10 Email Marketing Strategies to Increase your E-commerce Revenues

At the center of all marketing efforts in e-commerce is email marketing. According to Data and Marketing Association, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Email marketing, when done correctly, can be responsible for a good percentage of your total e-commerce revenue. 

People are almost drowning in the enormous amount of content thrown at them online. For businesses, the result can be likened to shooting one’s head off on a busy road – very ineffective. But you can print the same message on fliers and distribute them. In email marketing, the first thing is to ”distribute your fliers.” You can start by launching an awareness campaign. Your strategy should be positioned to get people on your email list as well.

Any successful online retailer knows how important and reliable email marketing is in improving eCommerce revenue. When you can put together strategies that work and consistently follow them through, you will get the desired results.

These email marketing strategies will improve your email marketing campaign and revenue drastically:

1.  Personalization

2. Welcome Emails

3. Incentives

4. Notifications

5. Segmentation

6. Re-engagement

7. Optimization

8. Call-to-action

9. Integration

10. Automation

1. Personalization – send your emails like letters

Imagine distributing a letter addressed to specific individuals instead of a flier. The way the recipients will treat both will most certainly be different. Okay, enough of imaginations, but you get the drift.

Personalized emails are not treated the same way as a ”mass-produced” email, shipped to anyone who cares to open it. Be specific. Let your audience feel special. You can achieve this by utilizing the power of automation. Again, statistics don’t lie. An email has an average open rate of 20.81%, but when you personalize your emails, you have a chance to get a 50% higher open rate!

“Hi James, I thought that I should take a moment to tell you about some of our new products. If you have a minute, you can check them out here (link provided here).” Now, wouldn’t you click on that link? You sure will, James!

2.   Welcome Emails – A warm welcome never fails

We can’t talk about an effective email marketing campaign without talking about open rates. Welcome emails have an average open rate of 82%. You are probably nodding your head right now – that’s high! Statistics don’t lie. With such a high open-rate, your welcome email is primarily an opportunity to make a lasting, positive first impression. Furthermore, you can pass some useful information about your online store and products.

You might want your audience to also know about a promotion or you could throw in a coupon in your welcome email because of the high open-rate. Let’s talk about incentives.

3.   Incentives – who doesn’t like discounts?

This is where you tell your customers about a promotion or a coupon in your email. Beyond welcome emails, incentives are an excellent strategic addition to your email marketing campaign.

Incentives can motivate people to take action, from signing up for your mailing list to making their first purchase. Incentives can be tied to an event or a holiday, for instance, a “Christmas sales promo with a 50% discount.”

4. Notifications – talk about your latest arrivals

Some apps on your mobile phone notify you when there’s new content or a message. To increase your e-commerce revenue, you want to tell your customers about your new arrivals. Remember the personalized email to James? 

This is an excellent way to inform your customers about new stocks. You can also re-engage customers that abandoned similar products in their carts. This strategy will be most effective for online stores that get new stock regularly. 

A regular basis doesn’t have to be every week. If you get new stock a few times a year, you can launch a “new arrival” campaign strategically for those periods.

5. Segmentation – know your audience

Segmenting your mailing list will help you speak to your customers’ specific needs and interests. For instance, if you run an online fashion store, Maureen’s needs and interests will be different from James’.

Segmentation will help you send content that each customer is interested in. This will improve your clicks and open rate, which in turn improves your revenue.

6. Re-engagement – remind shoppers about items left in their carts

As we have seen, segmentation helps you easily engage with customers who have left items in their online carts without purchasing them. Almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and online stores can recover up to 30% of cart abandonment via email marketing.

7. Optimization – you are looking at more mobile users than you realize

Let’s consult statistics again. According to Statista (August 2020), ”The number of smartphone users worldwide today surpasses three billion and is forecast to further grow by several hundred million in the next few years.” Interestingly, the number of global email users is slightly over three billion as well.

A sizable number of that statistics access their emails on their smartphones. Many get their emails via their mobile phones only. And a good number who do so on other devices also access their emails on their mobile phones.

8. Call-to-action – what do you want your audience to do?

Call-to-action is an excellent way to inform your audience about what action you want them to take after reading your email. So, you should do a fantastic job of conveying a degree of urgency in your messaging.

Phrases like ‘hurry now’, ‘offer ends at midnight’, ‘click now to redeem’, etc. can be used to influence your customers not just to act but to act immediately.

9. Integration – email marketing plus social media marketing equals magic

Most of your customers are on social media. Connecting with your customers on social media helps you build a strong relationship with them.

You can be at your customers’ touchpoints throughout their journey to making a buying decision. This many times involves getting information from more than one platform.

10.   Automation – let’s be honest, you can’t do so much without it

According to Forbes, ”Automation is the future. Marketing automation, in particular, can turn a lean marketing team into a force to be reckoned with, allowing startups and growing businesses to compete with large-scale enterprises in the war for customer attention.” 

You can leverage data journeys to send personalized emails and perform other actions based on your customers’ actions.

The bottom Line

ECommerce is growing exponentially today, fuelled in part by the number of brick-and-mortar businesses moving their operations online due to COVID-19. This can be overwhelming, but technology is here to help. In Canada only, the eCommerce market is projected to hit the US$ 40M mark by 2025. In other words: there’s no better time for online sellers to embrace marketing automation and really make a difference when it comes to increasing revenues.