If you want to build a sustainable, scalable, and competitive eCommerce business today, you have to be willing and able to invest in email marketing. A well-executed email strategy can help you boost brand and product awareness, qualify and prioritize leads and increase traffic to your store. Moreover, it can also drive repeat sales and build a stronger, more profitable eCommerce business over time.
In this article, we are going to explore the specific email marketing tips to increase your sales. Keep in mind that you need to follow each one of those steps if you want to get great results when running an email campaign.
- Define a Target Audience
Defining a target audience means separating groups of people based on their buying patterns, demographics, profile data, and so on. Once you’ve defined who your target audience is, you can segment them much easier.
Instead of sending generic emails, segmentation allows you to add a touch of personalization to your emails. This helps you build a relationship with those subscribers which, in turn, can help you increase your sales.
Some common fields to segment your customers’ emails list by,
- Location – location segmentation is a common strategy when a target audience has different preferences based on their location.
- Demographics – Demographics explain who your buyer is. This may include gender, age, education, employment, income level, and so on.
- Psychographics – Psychographics explains why your customer buys and what your user prefers. This includes behavioral patterns, opinions about your brand, lifestyles, and hobbies.
- Keep Your Messages Short and Concise
Most people are bombarded with emails every day. Thus, keep your messages short and concise to make it easy for your subscribers to scan them quickly if they need to. Remember, you are essentially trying to reach out to people who do not have much time on hand.
Emails filled with many topics, ideas, and news that would need a minimum of 10 minutes of uninterrupted reading to get through simply do not get the results an email marketer might want.
Your ultimate goal here is being concise and straightforward so that your email directs the recipient into a buying action. It should be engaging, fun to read. However, it should take a few moments to grasp and act in the first place.
- Consider Timing/Frequency
The timing in which you send your campaigns is one of the most critical elements to focus on in any effective email marketing strategy. You may be working from New York, but perhaps a large portion of your target demographic is in a different time zone. Hence, time your campaign based on the time zones that your recipients live in.
The goal here is that they receive your messages at an hour that is convenient and appropriate for them. If you are looking to maximize user engagement with your emails but are not sure when to send, a good place to start is by considering three core time slots. The first one is in the morning when your users are commuting or arriving at work. The second one is during the early afternoon, on their lunch break, and in the evening when they are home.
Aside from the timing of your email, the frequency at which you disseminate your messages also plays a significant role in performance. Sending messages too often can harm the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. Therefore, choose the frequency based on your customer’s purchase patterns. If customers typically make repeat purchases every six months, do not inundate them with targeted email advertising right after they have made a purchase.
You should not be sending a new email each and every day—that is how you will get a surge in unsubscribes. The optimal frequency may vary for different industries. For some, sending an email once a month maybe just enough.
- Personalize Your Emails
After segmenting the emails by groups and picking the optimal frequency, it is time to consider personalizing your emails for better results. If you individualize each message, you show your subscribers that you are paying attention to who they are and what they care about the most.
You need to create engaging content that relates to their needs. This can include sending out personalized images and videos, including names or recent purchases within your email content, sending out product-focused content that only relates to specific email lists, and getting creative with your storytelling content.
By personalizing emails in a step-by-step process based on relevance, your messages will be more effective since the content relates to what initially caused them to interact with your brand.
- Have a Convincing Subject Line
The subject line is merely a couple of words that can decide the future of your emails. It plays a crucial role in getting people to open your email, delete it or, even worse, report it as spam. Similar to the title of the content, your email subject line must grab the recipients’ attention and convince them to open it.
People open your emails if they feel they will benefit, if they are worried about missing out, or if you present compelling evidence about why they should. Do not use too many words to make an impression. Even less of your subject line shows on mobile screens, so it is wise to put the most important parts at the start.
- Present a Value With Each Email
What identifies a really successful email marketing campaign is its ability to leave customers with value. Something that keeps your business on their mind, whether that is educational information about your industry, promotional offer or holiday discounts. Otherwise, it will end up in spam or trash folder.
- Include Attractive Visuals
Visual content marketing can be defined as the use of multimedia to bolster the impact of your content marketing. This can be in the form of:
- Videos
- Images
- GIFs
- Infographics
- Cinemographs
Using visual content in your marketing is essential since it helps make your content more engaging. The more impactful your content is, the easier it is for you to turn readers into customers. Visual content has much higher chances to stick to your audiences’ minds for a longer time.
As tempting as it is to merely use any eye-catching image, you should limit your visual content to images that help portray your brand. Use content that:
- Follows your brand guideline
- Employs your color scheme
- Tells your brand story
When implementing a visual content strategy, don’t forget that each visual element must complement the content it goes with. Moreover, for a better result, it needs to enhance it. Otherwise, it will just be a distraction.
- Optimize Each Message for Mobile Users
Email design has been a hot topic in recent years, mostly thanks to the rise of smartphones. More people than ever are checking email on their mobile device. This is why email marketing has become one of the most substantial channels of mobile marketing.
Since a large portion of email marketing campaigns ends up in mobile devices, they need to be mobile-friendly for added efficiency. The problem is that you do not have much space to draw in your readers. Hence, try to keep your subject lines concise and compelling that can make readers want to know more.
Here is how:
- Use numbers, symbols, or emojis.
- Leverage the power of personalization.
- Use creativity.
Most email marketing providers can offer you options to optimize your campaigns for mobile users. Besides that, a simple test on one mobile device can identify the possible pitfalls of your campaign.
- Update Your Email Database Regularly
An engaged email list is a profitable one. When subscribers open, click, and share your emails, they are not only more aware of your product, but they are more likely to buy from you. Subscribers who are not interested are not worth keeping around. Therefore, don’t hesitate to remove some contacts from time to time.
- If your list is two years old, scrap it and start new. Two years is a long time, and there is no way to know if subscribers are still interested in your emails.
- If your list is old and not used consistently, you need to refresh it. Remove the contacts that joined your email list last year and didn’t convert at all. Run those names through a validation program like Kickbox to eliminate emails that are no longer used. Now, send the group an email and see how it goes.
- If subscribers are inactive, try to win them back. Define your ideal customer and try to address each of your emails for them.
Armed with these effective and practical email marketing tips, you are in a better position to design and run successful email marketing campaigns. Remember, email marketing is not a game of chance. You have to put certain systems and structures in place for you to see a good ROI (Return on investment).
Author Bio
Artyom Matevosyan is a content writer for SendSMS.Global, specialized in digital marketing.
Having his major in English & Communications, Artyom is passionate about writing. His writing is always backed up by thorough research above anything else—facts first, narratives second.
Email Marketing Tips to Increase Sales
