E-mail Marketing
E-mail is a tried and true method of marketing for many eCommerce stores. You can drive sales, and often your customers have already opted in for you to email them. However, you need to be careful to not bombard your customers with emails. If you do, they'll stop reading them, or worse yet, unsubscribe. Great marketing with e-mail means that your message is timely, relevant to the customer, and often times it's personalized.
E-Mail Categories
There are a few different types of e-mail you can send. Transaction emails are e-mails where you include receipts, tracking numbers, and so on. Promotional emails are those where you highlight sales, discount codes, new products and even newsletters. Lifecycle emails highlight a certain behaviour from a customer like abandoned carts, subscriptions, and the likes.
The Elements of a good E-Mail
A good e-mail should have a relevant and catchy subject line. Don't over-do it on caps or emojis, but try and make something that stands out, or makes the receiver want to know more. Make sure to send e-mails at reasonable times. If you're sending e-mails from Canada at 10PM to your German customers, it's going to reach their inbox in the early AM. They may never open it or see it.
The Body of an E-Mail
The format of your e-mail is important. Make sure the content is structured and easily readable in all formats (desktop and mobile) and for different OS's. Add images and colour and other fancy aspects as needed. But don't over-do it. They can cause loading or formatting issues if you use them too intensely.
Measure the success of your E-Mails
You want to see how your e-mails are performing, so make sure to track them. You probably want to track the open rate to see how many people are even opening the e-mail rather than immediately deleting it or ignoring it entirely. Track the bounce rate as well, which is how many e-mails don't make it due to incorrect e-mails, spam filters, or closed or inactive accounts. Click-through rate is another thing you can track. This is the percentage of your customers that click on a link or button and engage with your e-mail. On the flip side of this metric, measure the number of customers opting out of receiving your emails or who are unsubscribing.
