The value of a good e-mail marketing campaign is heavily underestimated by many entrepreneurs today. It is often said that e-mail marketing is dead, and it is a better idea to put your time and marketing budget in other marketing channels. Nothing could be more far from the truth, email marketing is a unique channel with unique opportunities. In this article we will go through the benefits of e-mail marketing, ideas of e-mails you can send to your customers and various tips to make your email campaigns run smoothly.
The advantages of e-mail marketing
In our CCV Love Local report 50% of the customers in the survey preferred to get information from their local shops via email. E -mail marketing is and remains a great channel to approach your customers.. Some advantages of e-mail marketing are:
- E-mail campaigns are very well measurable
- You can compare campaigns and zoom in on a personal level
- Very easy to test and further optimize different versions and type of content
- You are not dependent on Google, Facebook or other channels .
- E-mail marketing is personal and is only seen by the people in your mailing list.
- People in your mailing list are often already interested in your company/products.
- E-mail marketing is not expensive and very profitable
- Recipients can unsubscribe at any time (may sound like a drawback, but less inacive users also means your mailing list becomes more qualitative).
- Email marketing is largely automatic.
- Although email marketing is not without its own challenges and pitfalls, the channel offers many opportunities and you can get a lot of revenue and loyal customers from good email marketing campaigns.
Types of e-mail
There are different types of email that can be used in your email campaigns. Which are the right ones? Of course that depends on who you want to reach and what goals you have Below we list a few types of email campaigns
1 | The newsletter
The best known and most used e-mail marketing method, is the newsletter. Newsletters are used for different purposes. With regular newsletters you can share news about your business, products and perhaps also drive promotions. There are, of course, countless examples of good newsletters that are perfectly suited to the target group and offer the right incentive to make a purchase. Determine whether your target group should be approached more loosely, with colloquial language and a joke here and there. Or should your target group be approached a bit more formal and straight to the point? This information is also helpful for determining the layout and content.
2 | Transactional e-mails
Transactional emails are automatic emails sent when the user performs an action on your webshop. For example, an order confirmation or a thank you e-mail when you request an infographic or e-book from a website. These e-mails are never sent in bulk, so the recipient is the only recipient of the e-mail. However, what is often forgotten is the possibility to send reminders or win back e-mails based on the information from these e-mails.
3 | Win back e-mails
With a win back email you make sure that any inactive users are triggered again to make a purchase or take an action. Such an e-mail can be sent when, for example, someone has not opened the newsletter several times.
There are several possibilities that also partly depend on the type of webshop you have and the products or services you offer. Think of an Airbnb win back example: Airbnb doesn’t pay attention to who has or hasn’t read the newsletter, but pays attention to when the last trip was booked and sends out the win back e-mail based on that information.Another possibility is to use the win back campaign to clean up the mailing list, if you don’t press a consent box within a certain period of time, you will automatically be unsubscribed. If you haven’t done much cleaning up your current mailing list yet this is a recommended method.
A concept used by many webshops is to offer a unique discount code after a period of inactivity. Often this is a discount code of 5 or 10 percent, or when it concerns more expensive products, a discount code of a certain amount.
With a little creativity you can create a unique and effective win back campaign.
4 | Reminders
Reminders are event-driven e-mails that are very useful for businesses. Think of a reminder for an invoice that is still open, or a reminder for an event for which only a few tickets are available.
5 | Birthday e-mails
If you have a customer list including birthdays, it is nice to send a birthday e-mail, often including a gift voucher or promotion. For example a discount code, or a gift for free if visiting the store.
When you send birthday emails, make sure that the ‘gift’ is attractive enough to activate users, while also taking into account the cost to your business.
6 | Abandoned cart e-mails
Abandoned cart e-mails are sent when someone in your (if you have one) webshop adds a product to the shopping cart without completing the purchase. Since an addition to the shopping cart is almost only done when someone is in doubt or has no time to complete the purchase, the abandoned cart email is used as a reminder. If you do not send this email, it is possible that the user who did not have time to complete the purchase will forget about it and make a purchase from your competitor a while later. So, don’t forget this step in your email marketing campaign.
