Most e-commerce business owners tend to be quite familiar with every marketing channel that’s available to them, but plenty of them tend to overlook how important and valuable email marketing can be. Unlike SEO or social media platforms, email marketing is quite unique because companies are in charge of every step of the buying journey for their customers. Additionally, companies actually own their email contact list, which makes data collection a lot more important and effective, which is different from, for example, social media platforms, where companies have to rely on data and algorithms that are used by those platforms. Through email marketing, e-commerce businesses can generate more brand awareness, engage more customers, and get more sales to help them grow.
Email marketing
Companies in the e-commerce industry that haven’t started utilizing email marketing strategies before need to take several steps first. The first step is to set sustainable and realistic goals for the campaign that will help the business grow, such as improving customer retention by a specific percentage or building out the email contact list of the business. Businesses also need to choose an email marketing client and map out their initial email marketing campaigns. They also need to decide on the way that they’ll be collecting the email addresses from their customers and then set up landing pages for each campaign that’s been mapped out. The last step is to set up tracking for each campaign with the chosen email marketing client.
Personalization
Most business owners in the e-commerce industry already understand that personalization has bigger chances of compelling people to take action. That means every email that a company sends out to its subscribers needs to be personalized to improve open and click-through rates, as well as the company’s overall revenue. There are three types of personalization that companies can use for their email marketing efforts, including demographic, contextual, and behavioral personalization. Demographic personalization uses the demographic information of the people in the email contact list, such as their age, location, gender, and more, so it can inform the product recommendations for them. Contextual personalization is when the content of the email is personalized according to where that customer is in the different stages of the buying journey. The last type of personalization is behavioral personalization, and this type uses a customer’s website behavior and any past purchases they’ve made to make product recommendations to them.
Automation
In general, automated email campaigns tend to create a lot more revenue for companies compared to their non-automated counterparts. That means companies should be using automated email campaigns in their overall email marketing efforts. These automation efforts can be used to send out different types of emails to different types of customers automatically, without the company having to keep track of what every potential customer did, and only then create the email and send it out to them.