There’s nothing better for business than a direct line of contact to consumers — that’s exactly why email marketing is so popular among brands. You maintain a consistent line of communication with your audience and the best part, it’s free.
Why Should I Invest in Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an important part of your creative content marketing plan because it allows you to deliver important news to your customers. Promotions, new products, and especially sales announcements are great ways to keep your audience interested and listening. On average, when brands spend $1 in email marketing, they generate $38 in ROI - yes that translates to 3,800% ROI! With these odds, there’s no reason not to invest in email marketing.
Where Should I Start?
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is start. If you’re unsure about what kind of content your audience wants to see and you don’t exactly know in what medium they want news delivered to them, all you have to do is ask! One of the best ways to launch your email marketing strategy is to collect as much information from your consumers so you can know what they want.
Create a survey and ask users questions such as: would you rather see an image or a video? Do you like new product or sales announcements better? What’s the best time to send an update to you? Before you ask, yes, it’s perfectly fine to ask users these questions! No, you won’t drive them away. These kinds of engagements show that your brand actually cares about what consumers want to see. You also gain valuable information not only for your email marketing plan, but for your eCommerce SEO as well because you can source keywords from user responses.
When creating your survey, the one thing you want to make sure of is that your content is optimized for mobile devices. According to Campaign Monitor, mobile is the most popular environment for a subscriber’s first interaction with an email!
What Should the First Email Be About?
Now that you’ve gained a bunch of subscribers and you’re starting to see more traffic on your website, say hello! Create a welcome series, which are emails that are meant solely to greet new subscribers. You want to craft your welcome emails very carefully. Make sure you’re expressing gratitude and excitement for their subscription while still keeping it short and simple. You’ll have plenty of time to send them updates and notifications later, but for right now a quick hello and thank you will suffice. As online marketing veteran Nadav and the Founder & CEO of InboundJunction says:
Your welcome email is primarily transactional – it’s meant to confirm that the audience member did indeed opt in and that you can indeed reach him or her via the inbox. Beyond that, it’s an excellent opportunity to cultivate patterns of engagement.
It’s easy to get caught in the excitement of a new potential customers, but tread carefully because your welcome email will be one of the first digital impressions you make!
How Do I Keep Users Engaged?
While emails can primarily be used for announcements and updates on a mass scale, one of the best ways to stand out in a user’s inbox is through personalization. 74% of marketers agree that email personalization increases customer engagement, and it’s been proven that personalized emails have an improved click through rate of 14%, and can increase conversions by 10%. Personalization is on track to being one of the most utilized content marketing trends of 2018.
Sending news about your products and sales isn’t the difficult part, what drives your ROI is how well you know your audience. Much like eCommerce SEO, there are certain keywords that get users to click. In this instance, it’s their name. Try including first names in the subject lines of your emails. It attracts attention and instantly sets your email apart from the others flooding your users’ inboxes.
Past the subject line, you want to actually show your users personalized content. Remember the survey you took at the beginning? This is where you apply that information! Make notes of which users like beauty over tech updates, or which users like robot videos versus cat memes. This information is going to be crucial when building a strong relationship with your consumers because they want to know you recognize them as an individual and what their unique preferences are when it comes to your branded content.
How Do I Keep Users Coming Back?
When you’ve managed a creative content marketing plan long enough you realize it’s inevitable that users leave. Whether it’s a couple clicks on your website, to completely abandoning their cart, users will always come and go as they please. Don’t worry though, there’s always a way back into their hearts through retargeting!
When users are retargeted, you increase their chances of conversion by 70%. To do this through email, your team needs to start breaking down where users are falling off on their journey. Once you identify those points, you can create content specifically tailored to different stages of the customer journey and include an appropriate call-to-action. If you know users are just going to your website to do some research on your products and services, it would be more appealing to add a “Learn More” CTA button, as opposed to a “Continue Shopping.”
Joanna Lord, CMO of Moz, notes in her presentation that;
[r]etargeting is its own channel and must be managed accordingly. This happens by knowing your goal, targeting at the right point, having compelling creatives, relevant landing pages, optimizing your budget and adding consistent updates from your team.
How Do I Remember All Of This?
Just like eCommerce SEO, we know that remembering all the logistics of an email marketing campaign can be tough. Keeping all those steps in mind from start to finish is some serious stuff, especially when you’re thinking about integrating these tips into your 2018 creative content marketing plan. Hopefully this article helped you learn step by step how to execute an effective email marketing campaign that will drive ROI for eCommerce. Just in case, here are those tips one more time:
- Create a survey that asks users what kind and what type of content they want to see in their inbox
- Start your new email relations through a welcome series to make the perfect first impression
- Personalize your audience’s content so they feel more engaged with your brand
- Retarget users at different stages of the customer journey to increase your conversions
Good luck!
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Therese Palmere
Therese Palmere is a content writer and content marketing plan consultant for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency that specializes in creating the perfect user experience design. She writes on a variety of topics that range from social media to emerging technological trends.
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