Use Segmentation & These Best Practices to Step Up Your eCommerce Email Marketing Game

From welcome campaigns to abandoned cart and post-purchase email drips, there’s much more to email marketing than simply crafting up a friendly message and clicking the “send” button. Instead, email marketing needs to be personalized, helpful and data-driven.

With digital marketing opportunities growing at a relentless speed, how do you know what’s working to your advantage and what’s not?

If this sounds like the current situation of your eCommerce business – don’t fret! The marketing gurus at Springbot have pulled together a helpful guide to ensure your email marketing strategy is top-notch.

Check out some of the highlights from our Email Best Practice Guide below!

Part One: A Strong List Keeps Your Business Growing

When it comes to growing your subscriber list, think quality versus quantity. You’ve worked hard to attract visitors to your site, so now it’s time to turn these first-time site visitors into loyal customers. You can use email to charm your existing customers, build lasting relationships with them and drive more sales to your online store.

Along with keeping your list clean, one of the most effective ways to achieve this goal is by using segmented, highly targeted triggered campaigns, which we cover in detail in our Email Best Practice Guide.

Part Two: Get Smart With Email Segmentation

With today’s robust digital setting, keeping tabs on the customer journey is becoming far more complex. Use your customer’s behavior and demographic information. Using a site analytics tool, like Google Analytics, will help paint a better picture of your customer acquisition and behavior flows. Regardless of where your customer is on their journey through your site, you can effectively leverage email marketing to reach consumers across devices and at various stages of their path to purchase.

Segmenting your emails is one of the best ways to personalize your marketing. If you aren’t an expert in email segmentation yet, fear not! Our Email Best Practice Guide will give you the pro tips your business needs to start creating segmented campaigns and leveraging purchase behavior.

Part Three: Master Your Email Cadence

After taking the time to build up a list of quality subscribers, the last thing you want to do is throw away your efforts by sending content to their inbox at the wrong time. Because your subscribers have opted into your email list (whether through an email capture form or by making a purchase), don’t worry about annoying your customers with too many emails. If your email content is valuable, they’ll want to hear from you as much as possible.

After you’ve decided when to send out emails to your customers, you must choose who will be receiving them and what message they will be getting. This means it is time to say goodbye to email blasts and to say hello to triggered emails. This technology has been a game changer for marketers over the past several years. Studies have shown that business owners who incorporate triggered email campaigns into their marketing mix see a significant increase in click-through rates when personalizing subject lines or segmenting lists based on purchase behavior.

Part Four: Tips, Tricks and Tools of the Trade

Keep Your Subject Line Short, Sweet and Relevant

Your customers’ first impression of your email is the subject line, so it is important to keep it short, sweet and relevant. Less is more when it comes to crafting an eye-catching subject line. Today, most emails are opened on mobile, so keeping your email subject lines on the shorter side is essential. Keep in mind that most mobile devices can only display about 35 characters.

Tell Them What to Do with a CTA

Now that you’ve mastered the subject line, you can’t forget about the all-important call-to-action (CTA.) The CTA is the end result you want your subscribers to take and needs to be as clear as possible. Ask yourself, “What do I want them to do after viewing this email?” Examples include, “Shop Now,” “Share with a Friend,” ‘Write a Review” and more.

Embrace Video Marketing

When it comes to content, videos provide a realistic sense of scale, features, usability, and an end-to-end view that can’t be offered by text and images alone. Adding video to your emails can yield 200-300% percent higher click-through and open rates.

Part Five: Your Metrics Count

Now that you’re sold on the power of email, you’ll need to know which metrics to measure before you kick off your next campaign. Here are some email marketing metrics that will help you keep closer tabs on campaign performance. These metrics will reveal exciting new insights, helping you stay ahead of the competition.

Open and Click-Through Rates

These two metrics hold high merits to eCommerce marketers. After you’ve the taken time to craft an exciting promotional message, it’s only natural to want to know how many people actually opened your email, right? The higher your open rate, the greater the chances a subscriber will visit your site and hopefully leave with a purchase.

Conversion Rates and ROI

Now we’re talking! The percentage of subscribers who completed the desired action is your conversion rate. In the case for online retailers, conversion rates are often purchase-related and provide direct insight as to the ROI they are generating from email marketing.

The Unavoidable Unsubscribe and Bounce Rates.

Let’s be honest, having someone unsubscribe from your email list every now and then is unavoidable. But what happens if the unsubscribe rate on your list rises above a certain percentage? If you start to notice a high unsubscribe rate, you may want to take another glance at your triggered email sequences to see if your email frequency is off.Bounce rates are another metric to be mindful of. Did you know that there are two different types of bounces? They are referred to as hard bounces and soft bounces. Our Email Best Practice guide will go deeper into this and how to master it.

Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse into email best practices, are you ready to become an expert? Click here to download the full Email Best Practice Guide from Springbot so you can get started today!

ABOUT SPRINGBOT

Springbot provides advanced eCommerce marketing technology for small and medium-sized retailers. We make the overwhelming task of running and tracking multi-channel marketing campaigns ridiculously simple, from email and social marketing, to online ads, Amazon Marketplace and more. The key is Springbot’s integration with BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify to deliver the power of data management, marketing automation and analytics. We then take that information and make data-driven marketing recommendations specifically tailored for your needs.