Email marketing is the second most effective online marketing channel. It helps you build stronger relationships with your existing customers, increase their loyalty, and boost your sales.
This research from McKinsey found that email marketing is 40 times more effective for acquiring new customers than other online channels, including search, social media, and direct mail.
With that in mind, I’ve listed four tips on how to build a profitable email campaign that will skyrocket your sales.
Get the Right Leads onto your List
To get your email marketing campaign off the ground, you first need to add the right people on your list. However, with so many channels you use, attracting qualified leads may be challenging. Here are a few proven lead generation tactics:
Create Pop-Ups on your Site
For example, a visitor lands on your online store and the first thing they see is a huge popup promoting your discount.
This is a great way to grab people’s attention, capture their email addresses, and even inspire them to buy without being too pushy.
You can also use an exit intent popup which will help you keep your visitors on your website and trigger a product popup every time they will browse to leave the page.
Use Lead Magnets
In other words, you can give away free exclusive content in exchange for a customer’s email address. For example, these could be some comprehensive guides, eBooks, recipes, to-do lists, templates- basically anything that makes sense for your products and niche.
Run a Giveaway or a Contest
People that consider your products relevant will be eager to give you their email address in order to participate in your massive giveaway. All you need to do is make your contest intriguing, engaging, and ensure your rewards are valuable.
Boost your Promotional Email Campaigns
Now that you’ve attracted people to your email list, you need to inspire your subscribers to buy from you. This is where promotional email campaigns may help you:
Welcome Emails
Research says that, when compared with regular promotional emails, welcome emails have an average read rate of 34%, as well as a higher open rate and CTR. Use them as a chance to grab a subscriber’s attention, connect with them, and inspire them to buy from you or at least check out your offers.
Emails Related to Seasonal Events
For an online retailer, creating convincing email campaigns around big events like Christmas, New Year, Black Friday, or Valentine’s day is immensely important. Make sure your campaigns stand out. This is when most of your competitors will send out similar emails.
Cart Abandonment Emails
Stats warn us that almost 80% of customers abandon shopping carts and your goal is to minimize this number. This is where card abandonment emails step in, as they have a greater open rate and can inspire a customer to come back and finalize the purchase.
Optimize your Landing Pages
When talking about email marketing and sales, we often forget an important thing. Like SEO or social networks, email marketing is just another business promotion medium. It helps you put the right offers in front of the right people.
However, what happens when you hook them and entice them to click on your link? Well, if they’re not satisfied with what they see once they land on your page, they will run away without buying anything.
This is why you need to create user-centered buyer journeys. Now, there are many tools that let you create compelling landing pages using simple drag and drop features.
If you want to create unique pages that stand out and deliver personalized user experiences, consider consulting professionals.
I’ll take Shopify as an example, as it is one of the most popular and customizable ecommerce platforms. Did you know that 94% of users’ negative impressions is related to design elements?
You can prevent that by consulting a Shopify developer to help you create highly responsive and user-friendly landing pages that inspire conversions. This will help you:
- Write strong and powerful headlines that inspire conversions.
- Increase the visual appeal of your landing page.
- Design CTAs that inspire customers to take action. “Get Free Quote” still sounds better than “Submit,” you must admit.
- Create a strong value proposition and present it effectively.
- Skyrocket your loading time.
- Create user-friendly and optimized form fields.
Personalize User Experiences
Not all leads you generate are the same. These are people with different needs, preferences, expectations, and buying histories.
Statistics say that almost half of email users receive irrelevant emails daily. Sure, to fight the content they’re not interested in, they send it to the Spam folder.
This is where email segmentation shines. Namely, by creating segmented lists, you will put the right content in front of the right audiences. This will help you increase your open rate and CTR, as well as guide a customer closer to making a purchase.
Now, there are numerous ways to segment your email list, including:
Gender Preference
This is what Adidas does, for example. They send different offers to their male and female customers.
Location
This way, you will send relevant deals and accurate shipping information to customers in different locations. For example, Uber combines demographic and geographic data to provide realistic pricing options.
Purchase History
This is one of the safest ways to provide customers with personalized offers and retain them. Many fashion brands like ASOS do that. For example, if you buy a shirt, they will send you personalized emails promoting their sales on shirts.
Behavior on the Website
Amazon is a fan of this type of segmentation. Namely, they look at what you’re searching for, what products you review, or what you put in the shopping cart to provide you with personalized offers via email.
Preferences
This is a great way to collect more information about your customers. Charish asks their customers to make a list of their favorite products on their site so they can let them know when these or similar products are on sale.
Over to You
Investing in email marketing should be online retailers’ highest priority. It helps you build your online reputation, nourish stronger relationships with your customers, and encourage customer loyalty.
And, not using these tactics would mean leaving money on the table.
So, segment your audience and provide them with personalized experiences. Most importantly, optimize your landing pages to offer exceptional user experiences at every step your customers take.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from Pixabay.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Victor T. Miller
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