What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the practice of sending marketing messages to prospective and current customers via email to sell, educate, or build loyalty.

At its crux, email marketing is about building trust with your existing and potential customers. To accomplish this, you may use a promotional email, a personalized transactional email, free shipping coupons, and anything else that will encourage loyalty.

Email is an “owned” digital marketing channel—that is, the sender fully controls the content and distribution—and typically works best when used to send personal, relevant messages to segmented lists of recipients. Email is an especially important tool for e-commerce, where it’s used for sending transactional, promotional, and lifecycle messages.

Why email marketing is key to e-commerce success

The reality of website traffic, even highly targeted traffic, is most new visitors to your store will never return—unless, that is, you do something to keep them coming back.

Building an email list and sending compelling broadcasts gives you a way to retain the traffic you worked so hard to earn by providing subscribers with an incentive to stay in touch. Successful online retailers know that one of the most reliable and profitable methods is email marketing.

Getting email marketing right, though, may be challenging. There are so many things in an email campaign that can cause failure. After giving it a go, you may find yourself quickly giving up on the idea altogether.

Email marketing accounts for approximately 23% of sales, rendering it one of the most effective marketing channels at your disposal. Just like personalized ads and landing pages, personalized emails can have a big impact on your bottom line. 

Getting started with email marketing

Even the best email marketing strategy begins with choosing an email marketing service or collaborating with an online platform like Hobo.Video, establishing a plan to generate new subscribers, and understanding how to send emails legally.

• Be Visually Appealing

This can be done with images, yes, but you can also use non-image formatting like headings and bullets to break up text and make your emails easy to read.

• Look Good on Mobile

Chances are, your email service provider uses responsive templates that automatically adjust based on the display screen’s size. With Constant Contact, you can preview or send a test email to make sure things look the way you want.

• Be Easy to Understand

It’s best to focus on a single call-to-action in each email, so start with a plan!

• Capture the Reader’s Interest

Never underestimate the power of your words. Start with a hook and make sure your email copy pulls your reader deeper into the email as you go.

Don’t forget that you can also upsell and cross-sell in your emails! This is especially effective for transactional emails.

• Create Responsive, Well-Designed Emails

All emails coming from your eCommerce business need to be responsive and well-designed, from welcome emails to promotional emails including transactional emails.

This doesn’t mean that every email has to have images and GIFs. Text-only emails do well when they’re interesting.

7 tried and true tactics to sell your online products in 2021

1. Start With a Welcome Email Series

A welcome email sequence automatically gets sent to new subscribers when they sign up. It’s a series of emails that thank people for signing up, introduce them to your business, and outline what they can expect from your emails.

Ask any online business owner about their biggest marketing regret and many will tell you it’s that they didn’t start collecting email addresses from Day 1. Learn from this frequent mistake and start growing your list of subscribers as soon as you can, even before you launch your business.

When new subscribers sign up for your eCommerce newsletter, they’re expecting to hear from you. That’s why they signed up.

The best time to reach out to new subscribers is right after they’ve signed up; this is when they’re looking for an email from you.

2. Use Personalization to Target Different Segments

You may have more than one target audience that you’re trying to reach. It’s not uncommon for a product or service to appeal to more than just one segment of the population.

But what if you know you’re not going to be able to reach your entire audience with a single message? That’s where personalization comes in.

3. Offer Exclusive Discounts to Loyal Customers

Keep your most loyal customers coming back to your store again and again with a loyalty program.

Repeat customers are the bread and butter that will feed your business and help it grow. One of the quickest and easiest ways to build a committed and loyal following is by creating a special loyalty club for your best and brightest.

4. Design Email Templates

Next, pre-design your email templates so you can quickly send emails as and when you want to. This means you won’t have to design your emails from scratch every time and can instead choose a template to work from.

Design email templates that use your brand logo and colors that can be used for different campaigns as well as your newsletter. 

Most email services like Sendinblue have customizable templates or drag-and-drop email editors so you don’t have to have any coding skills to get started. You can also download templates from one of the many free e-mail template sources.

5. Choose the Right Email Frequency

How often will you keep in touch with your customers? You ideally want to find the balance between staying fresh in their minds and not showing up too often so that it’s annoying. 

You might choose to send out a weekly newsletter, or you might decide to only email your subscribers when you run promotions or launch new products.

These aren’t the only types of emails you can send; try experimenting by sending reviews, customer stories, or sneak peeks behind the scenes. 

6. Segment Your List

Segmenting your list is a great way to hone in on specific customer interests. For example, if you sell wine and cheese, you might have customers who are only interested in cheese and therefore get turned off when you send emails about wine. 

Avoid turning off customers by creating lists of subscribers based on certain actions they’ve taken (like whether they’ve bought multiple products multiple times from you) or who like certain product lines. You can then send personalized emails that cater to their specific interests and needs. 

7. Consider the Opportunities With Every Email 

Your transactional emails are prime real estate because you know they’re going to end up in your customer’s inbox (unlike your promotional emails, which might accidentally sneak into Spam or Promotions folders). 

Use this opportunity to encourage customer reviews, get feedback from buyers, and remind them of other products you have available. 

Your email marketing strategy is the key to staying connected with customers and ensuring they have a great experience with your business. If they do, they’re far more likely to come back and become loyal customers that buy again and again.