If you have a CCV webshop solution, the ‘Abandoned shopping cart’ app responds perfectly to this. The app is easy to link with CCV Shop. With various time intervals, the app reminds your customers by e-mail of their abandoned shopping cart. The content of the shopping cart and a link to your webshop (with filled shopping cart) are standard in the e-mail text. You can further design the content of the e-mail to convince your customers to place the order. The customer can then easily complete the order.
7 | Welcome e-mails
When you create an account on a website you will undoubtedly receive this e-mail in your inbox; the welcome e-mail. These emails speak for themselves and are often used to tell a bit more about the company or product, send account details and encourage interaction.
E-mail marketing tips
Within e-mail marketing, too, the market continues to develop, which is why it is important that you keep up with the latest developments. Are you already taking the following into account for your e-mail marketing campaigns?
Tip 1 | Continue to increase the number of recipients
Because you always run the risk that people unsubscribe from your mailing list, it is very important that you keep increasing this list. There are several ways to encourage people to subscribe to your mailing list. Think about the following:
- A subscription option on your homepage.
- Subscription option when ordering in your webshop or when a customer is physically buying something in your shop.
- Pop-up with subscription option or subscription option on your website.
Of course, there are many other ways to collect e-mail addresses. Are you creative enough to come up with your own innovative way of collecting emails for your mailing list?
Tip 2 | Personalize e-mails
Of all the techniques and developments in e-mail marketing, personalizing your e-mails is one of the most important. With personalized e-mails you can generate a higher open rate, click rate and conversion rate than when the e-mail is not personalized. Quite a difference, isn’t it?
Personalized e-mails do not only have to be standard e-mails where your first name is used, they can also be, for example, personalized product offers. Dynamic content is a large part of personalized e-mails and can be used to customize certain parts of your e-mails to make them more personal towards the respondent. Think not only of the text in your e-mail, but also of media items such as images or videos.
Tip 3 |Short and powerful emails
Nobody wants to read a huge block of text and when you do, someone will quickly click away your mail. Try to keep the content in your e-mails as short as possible while the message remains the same. Don’t you have a lot to say? Then divide the mail into different topics and give each topic its own CTA (Call To Action).
Tip 4 | Put your call to actions in a tactical place
The location of your CTA is severely underestimated within e-mail marketing. Are you already getting the most out of it? Make sure your Call To Action is in a location where there are no other distractions. Also make sure that the CTA stands out and attracts attention. The text in your CTA is also very important and should be formulated based on the subject of your e-mail.
Tip 5 | Deliverability
Deliverability is a problem that many entrepreneurs encounter within e-mail marketing. A large part of this problem can be solved by cleaning up your mailing list. The biggest causes of poor deliverability are:
Track your wrong e-mail addresses in your mailing list and retrieve them from the database. A typing error happens quite often, so this is something you should keep an eye on constantly. Do you have an Email Service Provider (ESP)? ESP’s often detect these e-mail addresses automatically.
5.2 | Poor Relevance
Are the e-mails you send relevant to the people in your mailing list? If not, you will notice this in the open and click ratio, which directly affects your deliverability. Make sure you monitor your e-mail campaigns in real time to keep the opening, click and conversion rates as high as possible.
5.3 | Spam traps
ISPs sometimes use a non-active e-mail inbox to detect spam e-mails. If this non-active inbox often receives e-mails from you, your deliverability will also suffer as a result. Fortunately, this is easy to solve by keeping the mailing list as clean as possible.
5.4 | Complaints
When someone presses ‘report as spam’ on your e-mails it will also affect your deliverability. Make sure you remove these users directly from your mailing list.
Conclusion
E-mail marketing is far from dead, on the contrary, e-mail marketing is a great channel to realize personal interaction with your customers for a low price without giving the feeling that it is an advertisement. Are you already getting the most out of your email marketing, or are you currently missing out on opportunities?