If you own an e-commerce business and sell products or services through an online store, then you should use e-marketing to acquire potential customers, attract them to purchases and turn them into regular customers who will help your brand develop.
In his book, The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business, KeySplash Creative Inc. CEO Susan Gunelius explains how automated email marketing works.
Using Email
One of the advantages is that many tools make it easy to create messages that are automatically sent when contacts in your list satisfy a predefined condition. Automated email marketing can save you a lot of time because you set it up once and it will work until you stop it.
The goal is to use active behavior and the emotions of consumers associated with it at a certain time in order to improve your business relationships with recipients, increase revenue or encourage consumers to make further purchases. If you send the right information by e-mail at the right time, it is obvious that they are more likely to notice this information and act in accordance with it.
If you want to get started with automated email marketing, there are five important aspects that every e-commerce business owner should consider.
Welcome message
Your welcome message is sent immediately after someone is added to your list of email addresses. This is the first contact between your brand and new subscribers, so make sure the message matches your brand promise and sets accurate expectations. It is recommended to explain how often consumers will receive messages from you, what content you will include, what special benefits they receive as subscribers and how to contact you if they have questions.
In addition, you can include links to your company’s website and social media accounts. You can also include a special discount as a thank you for subscribing with a link to your online store. Just be careful not to make the message completely self-promoting, otherwise it will annoy your new subscribers.
Message about items in the basket
Remarketing can be very effective in encouraging people to make purchasing decisions. If someone enters your online store, puts the goods in their shopping cart and then leaves your site before making a purchase, you must encourage him to make a final decision and buy the selected product. You can do this by setting up an automatic email to encourage them to make a purchase.
For example, your message may contain a special offer, for example, free delivery or a discount on the whole purchase. In this case, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that people who leave their basket have almost completed a purchase. Do your research and find out when people leave their shopping baskets. The problem may be in the process of placing an order, in the cost of delivery, or in something else. Until you solve this problem, you can try to return the people who left their baskets using automatic marketing emails.
Cross sell message
When a customer buys something from your online store, which of your related products or services can naturally complement his purchase? Define these groups and pairs, and then configure the accompanying automatic email marketing messages that are sent when the customer purchases the product.
For example, if a customer buys puppy food at your pet supplies online store, it might make sense to send an automatic message offering goodies for the puppy, toys, or carpet cleaners. You can enable a discount on these positions if you want to increase conversion, but it is always useful to check cross-selling messages with and without discounts to see if discounts are actually converted more successfully, since there is no reason to lose money on discounts if there isn’t necessary.
Anniversary and / or birthday
If customers have provided you with information about their birthdays, you can set up an automatic message to wish them good with a special discount or offer. You can do the same on the anniversary of their first purchase from you or, if they haven’t made a purchase, on the day they subscribe to your mailing list.
These types of automatic messages can help deepen your brand relationship with customers. Birthday greetings or gratitude to people for being customers or subscribers every year can lead to increased loyalty, additional sales and brand protection.
Repeated message
If the subscribers in your email marketing list do not open your messages, then most likely they are not in your list. Unconfirmed subscribers can adversely affect how all your marketing campaigns are delivered via email, which means that your future messages will generally end up in fewer mailboxes. You need to try re-engaging your subscribers or removing them from your list in order to increase delivery efficiency.
How often you will send repeated messages depends on how often you send messages to your subscribers in general. If you send only one message per month, then it is advisable to set up re-engagement for subscribers who have not opened your message for 6 or 12 months. If you send messages weekly or more often, you can reduce this time period to three months. The goal is to remove people from your list who are not interested in your content or offers, because the lack of participation can prevent your messages from reaching the mailboxes of people who are interested and will buy your goods.