“The easiest way to think about starting an email marketing strategy for your online store
is putting yourself in the shoes of your customer.”
Joanne Coffey, assistant manager of retention marketing at Jones Road Beauty
Email marketing is one of the fastest-growing and most effective ways to stay in touch with your customers.
Sure, you can shoot from the hip with your email marketing and it might work for the first three months or maybe even the first year. But, it probably won’t work much longer than that. And it won’t help you grow.
Brands that truly win at email marketing are the ones that send emails with intention and have a solid email strategy in place. Once you understand email and the strategy that surrounds it, you can take your account to a whole new level.
Let’s make yours one of those brands with a full eCommerce email marketing strategy built out.
What is an email marketing strategy for eCommerce & why it’s important?
A little bit of planning and focus goes a long way…
Whether you want to drive sales, generate leads, or nurture brand loyalty – a carefully constructed email marketing strategy is the best way to reach your end goal.
A good email marketing strategy outlines what your goals are and how you’re going to get there.
By setting specific targets, focusing on messaging in each stage of your customer journey, getting creative with content or formats, or using automation, your email campaigns have the potential to be highly successful.
Now don’t get me wrong, email is a powerful channel for your business, and having the right strategy in place can bring in significant revenue.
However, it isn’t a channel for beginners. Email marketing is a competitive and savvy place. If you don’t know what you’re doing find someone who does.
That being said, here are the top 4 reasons you need a strong eCommerce email marketing strategy ASAP.
The benefits of having a solid email marketing strategy for eCommerce
An effective email marketing strategy for eCommerce:
1. Can drive more sales,
2. Is cost-effective and
3. You can track ROI as well as see your audience (and profits) grow!
Plus, tracking sent emails helps you pinpoint exactly which messages are working best for your business. Once you have your email strategy in place it gives you a clear competitive advantage.
How do you develop an email marketing strategy?
Before you enjoy the golden eggs of your email marketing, you have to lay the groundwork.
A solid email marketing strategy for eCommerce has 4 stages:
-
Set up core email automation for pre-purchase (welcome series, pop-ups, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment) and post-purchase (thank-you email and post-purchase automation), as well as transactional emails (order confirmations).
- Scale by adding new emails for different stages of the journey.
- Segment your lists and send separate pre-purchase and post-purchase email flows to your audience, depending on their purchase history.
- Optimize email subject lines, preview text, your call-to-action (CTAs), landing pages, promotional emails, timing, and body copy for increased conversion rates.
Now the real question is: what’s right for your business, and where do you start?
Most brands are a mix of all stages – they have a couple of things set up from each stage but don’t have a clear birds-eye view of what is happening and what to do next.
Which is understandable, the world of email marketing is vast and complicated.
To help you develop an effective email strategy, I’ve created a list of 6 essential steps you need to take to lay the groundwork. Let’s dive in.
1. Conduct an audit
A thorough account audit is the first step in creating an email marketing strategy. During this stage (for the sake of putting things in perspective, let’s say you hired me to do an audit)… I’d go into your ESP account and conduct a thorough audit.
I look into your engagement rate, deliverability, segmentation, flow setup, and performance, formatting, CTRs, etc. Then I tell you your weak and strong points and what to do to improve them both.
After that, if you decide you want to build a solid, effective email strategy, we set goals…
2. Set goals
What is the main goal for your business today in 30, 90 and 365 days?
Do you want more leads, increased engagement, higher average order value, or more subscriptions?
Your goals determine the actions you should take and it also dictates the course your email strategy takes to support your goals.
For example, if during an audit I notice your last cart abandonment email brings in $3400, we should lengthen a cart abandonment email automation to recover more sales.
3. Know your audience
This phase is crucial to creating a successful strategy.
There’s no such thing as selling to everyone. Even Walmart and Target don’t sell to everyone.
To influence your audience, you have to understand how they think, what challenges they have, and what pains them. The more precisely we define your target audience based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral graphics, the better results you can expect from your email strategy.
4. Map each stage of the customer journey
Different stages of the customer journey require different email approaches. Dissecting each stage and defining what types of emails you should send and when will give you a clear picture of the overall email experience.
The customer journey visualized.
5. Test, optimize, and track
Email marketing is a fluid process. It involves a lot of experiments and learning as you go.
Every email marketing campaign offers plenty of opportunities for testing. From subject lines, content, length, and visuals, to CTA buttons, style, design, and personalization, to see what works best for your target audience.
You can use split testing, multivariate testing and more to understand how different elements alter your consumer’s behavior.
The learnings from your testing will show potential red flags and if there’s room for improvement. Your email marketing strategy should constantly evolve based on the results.
You should think about your email marketing strategy as any other marketing strategy—whether that’s content, growth, or product marketing. Without a strategy, you have no idea what your goals are, and you’ll find yourself ‘throwing things at a wall, hoping they’ll stick.
If you want me to do your account audit – click here.
OR
If you want me to help you build your personalized email strategy – book a call.
Katja
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Katja Mokotar is a professional email Copywriter. She creates email strategies for CPG eCommerce that generate new & repeat customers… and can often be scaled to $1M and beyond.