In ecommerce, you can either spend all your time and energy selling to one-time customers, or you can invest your time and energy into establishing and nurturing relationships that drive brand loyalty and repeat purchases.
Most ecommerce business owners prefer the latter option, so the question is, what can you do to transform one-time customers into lifelong brand loyal customers who buy from you over and over again?
One of the easiest and most effective ways to do it is with email. Despite the popularity of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, email remains one of the best tools you can use to effectively communicate messages, engage with your customers and would-be customers, and drive more sales.
In order to drive success, you need to have a few goals you can be working toward. That being said, it’s best to focus on 1-3 primary goals first when developing an initial email marketing strategy. In addition, the best goals are ones where progress can be easily tracked.
The next step in building an effective email marketing strategy for your ecommerce business involves testing and using tools that can ultimately help you automate processes and make your efforts more scalable over time.
The email marketing automation tool you end up deciding to use will ultimately depend on your budget and the specific features you’re looking for.
In order for email marketing to work, you need to be actively collecting email addresses from the people who land on your website. At one point it might have been enough to simply include one opt-in form at the footer of your website, but these days if you want to connect with the right leads, you need to include opt-in forms in a variety of places throughout your website.
The important thing to note here is that your goal isn’t to overwhelm or inundate visitors with pop-up forms—instead, your goal is to simply make it easy for people to join your list to learn more about your company, get product updates, receive special offers, etc.
Once you have a steady stream of new email subscribers coming in, your next step it to start nurturing them and moving them closer to the sale. One of the easiest and most effective ways to start doing it right away is by sharing enticing offers with your list.
Sometimes all someone needs to move from would-be customer to first-time buyer is a little motivation. The purpose of time-sensitive specials and exclusive promos and campaigns sent as emails is to drive subscribers to act now instead of later.
At the end of the day, you can’t make improvements to your campaigns and overall strategy if you’re not testing, optimizing, and identifying opportunities. To be a successful email marketer, you need to be willing to spend time and money on tools that allow you to test everything in your emails—from subject lines and delivery timing, to email length, body structure, images, links, call-to-actions, offers, and anything else you can think. The purpose of testing and optimizing your email campaigns is to ultimately zero in on the best and most effective tactics as fast as possible in order to drive more traffic and conversions in less time.
Courtesy of Sellbrite
