Email newsletters are an example of a marketing tool that has proven its effectiveness in hundreds of thousands of projects. Various email marketing strategies are used in most business spheres all around the world.
As a result, business owners can significantly increase the Return on Investment index. So, according to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, every dollar invested using a sales email campaign can be turned into $38 in total). Segmentation of clients and personalized trigger mailings, especially using various software (like getprospect.com/email-finder/bulk-email-finder) help to increase revenue and key indicators of mailings by tens and sometimes hundreds of times.
Does email marketing increase sales?
In order to answer this question for yourself and get the maximum result, it is worth following a few important strategies, which you will learn after reading this guide. They will definitely help you to increase the effectiveness of mailings tenfold and your business in general.
An Abandoned Cart Strategy
Many businesses are faced with a situation where visitors go to the target site, explore it, select the service or product they are interested in, put it in the cart and that’s it. A study conducted by the Baymard team indicates that almost 70% of site visitors leave the web resource with a full shopping cart, but without a completed order. The analytical company Listrak gives even more significant results – about 79%. There are many reasons why potential customers leave the resource at the last stage, but a simple reminder that the cart is not empty can fundamentally change the situation and return a significant part of potential customers.
According to statistics, using this strategy, you can return up to 11% of lost customers. Therefore, it’s important to use the no-order session return trigger system when building an email marketing strategy for your business.
As for the sending period, it is necessary to take into account the time during which interest in your offer is relevant. This is typically 1 hour after the visitor has left the website.
Use Email Channel for Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
How much do cross-sells give your business? For e-commerce giant Amazon, that figure was $37.45 billion in 2015 — more than 35% of total sales.
Amazon was mentioned for good reason, as its email marketing strategy examples, were recognized as one of the most effective. In particular, this applies to the indicator of cross-selling. According to statistics, it is possible to get success and achieve conversion to sales from recommendations at the level of 60%. But if you utilize mailshots, this indicator increases even more.
By adding cross-sell and up-sell methods to your email campaigns, you will activate an additional percentage of customers and form their interest in your offers for the future.
Customer Base Segmentation
To figure out how to write an email that will work, business owners forget or do not take into account customer base segmentation. Currently, there are two most common approaches in this regard:
- mass mailing method, when letters are sent immediately to all clients who are on the same list and who receive the same information;
- a personalized approach, when your customers in the database are divided into target groups (for example, they can be divided by age, gender, place of residence, interests, etc.). In this case, it is important to create an individual letter for each of the groups.
Of course, the second approach is more time-consuming but also many times more efficient. Depending on the type of business, personalized mailing can raise conversion rates from 35% to 120%. When dividing clients into groups, it is necessary to take into account not only the information that they provide during the registration stage but also the features of your offer to create exclusively relevant categories.
Optimize Email Sending Time
This aspect of creating email campaigns tends to be often overlooked, although it is crucial. According to statistics, each business has its own ideal time and day for sending mailshots. Basically, this can only be learned by experience or by analyzing the practice of competitors from the same niche. However, there are a few common tips that will help you increase conversions:
- it is better to send letters in the first half of the day from 10 AM to 11 AM;
- Tuesday is the day of the week when the percentage of opening sales letters is the highest;
- the most effective click-through and response rate are observed on Friday, which is probably due to the fact that customers continue to check inbox and open links during Saturday and Sunday;
- if you want to send a newsletter on the weekend, it’s better to choose Sunday.
Also, many people forget that there is a time difference, so your email campaigns should be built considering geographic zones.
Use iterative optimization
If you are one of those for whom all of the above information is nothing new and is a “must-have” component of the strategy, then pay attention to iterative optimization. If you run email campaigns without accompanying analysis, it is pretty hard to assess the effectiveness of each mailshot and the actual conversion rates. Testing newsletters and email open rates are necessary to understand what you need specifically, or rather, your customers.
Thanks to split testing, the business owner can gradually, step by step, study the effectiveness of the hypothesis by means of email newsletter template customization. The changes may affect the layout, design of the letter, as well as the content of each mailshot. Some companies have a group of specialists called “growth hacks” whose main goal is to constantly optimize the effectiveness of trigger or promotional emails and test up to several dozen (depending on the capabilities and size of the campaign) hypotheses.
Tips for Building Email Campaigns
Now when you know the basic marketing strategies that are performed via email, check out two more tips to help you optimize them. On the one hand, they are obvious, but as in the case of the above-mentioned strategies, for some reason, many people forget about them.
Tip 1
It is related to basic rules for collecting information about your potential customers that are used to build an email marketing strategy.
Your customers are an endless source of useful information. Based on the analysis of user behavior on the website of the online store, the history of purchases, and interactions, it is possible to segment the customers base by various parameters, build forecasts for future purchases, and develop predictive models. The more accurate offer you can make to existing or potential clients, the more profit those clients will bring to your online store.
Tip 2
Try to use a fully automated email marketing system. The fact is that almost all of the above-mentioned actions can be configured so that they are performed automatically. Gathering clients into groups, sending individual letters, split-testing of individual elements of the letter (subject line, headings, pictures, button colors), and changing the order of links in the chain of trigger letters – all this is better to transfer to automatic rails. For this purpose, there are a lot of various tools and software that will save time you can use to grow your business. In addition, you will have more financial resources that can be used to solve other strategic tasks.
