If you are a business running an eCommerce website, you probably have a few tasks automated to make life easier for you. One of them, in particular, will be your email marketing.
While email marketing for your eCommerce website may not be the most natural thing for your business to invest in, statistics show that email marketing has one of the highest ROI for businesses. And with over 59% of consumers saying that email marketing is more likely to influence their purchasing decision, it is no surprise that over 80% of businesses believe in email marketing’s persuasive power for customer retention.
It is, therefore, safe to say that having a strong email marketing strategy is essential for the success of every business. But with so many emails on your mailing list, automation is the next regular step to ensure your email marketing endeavors don’t get overwhelming and inefficient.
If you want to take the right steps when automating your eCommerce email marketing, here are seven best practices to observe from now on.
7 Best Practices for Your Email Marketing Automation
1) Set a goal for your email marketing
The first best practice you should follow is to set goals. Set goals for your email marketing strategy and review them periodically. Your goals should range from:
- Goals for the growth of your mailing list
- Goals for your email marketing delivery strategy
- Goals for engaging with your customers
- Goals for increasing online sales through your email marketing strategy, etc.
Goals are essential because they will help you track your progress and measure your successes once you start email marketing.
2) Make use of a welcome email series
Next, use a welcome email series; this is a form of a trigger email campaign. They can be easily set up on your email marketing automation software and are very useful:
- To send when a new subscriber first signs up, thanking them for signing up
- For building trust with new email subscribers. You can send them a welcome email, sharing a brand introduction with them when they first sign up.
- To learn more about new subscribers. For example, you can send them messages asking them questions about their particular interest, how often they want to receive emails from you, and things like that.
There can be as many as six sequences in your welcome series. It all depends on your brand and what you want to achieve.
The best thing about a welcome email series is that with open rates reaching 57%, they have one of the highest email engagement rates from consumers.
3) Target your mailing list on social media
Another best practice for your eCommerce email marketing is to target your email subscribers on their social media. You can upload your mailing list to your social media automation platform. Again, this is an entirely legal process, and it helps you create a custom audience you can send targeted content to.
Other reasons why you should do this include;
- It will help you target your audience’s lookalike on social media instead of spending a ton of time finding new subscribers.
- It helps engage with the subscribers on your mailing list on varying platforms.
- With Facebook audience insights, you can send targeted campaigns to your mailing list.
These are just a few of the benefits of this email marketing best practice.
4) Resend unopened email newsletters
It is easy for businesses to disappear when they don’t get the open rate they expected. Instead of trashing your carefully crafted email newsletters when this happens, resend them.
However, before resending them, doing the following things can help you get better results.
- Avoid sending them on Mondays or Sundays. These are estimated to be the worst time for consumers to receive eCommerce emails.
- Optimize your emails for mobile phone devices
- Optimize your headline for mobile phone devices.
While these are just a few best practices to follow when resending that email newsletter, they could be handy and bring you better results.
5) Build a solid abandoned cart series
On average, shoppers abandon between 60% to 80% of shopping carts on eCommerce websites. These are potential buyers who never got to the finishing stage of their purchase.
A solid abandoned cart series aims to win some of these shoppers back with your email marketing. There are different ways to go about this, but the most common one is to send three emails to your consumers;
- The first one should be sent 30 to 60 minutes after a consumer abandons a cart.
- Send the second email 24 hours after the consumer abandons a cart.
- And send the last email between three to five days after a consumer abandons the cart.
While this is a best practice for this series of emails, you can use automation software to find the best time and frequency to send your abandoned cart emails.
Studies have shown that following the abandoned cart email series and best practices can help your business recover as high as 11% in sales that you could have lost.
6) Make use of the A/B testing feature on email marketing automation software
Next, guarantee that whatever email marketing automation software you use for your business has A/B testing. Continually testing the emails, you send out will ensure that you;
- Aren’t sending out emails with ineffective subject lines
- Send emails with a strong call to action
- Are you sending emails with offers that appeal to your audience, etc.?
A/B testing can help you increase your open email rate. It will also ensure that email providers don’t route your emails to spam.
Pro-tip for carrying out A/B testing; ensure that you only change one variable when carrying out your tests. This will help you pick what works and what doesn’t.
7) Optimize your email list with a double opt-in
Double opt-in is the function most email marketing automation software has that requires your subscribers to respond to an email confirmation link sent to their email address.
While this can seem tedious and unnecessary, it is a way for you to lower your bounce rate by confirming that your subscribers want to be on your list.
It will also increase your deliverability rate as your email marketing automation software ensures that all the email addresses on your list are genuine.
Final tips
While these are just a few best practices to practice in your email marketing for your eCommerce business, make sure you keep improving and reviewing these techniques/tips. See what works for your business, and use all the features your automation software has to ensure you engage with your audience in the best possible way. Finally, craft your email marketing copy to maximize engagement. If this isn’t something, you are good at, use essay writing service reviews like Online Writers Rating or Best Writers Online to get professionally crafted copies for your email marketing.
