Email Campaigns

How Can E-Commerce Companies Create Nurturing Campaigns

November 20, 2020 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

For e-commerce companies, creating a nurturing email campaign is just as important as it is for lead generation or any other type of marketing initiative. The difference is that with e-commerce, you have numerous products, various potential audience segments, and campaigns happening at any given time. That’s why it’s so important that you nurture the customers and prospects no matter what stage of the buying process they’re in.

Segment for Buyers at Different Stages and Product Types

This advice is going to depend on how many products you have and how many stages your buyers typically go through before they take action. As it’s different for every e-commerce business owner, you’ll want to take the time to map out your typical customer journey, as well as different segments of products they may be interested in.

As every customer is different, it’s impossible to have a “one size fits all” approach for every customer and prospect segment and product type. You know your audience best, so take the time to do this — you can always refine it later.

Don’t Rush to Convert

One of the biggest missteps that many e-commerce businesses make is that the moment a user signs up for their mailing list and gets their freebie, every subsequent email is a sales pitch. You wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of constant sales announcements from every email list you’ve ever subscribed to, so it’s a pretty sure bet your prospects wouldn’t either.

The good news is that this is precisely what a nurturing campaign is designed to do.

There are lots of different paths you can pursue — consider having additional content created that helps the user reach the next step of their journey, such as comparison charts, white papers, checklists, gift ideas, curated collections and more. Use that content to help nurture and build up a good business relationship with them that in turn reflects and communicates your brand and tone.

Make Sure Every Email Has a Single Goal

This is a common mistake that’s often overlooked even by the best and most cohesive email marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that the overall goal isn’t just to “sell things” but rather “increase conversion rates by X% while increasing AOV (average order value) by $Y.

Having concrete goals like this will help you determine whether your email campaigns are hitting the targeted goals or if they need further refinement. And if they do need further refinement, that’s not a problem, because email marketing is an ever-changing beast and what worked last year or even last month may not work as well now. Which leads us to our next point…

Test, Evaluate and Optimize Every Message

Every message you send is an opportunity — not necessarily to sell but to continue nurturing and showcasing your business in such a way that your products are the best possible solution to the prospect’s needs or wishes. If they can already visualize themselves using or enjoying the benefits of your product, then all that’s left is to encourage them to naturally take the next step. This is where low inventory notifications, limited time offers and especially free shipping can finally seal the deal.

Look at every message. Split test subject lines or other facets of your email, evaluate where you can improve and then optimize and refine them. Your emails aren’t (and shouldn’t be) set in stone. Even in not so uncertain times, products change, focuses change, business goals change, so it is imperative that your emails should change along with these factors.

As you continue to optimize your messages, you’ll find certain things that truly resonate with your audience, and other things which don’t have the effect you had anticipated. This is all part of the nurturing process — learning what works, what’s relevant, and how to continue fostering positive responses from your customers and prospects alike.

Still Have Questions About Creating an E-Commerce Nurturing Campaign?

It’s understandable to have questions about creating an e-commerce nurturing email campaign, since every product and audience segment is different and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed, confused and lost.

Fortunately, help is just one click away. With Workdom’s on-demand marketing talent, we can leverage our extensive e-commerce and email marketing experience to create and cultivate nurturing campaigns for every phase of your funnel. Talk to our senior advertising and marketing professionals today so we can get started working together to formulate a plan that works for your business goals, resonates with your audience, scales your brand, boosts your business’ growth, and so much more.

How To Use Email Marketing to Increase Sales

September 25, 2020 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

If you’re just starting out in the world of email marketing, you’re in luck! It has never been easier to use one of the oldest marketing methods on the internet to drum up more sales, even today. Here are our top tips for those just getting started with email marketing.

Treat Your List Like Gold

Without your list, your need to market to them via email wouldn’t exist. That’s why it’s so important to treat your list like gold. Grow it, nurture it, find the right balance of contact without being too insistent. Subscribers will come and go, but staying true to your core message and remembering your goals for building your mailing list is paramount to getting the most out of it.

Check Your Message Layout on As Many Devices as Possible

Many email service providers allow you to test your emails on different devices, including on mobile phones, before you send them. It can make the difference between reaching and engaging your customers in a way that’s convenient and easy for them to read, and sending them a messy jumble of images and text.

Your Subject Line is Your Headline

Just like any good sales letter has a headline, your subject line is like the headline of your email, and you’ll need to make it count. Don’t trick users into clicking on your messages. Instead, think about the kind of subject line you’d want to read if you were in their position. Make your subject line pique their curiosity, entertain them, or provide value right away while including some sense of urgency.

For example, subjects like “Get 20% off all courses now – offer ends September 8th” are clear, to-the-point and explain with a sense of urgency, while more curiosity-inducing subject lines could be something like, “Which of these courses could help you earn more in your job?” We don’t know, but the possibility of earning more entices us to want to click.

Put an Actual Person Behind Your Messages (Both Sending and Receiving)

There’s nothing that your readers hate more than reading an email, having a question, but having to go through countless hoops to actually reach someone. Having that all-too-familiar “no-reply@” in your emails also tells them, “we don’t really want to hear from you”. Have someone designated as the reply-to and send-to person for emails. People want to know that they can simply reply to an email and reach an actual person — not another automated system. Plus, adding a name and having a mailbox as a sort of catch-all for these kinds of messages makes the whole process of sending marketing emails feel more human, approachable and comfortable to your prospect.

