The traditional nine-to-five schedule in the typical work environment is not for everyone. If you’re a parent with disabilities, a work environment with little flexibility may not be the best option, but forming a small business might fit your life and needs. A small business startup or franchise will give you the opportunity to find your passion, establish your own schedule, build a career around your strengths and limitations, and open doors to a better quality of life.
Even though gathering new customers is important, most e-commerce marketers focus only on that while somewhat neglecting client retention. But new customers cost them 5 times more than retaining the ones that are already invested in your company. Existing customers are 31% likely to spend more and 50% more likely to purchase new products.
This is why marketers should focus on them.
Here is an easy workflow of what you should do to optimize your emails for best results and an email automation cheat sheet that will make all the difference in your relationship with existing clients.
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Social media affords many promotional opportunities, PPC drives a lot of traffic, and on-page SEO yields organic search rankings that keep on giving— but to this day, nothing bolsters an eCommerce strategy quite like email marketing. That’s exactly why yearly spending on email marketing in the US alone is expected to hit 350 million dollars by 2019.
But like any marketing medium, you won’t get much out of it if you don’t think it through and plan it out with specific goals in mind. Whether the intention is to build loyalty in new customers, keep old ones happy, promote new products or establish industry authority, you have to approach things carefully and analytically.
To that end, here’s how I recommend you go about devising a great email campaign that will truly back up your broader eCommerce efforts.
1. Email is Permission-Based
Unlike with social media and PPC marketing where you’re displaying your ad to broad sections of your target audience in hopes that they click, email marketing is permission based. Whether they opt into a newsletter or sign up for some promo codes, your consumers are willingly giving you their email as a way to say “Hey, I’d like some more information”. A study done by Marketing Sherpa found that 91% of consumers like to receive promotional emails from brands they support (Source: Marketing Sherpa).
2. People Love to Stay Informed
From the time the alarm goes off in the morning till the sun goes down, people are attached to platforms and services that provide them with the information they deem valuable.
While social media handles the entertainment and current events side of things, email is reserved for more important, time-sensitive information like special offers and dreaded bills. In fact, the average person checks their personal email 3 times per day!
Everybody has heard the saying “knowledge is power.” For business owner’s knowledge often comes from data, thus “data is power.” The more data your small business has the better, right? How many widgets sold last month and how many are in inventory? What is the profit margin on each widget sold? What were total sales yesterday, or last week? These are questions that business owners can answer quickly, and they are all derived from data.
Email marketing is only effective when people can see and read your message. Ending up in the spam folder can be a dangerous fate if your company uses email marketing as a primary marketing tool. It can mean reaching fewer potential customers, lost sales and a decline in revenue. With such high stakes, you can't afford to make any serious missteps on an email marketing campaign.
