5 Tips Why Email Marketing Is Crucial To Your Ecommerce Business

The eCommerce industry has been rapidly expanding making it tougher for competition. Whether you deal in grocery, baby products, clothing wear, trainers etc. – there are thousands of other competitors within this space. Although online shopping has been growing over the years due to increase customer demand, acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones is a daily challenge for many online retailers.

Customers would normally research online for a product they are interested in buying before making that final decision of placing an order based on the best deal from a credible retailer within the market. There is no doubt you can drive traffic to your online shop using Pay Per Click (Ppc), Google Shopping, Remarketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Content Marketing, Referral and Affiliate Marketing  but the is no guarantee that shoppers would purchase from you at the first instance – right?

Millennials and Youngsters still use email very much in their daily life. It is estimated about 91% of consumers check their emails daily and this communication medium is definitely a place for marketers to promote their online store or popular products ‘directly’ to interested individual shoppers. The number of e-mail users worldwide is forecasted to rise to 2.9 billion users by 2019. (Source: Statista, 2016)

Ecommerce customers who received multiple abandoned shopping cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete the purchase than those who receive only one follow up email. (Source: Experian, 2016)

Here are 5 tips why email marketing in crucial for your ecommerce business.

1. Email continues to be a cost effective channel

Sending emails is not as expensive like other digital marketing channels of advertising. You can send your customers emails using if you have a gmail, yahoo and Hotmail accounts. But as a professional eccomerce business, it’s best to have a customised email account with your domain name which reassures and provides consistency and trustworthiness of your brand. A personal email from the founder, owner, and popular sales/known face within your business definitely builds trust and creates a good relationship with your audience/customers.

To get the best out of your email campaigns, it best to use email service platforms that are low cost and provides value for money. These include SendinBlue, MailGet Bolt, MailGet, Mailchimp, iContact, BestResponse, Constant Contact etc. These email marketing platform provide you with tools to easily create professional newsletters/emails and send out to everyone on your email list.

2. Email Has A Good Click Though Rate (CTR) Compared To Other Channels

According to Smart insights, Small and Medium Enterprise email marketing campaigns provided the following:

• Open Rate: 24.79%
• Average Click Through Rate: 3.42%

With this stats in mind, it’s estimated an email list of 2,000 opted in subscribers will provide an average of 66 click for each message – this sounds impressive to me.….doesn’t it?

Actual CTRs vary widely by country, industry, and channel and by paid/unpaid links. Nevertheless it does set the background for some useful comparisons.

3.Old And Repeat Customers Spend More Than New Customers

It is estimated it cost 7-10 times mores of advertising spend to acquire a new customer. This is why it’s essential you treat your existing and repeat customer well so their purchase continue to provide incremental profit for your eccomerce business. These customers already trust your business and therefore don’t need much convincing to purchase from you again and again.

It’s crucial to keep the relationship ongoing with old and repeat customers all the time, so your brand remains in their mind – and that is where email marketing can be so effective. Regular weekly or monthly emails to these segment of customer based on their purchase history is key to your email success.

4. Email Drives Traffic And Sales Uplift

Return on investment from email marketing has remained consistently high over the years and this is a reason why many businesses still use email marketing. Email has the ability to communicate your messages to particular segments on your email list and therefore you can use your email list to reach your customers in a wide variety of ways. Below are some ways you could entice your eccomence customer

• Special occasion emails for customers on their birthdays and holiday offers
• New product launch and offerings
• Reward loyal customers with exclusive discounts
• Cart Abandonment email reminders to ensure that customers comeback and complete their purchase
• Review and feedback from customers that can be used as testimonials or customer success stories

5. Extensive Reach, Sharable and Great Content Value

The potential to reach millions of customers with email both private and work email is staggering. Even though without customers emails there is that possibility of asking for them when you drive traffic to a landing page, with informative and education content that are of interest to such audiences. Whiles most customers have facebook, twitter and linkedin accounts, they normally check their emails (work & private) daily and several times.

Email has great delivery rate too, which depending on the quality of your email list and engagement with your audience can help get the best click through rate for campaigns. It’s always good practise to send tailored, personalised, engaging and relevant branded messages to your targeted audience.

Emails are eminently sharable depending on how it’s created. At the click of a button an email can be forwarded or shared on social media based on using templates that provide all these features. Customers are far more willing to share a branded email to friends or colleagues that a facebook post. With Links to landing pages in marketing emails can also be copied and pasted into social media content and shared on other channels. The key is keeping your content relevant and valuable with emails.

Conclusion:

Email marketing campaigns are cost-effective forms of generating leads or sales online for many businesses as on average it provides 21% return on investment. Email marketing is a critical and strategic component of any ecommerce business marketing plans. From newsletters to abandoned cart recovery emails to quarterly report sharing and even the personalisation of the sales journey, email is playing a growing role in online marketing. So take advantage of this and make the best out of it.