If you are someone who runs an ecommerce store, then you know the importance of email marketing. Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with your customers and generate more sales. With all the expensive marketing initiatives on the market, using an effective email marketing strategy that can help you reduce costs while also increasing your sales is a no-brainer. In this article, we have shared some foundational ideas and suggestions which can help improve your email marketing strategy so that it becomes more effective and valuable for your online business.
What is an Email Marketing Strategy?
Email marketing is a powerful tool to generate leads, increase sales and improve customer retention. It is crafting, automating, and executing different marketing campaigns that use emails to directly appeal to customers on your shopping lists.
However, knowing where to start when building an email strategy for your WooCommerce shop can be difficult. The most important aspect is to test your campaign and track its effectiveness. It is okay to feel overwhelmed. This growing, living marketing channel takes some work to get right.
How Does this Improve Your Ecommerce Store?
With email marketing, you can build a relationship with your customers over time by providing them with valuable content that they find interesting or useful in some way.
This will make them feel more connected to your company, which will lead them back into the sales funnel at some point further down the line when they’re ready to buy again from you. Some of the key ways an email marketing campaign is a good idea include:
1 – Cost Effective
Email marketing is the most cost-effective form of marketing. It’s easy to set up and maintain, so you don’t need a lot of money to get started. In fact, there are many free email marketing services available that will help you create and send your first campaign without any upfront costs at all.
2 – Highly Targeted
If you have a WooCommerce shop, then the chances are that it’s selling some kind of product. You may be selling physical products or digital products (or both). Whatever type of business you’re running, one thing remains constant: your customers want to be targeted with emails relevant to them and their needs.
3 – Easy to Personalize
You can use dynamic content in your emails to personalize them for each customer. For example, if someone has purchased a product in the past and is now returning to buy again, you can greet them by name and offer a discount code or other incentive that only applies if they purchase from you this time around.
You can also use dynamic content to personalize your email based on where customers live or their time zone.
4 – Boosts Brand Awareness
Email marketing is a great way to build your brand. Customers will see your brand in their inbox, on the home screen of their mobile app, and when they open an email from you. It may sound obvious, but building awareness is one of the main reasons businesses use email marketing to promote themselves and communicate with customers.
5 – Works with a Variety of Goals
Email marketing can be used to achieve a variety of goals, such as increasing sales, building relationships with customers, and generating leads. It is a direct line of communication with your new, current, and future customers that gives them an inside track into what you offer and any potential promotions you are providing.
6 – Great Conversion Rate
If you can get your customers to opt-in and give you their email addresses, then you’ll be able to reach them with targeted sales emails that help build trust and rapport. When they feel like they know you, they will be more likely to buy from you than competitors.
Conversion rate is an important metric because it shows how well your WooCommerce store is converting visitors into customers (or subscribers). The higher the conversion rate, the better.
So improving conversion rates will help increase revenue and profits per visitor on average over time as well as overall profit margins since less money goes toward advertising costs.
What Types of Emails Should I Be Sending?
Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with customers, so it’s important that you have a plan for sending out the right messages at the right time. The following are some common types of emails:
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- Transactional Emails – these emails confirm an order, shipment, or payment. They’re sent to customers after they’ve made a purchase in your WooCommerce shop.
- Newsletters – offering newsletters is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. You can use them to promote new products, build relationships and trust with your audience, and even help you collect information about your target audience.
- Promotional Emails – use these to promote new products or services as well as prepare for any seasonal events.
- Automated Emails – are sent based on a set of rules. You can set up automated emails that are sent when a customer buys something or when they haven’t bought anything in a while.
- Email Blasts – are a great way to get your message out to your customers. You can use email blasts to announce new products, sales, or promotions. These are typically done in a “one-off” situation.
- Retargeting Emails – are a great way to remind customers about your products and services. You want to use retargeting to leads who may have signed up for your list but never purchased or older customers who may not have interacted with your brand in a long time.
- Thank You Emails – these are a great way to show your customers that you care. Thanking them for their purchase is one thing, but what about thanking them for their feedback? You can use these emails to ask your customers for more information on their experience or even just let them know that you appreciate the time they took out of their day to write a review.
