eCommerce Email Marketing
eCommerce email marketing and email deliverability aren't only skills: they're a science. Acquiring more new customers and selling to more existing customers via eCommerce email marketing strategies takes more than just hitting some inboxes. The good news is that eCommerce email marketing strategies and best practices can be taught and learned.
Our friends at Listrak, Email Marketing Solutions for Online Retailers, know the ins and outs of eCommerce email marketing. This guest blog article by Listrak's Ross Kramer will teach you how to reach the inboxes of your prospective and current customers.
Guest blog article by Ross Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Listrak
Here are the top 10 for eCommerce email marketing strategies:
1. Choose your email service provider (ESP) carefully
You should rely on your email service provider for input and support when authenticating your domain, going through certification and authentication processes, testing messages and keeping up with trends, regulations and email best practices.
2. Follow acquisition best practices
Blasting your eCommerce email marketing message to any email address you can find will land you in the spam folder. Instead, grow email lists organically and always get permission to send email messages.
A safe way to grow your eCommerce email marketing lists quickly is to add a Modal Popup to your website asking visitors to subscribe. Consider offering an incentive, and definitely include privacy information and an explanation of what types of communications the email subscriber should expect.
3. Be trustworthy, not tricky
CAN-SPAM and the upcoming changes to CASL ensure that certain standards are met: opt-in boxes can’t be pre-checked; email marketing messages must contain a valid, non-deceptive email subject line and header; email messages can’t contain false or misleading transmission information; and the opt-out process must be easy and quickly honored. Never trick people into subscribing or clicking on a link they’re not interested in, because they’ll click the “this is spam” button instead of unsubscribing.
4. Engage email subscribers from the get-go
A confirmation email message is one of the most important you’ll ever send. It validates email addresses to keep your lists clean and starts the relationship off right. Welcome email messages have extremely high conversion rates because they reach email subscribers when they’re most engaged.
But don’t stop there. Send a series of relevant, timely eCommerce email marketing campaigns that positively reinforce your eCommerce brand, messaging and offerings to set the right expectations and keep email subscribers engaged.
5. Follow design best practices
How does your email message look in the preview pane with images turned off? On a tablet or smartphone? Is your eCommerce email marketing campaign engaging enough to get opened? If not, you could be hurting your future email deliverability. Internet service providers (ISPs) measure engagement, and if eCommerce customers aren’t opening your messages, you could look like a spammer.
6. Watch email deployment schedules
The number one reason people unsubscribe to eCommerce email marketing campaigns is over-sending. And while some will opt-out using the unsubscribe link, many others will unsubscribe by reporting the email marketing message as spam.
On the flip side, be sure to send often enough. ISPs look at your overall email deployment schedule, and if you only send one email message monthly to a list of 500,000, you could be hurting your eCommerce email marketing strategy reputation. The trick is to send often enough to maintain maximum engagement.
The best approach is to segment email subscribers and target them with relevant email marketing messages. Also, coordinate segmented email campaigns with automated email campaigns so subscribers don’t receive different messages on the same day.
7. Send triggered email campaigns
Don’t limit triggered email campaigns to a welcome or shopping cart recovery message. Triggered email marketing messages have 70.5% higher open rates and 101.8% higher click-through rates than batch-and-blasts, and higher engagement rates mean better Sender Scores.
Consider triggered email marketing post-purchase campaigns like an eCommerce product review request and related merchandise, time to re-order for consumables, win-back for eCommerce customers who haven’t purchased recently, and re-engagement to prompt inactive email subscribers to become active and engaged again.
8. Re-engage or remove email subscribers
Segmenting your email list and sending triggered eCommerce email marketing campaigns will help keep email subscribers engaged, active, and clicking, but you still have to monitor inactive email subscribers. If someone hasn’t opened an email message in months, try to re-engage him or her. If that doesn’t work, remove or suppress them from future sends. Old and unused email addresses could turn into spam traps, and sending to those addresses will ruin your eCommerce email marketing reputation.
9. Monitor results
Monitor your metrics and email list hygiene after eCommerce email marketing sends. Not just opens, clicks and conversions, but unsubscribes, complaints and bounces, too. Your email service provider should automatically remove any email subscriber that reports your email message as spam and any address that hard bounces, but it is up to you to ensure that these email addresses are being managed correctly. If you notice a lot of complaints from a particular domain, it could point to rendering issues. It is very important to monitor and manage email deliverability metrics.
10. Be smart
Email deliverability is no longer about doing things the wrong way, it’s about doing things the right way. You must honor email unsubscribes immediately and stop sending to un-engaged and inactive email subscribers, as it can do more harm than good. You should also consider adding a “this is not me” link in your transactional email messages to give recipients an easy way to report that they received your email message by mistake due to a typo or other glitch.
Listrak’s Chief Privacy Officer James Koons offers great email deliverability news and advice on his blog, ideliveremail.com. You can also learn more in a new Listrak whitepaper Don’t Be Left Out of the Inbox: Email Deliverability Tips for Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle.
See Ross's article for iMediaConnection.
About Ross Kramer
Ross is a co-founder and CEO of Listrak. He has nearly 15 years of executive leadership and more than 10 years in email marketing, successfully launching and directing three technology start-ups. Ross has led Listrak from concept to leading email marketing solutions provider serving online retailers. He is a thought leader within the online marketing community, lending his expertise to conferences, seminars, and webcasts. Ross is also a frequent contributor of email best practices articles that can be found in Adweek, Internet Retailer, eM+C, iMedia, and other publications.
