At HandySends, we are glad to present and assist you with the know-how and step-by-step guidance about email marketing, that would take you miles ahead in your quest to establish quality communication with your customers, increase your market presence and retain your old clients.
Introductory email
Establishing the 1st connection with the customer is a vital step towards starting a long-lasting relationship. After a new customer has signed up or subscribed to your newsletter, the best practice should be a prompt response email from your side that would educate the customer about your services.
The study shows that sending a series of three emails to your new client is important to create sound product awareness, make your client feel important and wanted. It is also an ideal opportunity to add the client to your regular mailing list for future communication.
The study also reveals that the 1st response email garners as high as 85% open rates and generates as much as 320% more revenue per email when compared to other emails.
This mechanism of 1st response can be automated by your ESP, email marketing service provider or you may connect with the HandySends team available 24×7, we have the most advanced and intelligent mechanism to establish a customer response mechanism, that is user-friendly, supportive, and powerful tool.
Personalized approach
We all love personalized attention; the same rule applies to our valuable customers. Often companies go to lengths to establish that personalized attention to remain above the competition and win more clients. Our target audience could be multiple & wide, our email marketing campaign might not be enough to reach every target audience that we want to.
A personalized approach creates a win situation for your e-commerce company to have the highest click ratio, high open rate, and minimum bounce backs, unsubscribe requests, and spam reports. Imagine a customized email, tailormade to suit your client’s preference and interests. It will be an instant success, resulting in a maximum subscription and more purchase rate.
The best way to do it is:
⦁ Categorizing your customer database into standard segments like gender, age, education, and maybe income status
⦁ Use demographics to determine further details like interests, personality, and values/ behavior
⦁ If you understand your customer behavior, you are in the best position to determine how to connect with them most effectively and which email list should/be assigned to.
Smart offers and discounts
It is a common psychology of the clients to get attracted to discount offers and exclusive deals. Deals and discounts get your customers to come back to your e-commerce platform repeatedly.
Once you can create a repeat customer base, you have won’t half of the battle. The repeat customers are the fuel that will run your business. They are your frequent buyers and also the source of recommendations.
To have a loyal repeat customer base, it is worth having a separate database dedicated to these categories of clients. Schemes like loyalty programs, assigning membership types viz: silver, golden, platinum often encourage your loyal customers to make purchases more frequently on your eCommerce platform.
You can plan to have targeted email marketing practice just to nurture this most important section of your clientele, making them feel they are most valuable for you, keep them glued to your store.
Persuasive emails and Holiday/festival offers
Holidays and festivities are the times when the e-commerce sights get the maximum number of hits. To make your store a busy marketplace and convert a window shopper to a potential client, have those tactics up on your sleeves which will keep you ahead of the competition.
Your email marketing strategy should be tuned to make the most out of the customer demand using holiday-themed email campaigns, the various package offers with better privileges, attractive discounts, or bonus points. The festive shopping accounts for a major chunk of annual buying in almost all countries globally. Example: Diwali shopping season in India, Christmas and New year shopping season in Europe, EID shopping season in the middle east.
Impactful Proposal and awareness
The main mantra of a successful email marketing campaign lies in its smart design, attractive looks, and responsiveness. Be it promotional or welcome email, the impression of the customers has been high and generates curiosity and interest among the customers.
It doesn’t need to contain a high volume of graphics, pictures, or GIFs, sometimes text-only emails can be equally powerful and effective. The study has shown that visual appeal makes the first impact on the customer’s mind.
The email must have bullet points, text breakups, easy font, and to the point of communication.
The email should open equally in the various devices, with no impact on its resolution, contents, and visibility. Be it a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, or your desktop, performing the email has to top-notch.
A single-call-to-action can be the best practice in each email.
You may start with a hook to keep your client engaged, or try to upsell or cross-sell effectively by transactional emails.
Dry-run Testing
It is highly recommended that your email service provider should make a dry run before going ahead with the campaign. Split testing is an effective way to check your original version of the email and test it against another version of the email where you might have made some alterations like subject line, part of the design, call-to-action, etc. Using the Constant contact mechanism, the email subject line can be traced and tested.
Email Series for aging cart items
It is a generic trait of shoppers to leave their cart with loads of product selected–it remains there for weeks and months but this does not signify lost business or sales. Whilst you are collecting the subscriber’s email and other credentials, our next move can be to send a notification to the subscriber for the pending action that his cart needs.
Planning an email series of sending such notification will lead to positive results.
Email List-an important component
Update your email list and keep building it time and on to ensure your subscriber list is combed with actual data and you continue to add new subscribers. We see several options these days which allow us to get subscriber details–Header sections are the most used section followed by footer.
The fact is an average of 20-25% of the subscribers do unsubscribe, move from companies or simply change their email coordinates which one does not have control of, in doing so we need to be careful. Therefore it is recommended to set a schedule for your email check and ensure they are filtered.
Are you checking out – Subscribe
When a user moves from one page to another whilst they are shopping, selecting and adding wish lists–prompting them to subscribe yields positive results.
Transactional emails are another great way to include subscription requests. Ask the subscriber to subscribe with just one option and click–you will be amazed to see the result.
Transactional emails are the best communication channel to help you subscribe, sell, launch a product or service, and of course a great way to stay in touch.
Customer Reviews and feedback–a superb marketing tool.
Feedback and experience are great marketing tools. Customers who have used your services and bought products will not hesitate to share their experience and these testimonials help new clients to gain confidence. Product reviews, client feedback, testimonial goes a long way.
Engaging customers while they are buying from your store is an important marketing activity and goes a long way.
Initiate a friend – Referral Program
Customers referring to their friends and family prove beneficial for online marketing activities. This acts as an add-on marketing tool.
Our research shows over 90% of customer feels confident when they get the prior reference of the product and this becomes a chain marketing tool, weaving families, extended families, friends, peers, colleagues and so on.
What are you waiting for–device a smart referral reward and see the positive change?
All these tools, implemented in the right way, make up for a great marketing campaign. But you should be careful to not overdo any of the above. If you wish to send a persuasive email comprising festive offers or promotional activities, remember to do it occasionally and not every day. Any repeated marketing activity and unscheduled one can result in negative marketing.
Use strategic methods and careful consideration of marketing activities. Ensure they are well planned and scheduled.
Results of marketing initiatives won’t show overnight, hence you have to wait to see the yield. Study the trends-work on areas that need attention–you will learn as you progress.