Ecommerce is developing at a truly spectacular rate. The figures just confirm that buying online is now a part of our lives and can only become an even bigger part.
The digital world is one in which there are more and more businesses offering their products and services. As a result, it is now essential to have a good online marketing strategy. SEO, social media, Search Ads… There are lots of options when it comes to boosting online communications and marketing your goods and services. However, email has a fundamental role in this new scenario. Email – so much a part of our personal and work lives – is one of the most effective channels for communicating with customers and building a relationship. It is also the direct marketing channel with the highest return on investment.
So, if you haven’t already got one, now is the time for your e-business to have a new email marketing strategy.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is defined as the sending of commercial communications to a specific address held in a database to which the addressee has given prior consent. Nevertheless, in digital marketing, the term encompasses much more. Thanks to its accessibility and scalability, email marketing is a channel that is used to lead potential customers into the conversion funnel and increase revisits and brand loyalty.
A good email strategy can be a significant boost to activity in an online outlet and is key to reaching your target audience easily and effectively.
Reasons why you should include email marketing in the digital strategy for your website
Email campaigns are a perfect way to introduce your business and a key step that offers multiple benefits.
- It is cheap and value-for-money
Email marketing is generally thought to give one of the best rates of return of all online marketing strategies. Sending communications by email is one of the least costly direct marketing channels and, at the same time, a strategy whose return on investment (ROI) is among the best. That represents a great opportunity for online stores that can reach and entice their target audience at the maximum level of yield – regardless of how big they are.
Tip: just because it’s cheap and value-for-money doesn’t mean that you should do spam mailings to sell more. Always prioritise quality over quantity. As with any other digital marketing technique, you need to plan a strategy with specific goals and stick to it to get results. - It allows much more segmentation and personalisation
Another really important advantage of email marketing is the very wide scope if offers for segmentation and personalisation of communications sent to your database. Thanks to the different categories and models of segmentation the tool offers, websites can have specific campaigns for each specific target. That way, messages can be unique and personalised by demographics, preferences and even in function of where each person is in the funnel. And the more adapted the content is to specific groups of users, the higher the resulting conversion is likely to be.
Tip: Try to divide up your database to make sure each person receives the content most relevant to them. Segment by type of customer, whether they have already made a purchase, do they keep revisiting, or have they never bought. Segment by behaviour and send more campaigns to those most likely to buy and try to reactivate dormant customers. Or segment by demographics to make the products appeal more to your subscribers. - It is very versatile:
The scope with email marketing to create different types of content in an email makes it a very versatile tool to get people’s attention. It is a channel that can adapt to campaigns of all kinds and the content of communications can be endlessly personalised.
Tip: Make sure the designs of your campaigns are responsive and adapt to devices of different sizes so that people seeing them on devices from desktop to mobile phone have an equally positive experience. - It lets you reach a high percentage of users:
Practically everybody has an email account and they use email in work and outside it. Email is one of the most universally used tools, part of our everyday lives, one that we can access from all our devices. Bearing that in mind, email marketing creates a brilliant opportunity for websites to improve their reach and visibility and reach a wide range of different audiences.
Tip: remember that your emails are addressed to individuals and the process mustn’t appear cold or perfunctory. Introduce yourself, write in a friendly tone, personalise the message and empathise with your audience. - It can be automated and saves time:
Automating email marketing helps to improve the relevance and timeliness of campaigns and can turn a lost opportunity into an opportunity to build a relationship with that person and make a sale.
Automation makes it much easier and faster to hit your goals, saving time for any online outlet.
Tip: use automation to send messages to people automatically when they’ve done specific things. For example, when someone abandons a full basket on your website, make sure they get an email reminding them of what they wanted to buy and offer to help or an incentive to complete their purchase. - Improve customer loyalty and repeat visits:
Email is part of every step of the customer relationship: lead nurturing, prospecting, conversion and building loyalty. And email marketing is ideal to build and maintain a lasting relationship that goes beyond a single sale, increasing the lifetime value of customers.
Thanks to the possibilities of email marketing, websites can generate personalised content and offer exclusive products and services to customers in the database, maintaining a continuous relationship with them in order to meet their needs.
Tip: Take care of every customer, offer them exclusive discounts, let them know about campaigns and offers, send them a birthday present, or just remind them about their favourite products. That way, apart from getting them to visit again, you will make your customers feel valued and they will make you feel valued. - It’s easy to measure:
The only way of knowing if a digital marketing strategy is working is to measure the results. And that is one of the great advantages of email marketing for an online store. To know who has (or has not) opened your email, what time and what product were they interested in, that is just some of the information that you can get from email marketing platforms.
The importance of these metrics is fundamental to know how successful campaigns have been and to know how to improve campaigns to get more from your strategy.
Tip: This channel is perfect for A/B tests. Select a small part of your database and split it in two, send a different version of an email to each group. It’s great to compare the outcomes and keep the more successful version.
Email marketing has established itself as one of the most powerful tools to reach people and a perfect partner for online businesses. So, use all Trilogi’s tips do make a step change in sales via your online store.
