Email marketing continues to be a critical strategy for marketers. While social media is becoming more and more popular and is an essential endeavor in the marketing plan, the best way to get personalized communications to customers is through email. Not only that, but email marketing continues to be an overall low-cost tactic in comparison to some more traditional forms of marketing such as direct mail, email, and television.
As it turns out, consumers actually prefer to communicate via email more than social media, phone calls, and text messages. Email provides an opportunity for people to respond when it is convenient for them and takes away some of the pressure of that waiting voicemail or text message. Add this to the notion that people tend to have far more consistent access to their email accounts than social media accounts, and it makes email marketing quite the no brainer.
To ensure an email marketing strategy is successful, marketers need to send various emails to ensure that they can get in front of customers at the right time with the right message. This means that personalized, segmented, and triggered emails are critical to an email marketing strategy. Automated emails and email drip campaigns play a vital role at the center of any marketing strategy. When the eCommerce side of the business is able to nurture the leads that come in through triggered emails, average order value (AOV) and conversion rates increase, often dramatically.
Critical emails for your business
The list below highlights six critical emails that are important for any business. These emails are tried and true in keeping customers engaged and driving them to conversion and continued spend.
- Welcome series email – The welcome email creates the very first impression that your customer or prospective customer has of your company. Content within these emails can vary, but often include special offers, sign-up forms, or simply a hello or welcome aboard type of message. To tie together your various marketing channels, welcome emails can consist of links to your social channels at the end so that customers can click to follow. This helps ensure that your customers can receive a cross-channel marketing experience with your brand.
- Abandoned cart reminders – Nearly 80% of shoppers abandon a site without completing the transaction, and while this varies depending on the product or service being sold, or even the site experience itself, there are a variety of methods that retail marketers can engage in getting that customer to return and convert. Abandoned cart emails are one of those strategies. To maximize conversions, ensure that these emails include either an offer for a discount, a low-inventory reminder, or a did you forget something type of call to action.
- Purchase follow-up – After a customer has made a purchase, especially if it is a higher-end product or service, a follow-up email to thank the customer and inquire as to their complete satisfaction can be highly effective and much appreciated by the customer. These emails are a great way to demonstrate that your business cares about their satisfaction and that even though they have paid, you want to provide assistance should they need anything.
- Re-engagement prompts – If you have customers that have seemed to disappear or their cadence of purchases has dropped off, this is a great opportunity to reach out to see if you can get them to reengage. This can also help to draw out loyalty from a customer who has started looking at one of your competitors. When you reach out and remind them that you are thinking of them, customers often reengage. Automated re-engagement emails can send prompted messages that feature a too-good-to-pass-up offer that is highlighted in the subject line or main title of the email. Free products, discounts, giveaways, and contests are often appreciated by customers who have disappeared for some time.
- Upsell and cross-sell offers – When automation and analytics are used to their advantage, emails that provide some sort of cross-sell or upsell message based on the customer’s recent purchase can result in quick follow-on transactions. These emails build off of what was just purchased and can offer complementary products or relevant accessories that can enhance the customer’s enjoyment of the original purchase.
- Updates and education – Today’s consumers are smarter than ever based on the vast amount of data that can be found online. Gone are the days when salespeople had to educate customers about every detail of a product. Now, in many cases, consumers are just as, if not more informed than anyone else. For this reason, customers appreciate receiving notifications in advance of important changes to your business, coming product or service enhancements, and how-to type information that can make them even smarter. Customers love to be in the know.
Automation keeps your email marketing at the top of your overarching plan
Email marketing won’t be going away anytime soon. If your business isn’t yet taking to email to help with customer acquisition or to keep existing customers and prospects engaged, now is the time to start. Further, the use of email continues to grow. In 2015, over 205 billion emails were sent and received each and every day and that is anticipated to reach 246 billion per day by the end of this year (2019). And if those statistics aren’t impressive enough, consider that 4.2 billion people are estimated to use email by the end of 2022. That is well over half of the world’s population!
If your organization is not using the above-mentioned email strategies, it is never too late to get started. Marketers are not expected to go at this alone either. Partners such as Shop Style Design are ready and able to help your organization to develop an email strategy that will not only acquire and convert new customers, but that will pay for itself with a positive return on investment (ROI) in just a short period of time. Just like email strategies are designed to create a personalized approach to building customer relationships, at Shop Style Design, we believe that a relationship-centric approach is critical in everything that we do. We’re here to assist you in building and deploying your email marketing strategy – every step of the way.