What Email Marketing Strategies Should I Use?
There is no “golden rule” for WooCommerce email marketing campaigns. The overall effectiveness of your strategy may vary drastically even from a close competitor. It is all about finding what works best with your target audience. Some general ideas to get started include:
1 – Leverage Opt-in
One of the most important things you can do is leverage opt-in. Customers are more likely to respond to emails that they have opted in to, so it’s important that you get them on your list as soon as possible. A double opt-in process will help ensure that only those people who want to receive your messages are getting them.
2 – Segment Out Your Email Lists
Segmentation is a way to divide your audience into smaller groups. This will help you send more targeted emails, which means that you can get more sales from each customer.
You can create category segments like the buyer’s age, geographic area, types of products purchased, and more. Imagine how much more effective this would be than sending out one generic message!
3 – Cultivate and Clean Your Email Lists
Email marketing is an integral part of your WooCommerce store’s overall strategy, but it’s not the only part. You need to build a list of people who are interested in what you’re selling and then nurture those relationships over time.
To do this, you need to keep track of the emails that people give you when they sign up for updates from your site. That way, when it comes time for them to hear from you again (by email), they’ll actually get the message. Be sure to clean your email list by using the services of your email list provider.
4 – Try Not to Use No-Reply Rules
Using a “No Reply” rule shuts down communication between you and your customers. Instead, always have accurate and easy-to-read contact information in your emails so a customer can ask more questions or get the help they need to convert into actionable sales.
5 – Customize the Email with Your Branding
In addition to email marketing basics, you should customize your emails with your branding. This can be done by using your logo and colours throughout the email. You can also add images representing your brand, like photos of yourself or staff members in action at work or even product photos.
6 – Use Subject Hook Lines
The subject line is your first impression. It’s your chance to grab attention and entice readers into opening your email. So how do you make sure that happens? Well, first off: don’t be boring! Try to think of quick and easy messages encouraging them to open the email when they see it in their inbox.
7 – Include a CTA
In the email, you should include a call to action (CTA). The CTA is simply a link that directs customers to your website or landing page, where they can take the next step in their journey. It’s important that this link is relevant to your product or service and accessible for them to understand what it means.
8 – Keep it Short
Keep it short and to the point. Your email subscribers don’t have a lot of time, so make sure your emails are concise. Use bullet points, subheadings, and images to break up the text and keep it interesting for readers who may be skimming over their inboxes.
9 – Evoke Emotion
A good email marketing strategy should be more than just sending out emails. It needs to be an art form, a way to connect with your audience and evoke emotion in them.
Emotions are powerful motivators that drive action, so you want your customers to feel something when they read or hear from you. You can do this by being personal and sincere in communicating with them, using humour and wit or visual materials.
10 – Track the Analytics
The last thing to getting the most out of your email marketing strategy is tracking. You need to know which emails are converting, how many people opened them, and what they did next.
If you don’t have a dedicated analytics platform for your business yet, there are plenty of free solutions available that can help you analyse all kinds of data from across different platforms (including Google Analytics).
Don’t Forget the Power of 24/7 Customer Support
The power of 24/7 customer support is something that can’t be overstated. Customers want answers when they need them, so you’ll want to make sure your shop has the right tools at its disposal to provide those answers.
Now that you have an effective email marketing strategy, you need a strong customer service team available to answer any follow-up questions and boost conversions. An easy way to do this is by installing the Customer Support for WooCommerce plugin from OPMC.
This will give you bespoke control over how your customers interact with your brand and create a more rewarding customer experience.
Conclusion
Email marketing is an excellent way for your WooCommerce shop to grow, but it’s important to remember that it takes time and patience. You can’t expect immediate results from this strategy, so ensure you’re ready for what comes next. Use A/B testing and let your creativity and data guide you into new pathways of powerful personalized sales.
Download Customer Support for WooCommerce plugin today
This plugin will give you bespoke control over how your customers interact with your brand and create a more rewarding customer experience.