Always Offer Something of Value

Every email should have a goal, but that goal shouldn’t always be to sell something. Get to know your prospects with things like surveys, contests, Q & A groups or Facebook Live groups and much more. Look at every email as an opportunity to ask, “what can I do with this message that will deliver value to my readers?

Not only will this help you build more rapport with them over time, but it will also keep them eagerly expecting your next message and the consequent value it provides. Consistently doing this over time helps build greater customer and brand loyalty. People will come to know and associate your brand with quality through the emails that you send.

In addition, with a few tweaks to how your mailing list is set up, you may even be able to allow your subscribers to adjust their preferences. So if they only want sales notifications on certain items, or only want the latest news, for example, they can change their settings in their account to receive only those things. This helps you keep more subscribers as well as making sure they’re happy with what they receive!

Test, Track and Repeat!

Finally, don’t forget to test, track and repeat. Your email addresses aren’t sent into a vacuum. You want to analyze their performance. How many were opened? How many were clicked on? What can you do to increase those numbers? Email providers that allow you to split test can help you understand how one subject line, email design, and other aspects of your message perform against each other.

Use this to your advantage to see how your message resonates with your target audience! And if you run into problems, have questions or need guidance on getting started with email marketing, why not reach out to our senior executives at Workdom? We can work with you to develop a concrete email marketing strategy even if you’re starting from scratch. With our on-demand marketing services, there’s simply no better way to start reaping the rewards and the profits that email marketing can bring.

What to Do Before You Launch Your First E-Commerce Email Marketing Campaign

September 4, 2020 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

Email marketing is a lot like a good, hearty meal. A well-planned, well-executed email campaign has absolutely delicious results, and an artfully crafted message is the kind of thing that you and your readers alike will want to savor. Although in this day and age it seems like our breakneck digital pace doesn’t slow down for even a second, there are still some things that you’ll want to keep in mind before you launch that new email campaign.

Taking these steps now can save a whole lot of headache later, so it’s worth following this checklist to make sure you’ve got all the bases covered before you hit SEND!

Be Clear About Why You’re Sending This Message

I can almost hear you saying, “I’m sending this message to increase sales, duh!” But what we mean by that is more-so why your recipients need to know about it, and why now. Is it a limited time offer? A special promotion?

Let them know up-front why you’re sending it before you even get to the products. From that text alone, your prospect will decide whether or not your message is worth reading, or sending straight to the circular file.

Stay Safe with CAN-SPAM

If you’re based in the USA, you’ll want to be sure that your message complies with CAN-SPAM regulations, namely that every message:

Contains an unsubscribe link
Unsubscribes the user within 10 business days of their request (however it’s recommended that you do it right away)
Include a physical address

If you’re in a different country, you may have other, similar laws or regulations to abide by, so be sure you’re aware of them and follow them to avoid having to pay big fines for breaking them!

Turn Off Images

This might sound counterintuitive, especially for an e-commerce company, but remember that many of your users will be viewing your email on their mobile phones or on their computers with images turned off. That means those beautiful photos that you so painstakingly included may not even be shown at all until the user clicks through to your page.

Viewing your email without images will show you how a large swath of your user base receives your messages, so be sure that your email looks good even with a minimal layout. This goes double for the call to action button (which may be hidden as well). You do have a call-to-action link as well, don’t you?

Make it Easy to Adjust Preferences

This is a big one. Most businesses approach email marketing as if users are either subscribed or unsubscribed. However, it’s entirely possible that users simply want to lessen (or increase) the amount of emails they receive from you.

In that case, make it easy for them to adjust their preferences. Maybe they only want to know about new sales announcements, or they’re only interested in women’s fashion, or they’re keen on back-to-school discounts. Giving them more choices shows that you respect their time, and also helps build up your credibility and that all-important business relationship with your customers.

Sending Test Emails

Before sending out your email campaigns to your prospects, make sure you send yourself a test email so you can double check that you’ve got everything setup correctly. It is way better to be extra careful than to quickly send then out as this might hurt your brand in more ways than one.

Pro tip: use this blog as a checklist when double checking your test email!

Fine-Tuning

People often wonder when the best time to send an email is. If you’ve always heard that it’s “Tuesday morning”– why not test and find out what works for your target audience? Every prospect is different and that may not be a huge revelation here. But keep in mind that time and day of sending is only one of the many things that you can test, including:

Subject line
Offer
Personalization (or not)
Free shipping (this is a GREAT one to test)
And much more

Your email service provider should make it easy and straightforward for you to conduct split tests (also called A/B tests) with your emails so that you can see how one small change affects the number of opens and click-through rates.

As you can see, there are several steps you’ll want to keep in mind and check before sending out your email campaigns. And should you need help at any stage of the process, or you want to create a competitive email marketing strategy to reach your conversion rates, our senior advertising professionals here at Workdom are here to help you take the next step with confidence.

Contact us today for any help you might need with your email marketing strategy, e-commerce business promotions, campaign creations and much more. We’re ready to help you grow your business further!