of taking care of the store, should know their customers, know the reasons why they chose this store, what they like in the serivce and how it can be improved. This is a good starting point ot collecting this kind of feedback.

Abandoned shopping cart:

According to a study by Baymard Institute, in year 2013 almost 7 out of 10 carts were abandoned by users. As we know, abandoned carts mean the low conversion rate and lack of income for the seller. How we can deal with this problem?

Many e-commerce platforms allow monitoring all abandoned carts.It is an important step to increase sales, so if your platform does not do that, be sure to take care of the introduction of this feature in your store.

If you already have the statistics of abandoned shopping carts (number of exits, detailed information about the contents of the cart and user data) we can plan further actions. The easiest way is to send the customer an e-mail with the reminder. It should include the information about which products have been added to the cart, what was the cost, it is also advised to visualize everything with product photos. It is necessary to add a link directing user straight to the cart, what makes it easier to confirm the transaction.

In the body of the email, try to convince the users that it pays off to place an order at your store. If, after a while, you do not notice the effects of your actions, you can always attach a one-time discount voucher.

It’s also a good idea to collect information on reasons for cart abandonment, which will help in better planning of future actions. For that you can use the online survey that was mentioned before. It is worth considering to automate the process, but, inspite of that, it is necessary to ensure that that message was sent to the client as personalized as it can be.

Commitment is the key:

Newsletter is a very powerful tool in helping you to build better relationships with customers, who usually already made purchases in our store. However, signing up to the newsletter may precede making the purchase if we will encourage user to subscribe with, for example, a discount coupon.

To make the best use of the potential of the newsletter, it is necessary to adapt it to our target group and to plan ahead all of our activities, such as the preparation of appropriate content, linking it with other marketing activities or promotions and picking a adequate frequency and time of dispatching messages. Nevertheless, the most important thing is to ensure that the content is interesting for the recipients and that it's engaging them to take action and tempting to purchase a product.

Additional points worth remembering:

• Adaptation for mobile devices
  Nowadays 1 in 6 e-mails is opened on mobile devides, so it is worth to to take care, that users can enjoy our site on their mobile devices.
• Analysis and testing
  We should always keep track of results of our actions to verify whether we achieved our goals. In e-mail marketing we should always track our open rate, click rate and conversion rate. With that data we can check how many people, who visited our site, decided to buy something.
• Personalization of content
  Each message will be better recieved if it will refer to specific person with contet adapted to their needs (for example, if we know that the user is a woman, she will not be interested in shavers for men).
• Using automation wherever it's possible
  By using shipping automation tools you can send a message at specific situation, for example, when the shopping cart is abandoned.

Summary:

1. Examine all points of contact and situations, when you should send an e-mail to the user;
2. Plan your whole communication with clients and try to personalize the content;
3. If possible, use tools to automate the process;
4. Customize mail templates to work on mobile devices;
5. Test a veirety of templates and contents, analyze the results;
6. Constantly track the results of your operations and try to fix the mistakes that you notice.

These are the effective ways of using e-mail marketing. If you want to know more about basics of e-commerce, wait for fourth part of our guide, where we will tell you about how to correctly analize the data you collected for your e-shop.