This is a guest post from Konstantin Gerasimov at Goivvy, LLC.
Investing in a site is a big step for your business. But there are many things that a store owner needs to learn how to do in order to run a successful business—like learning how to leverage your email marketing list for maximum success.
Read on to learn how to make the most of your growing email marketing list.
1. Segmenting is key
Your customers have different reasons for going to you. Email marketing gives you an opportunity to target each of those reasons on an individual basis.
Take a moment to think about the reasons why you’d want to send an email:
- Do you want to welcome a new customer?
- Are you looking to re-engage with old customers?
- Would you like to treat your best customers to a promotional code?
These many different reasons are why we need to target our emails carefully.
A great way to maximize the return of our email campaigns would be to categorize your customers into different segments.
Categorizing your segments involves taking your email list and sorting out your potential customers into different groups. Such groups may include:
- A business that may have a list of all your customers for general sales.
- A fashion retailer that may have a segmented list for women and men so that they can send emails for the new women’s and men’s collection, respectively.
- A flower business that may want to keep a segmented list for business owners so they can send emails about corporate gifts.
- A shoe retailer who would want to keep a list of their top spenders to email special promotional codes to.
There are many more types of emails that a business would want to send to their customers. However, the important thing to remember is that, by segmenting an email list, a business can:
- Save time by not sending so many emails to the entire email list.
- Increase sales potential by only sending emails to groups more likely to participate in the campaign
- Build trust among the customer base by sending a lot of emails, but not spamming the entire email list with a large number of unnecessary emails.
2. Establish your email goals
Behind every email campaign, there has to be a purpose, and an email marketing campaign is no exception.
Think about what defines a successful campaign for your store. Some metrics to look at might include:
- Open rate: the rate at which people open their emails
- Click-through rate: the number of people that clicked a link in your emails
- Conversion rate: the number of people that bought something as a result of your email
- Unsubscribe rate: the people that unsubscribed from your email list
But, no matter what metrics you choose to look at, you need to make sure that your team understands what you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign.
So, before you create your email, make sure that you’re clear on what you need your campaign to accomplish and how to execute it. You want to make sure of the following:
- Your email’s message to the customer is clear
- Your call to action can grab your audience’s attention
3. Automate your lists
Sometimes email marketing can prove to be a repetitive task. If everything’s going well, there’s a chance that you’re receiving new email signups every day. That would mean that you’d have to send at least one welcome email on a daily basis.
However, automating your email lists can save time and re-focus productivity.
Automating your email list involves creating an email list with an email template that’ll send out emails automatically.
And, with an automated email list, every time a new customer signs up, they’ll automatically be sent a welcome email.
In most cases, you can set up the automated list to send emails and then send the email address to a general list, so that you can sort it out later.
A tactic like this is perfect for birthday emails, welcome emails, and even newsletters.
4. Optimize your site for increased traffic
With every email marketing campaign, you should expect some increased traffic to your website. You should also expect to have some of that traffic convert into business for your online store.
While increased site traffic and the prospect of sales are a wonderful thing, you should make sure that your site’s prepared to handle the traffic that you’re expecting from the campaign.
A really important thing to do is confirm the security of your website. By doing so, you can put your customers at ease by ensuring their personal information will be safe while making a purchase.
You can also put your team and yourself at ease by ensuring yourselves that the chances of a cyber attack will be at a minimum.
There’s a lot you can do to ensure the security of your website. However, here are some of the most important things:
- Update your site to the latest version
- Keep your SSL Certificates in check
- Monitor all website activity
You should also do a quick run-through of your website’s speed to make sure that the site is optimized for the traffic that you’re expecting.
One of the best ways to make sure your site is optimized is to conduct a full speed test. You can do this by taking some of the following precautions:
- Making sure your images are optimized
- Doing a check on your server and your hosting plan
- Audit Magento Code
5. Create a campaign for every occasion
As we’ve established earlier, segmenting your email list is important. Something that’s equally as important is making sure that there’s an email ready for every occasion.
Aside from major retail days like Valentine’s Day and Black Friday, there are many more reasons to send an email to your customers. Such reasons include:
- Birthdays
- Minor holidays
- Company anniversary sales
It’s important to create an email for every appropriate occasion. Doing so would increase your chances of making a sale. It would also:
- Keep your store in the customer’s inbox
- Create a better recall for your customer fanbase
- Allow you to use minor holidays to take advantage of store promotions
6. Don’t lose your customers
While holidays are a great reason to send emails, these same email campaigns are also a great way to convert an “almost” customer. By almost, we’re referring to:
- Abandoned carts
- Site visitors that signed up for the email list but didn’t convert
- Customers that have a wish list
Just because these customers didn’t convert at first doesn’t mean that we can’t push them to convert. When you’re faced with an “almost” customer, here are some helpful emails that you can send to them:
Abandoned carts
Customers usually abandon their carts for two reasons:
- They changed their mind once they saw the price, with taxes and shipping.
- They didn’t have time to complete their purchase
The best email to send to these customers is the abandoned cart email. An abandoned cart email is simply an email that reminds a customer that they’ve left an item in their shopping cart. Sometimes such an email will encourage the customer to go back and finish the purchase. You can see an example of a default abandoned cart email, from Magento 2, below.
Through the use of custom extensions, you may be able to enable abandoned cart emails on your site.
Email signups (Non-converts)
These customers signed up for your email list, but that was about it. They may have browsed around your selection enough to like some things, but they didn’t put anything in their cart or wish list.
These customers are usually a little harder to convert because they like the brand, but they are waiting for the right product to purchase. This segment of customers is generally looking to save money.
Generally speaking, all types of emails would be great emails to send to this segment of customers. But the best way to pull these customers into your conversion cycle is through these types of emails:
- Emails that feature sale collections
- Sales exclusive to those on email lists
Customers with a wishlist
Customers that browse your store and create a wishlist can generally be categorized into the following groups:
- People that like the items in your store
- People that see the items in your store as outfit inspiration
Either way, these are really great customers to convert. However, they may be on the fence about buying products The following emails may be able to help you convert these types of potential customers:
- A promotional email with a discount for their first purchase
- Newsletters that highlight great practical uses for your store’s products. At the bottom of the email, you can remind your customer that they still have some items left in their wishlist.
7. Don’t over-email
While it can be tempting to update your customers on what’s going on in your business, the most fundamental tip to your Magento email marketing program is to not email your audience to the point of spamming.
While email is a great way to stay in your audience’s memory, sending too many emails may not be the most ideal method for gaining conversions.
Rather than send an email every day to your customer base, it would be better to send regular updates, at most, once a week.
If you look at this chart from Smart Insights, you can see the general pattern of sending between the years 2012 and 2015:
Wrap up
Magento is one of the best e-commerce platforms out there but, in order to make an online store work, you need to rely on more than just your platform.
You need to focus on getting your store out there and, to do that, you have to find a way to reach people. You can reach out to potential customers through SEO and social media, but the best way to stay in touch with customers is through email marketing.
In our digital age, there are still many uses to email marketing. Some of the most efficient ways to use email marketing include:
- Optimizing your website to get emails
- Segmenting your customers
- Setting goals for each group of customers
- Automating your email marketing
- Creating campaigns for every occasion
- Nudging your prospects into a sale
- Selling to your customer, rather than spamming them
Luckily, Campaign Monitor has a great system that can help you achieve the perfect email marketing strategy.
Konstantin Gerasimov is a Magento Certified Developer at Goivvy. He specializes in performance optimization and backend development.