Maybe you think email marketing is no longer meaningful in our times. Nowadays there are plenty marketing methods. We can mention other marketing methods such as social media, paid campaigns, SEO and so on. If you think that email marketing it’s no longer relevant maybe you should analyse more. Or more correctly, why shouldn’t you use email marketing too? Especially now when the emails are checked frequently.
Through email marketing you can build a more personal relationship with your audience. This way you can communicate directly with your company’s clients, whether we’re talking of individuals or businesses. Don’t misunderstand us, all marketing methods are important. If they are made at the same time, it’s hard to go wrong when you are promoting your business. You need to make room for yourself on the market. You must create the necessary exposure in order to sell.
Why should you use email marketing in 2019?
The message will arrive directly at your audience
Your company message will arrive at the interested people. The people that are subscribed to your newsletter are surely interested in your business and your promotions. Your target audience will receive specific content that meets their needs. You can even customize the messages for each customer. Or you can customize it depending on the specific attributes found for each segment of people. Why should you do that? In order to have a higher conversion rate. We’ll discuss more about segmentation in this article.
Brand awareness
You present your brand to potential customers when you’re sending emails. You will also refresh your brand image in your client’s memory. You are also giving to your customers the attention they need. Therefore, they will see how much you care for them.
This is the most personal method by which you can develop a relationship with your clients. By segmenting your emails according to the interests of your customers, you show that you care about their needs and preferences. This way you can surprise them with interesting news and offers.
Costs
Email marketing is quite cost-effective. It is an effective way to reach people who have already bought from your company. You’ll also make your products more visible to the recent and future customers. The best part of email marketing it’s the cost. You can perform an email campaign with a low budget or with no budget at all.
Increase conversions
How do you increase conversions due to email marketing? The explanation is simple. As long as you send newsletters with offers created according to the interests and characteristics of your customers, your customers will be interested in your offer and your products. You are showing to your customers products they are interested in. This way they don’t have to search for those products through the store. Customers may not even know that your online store has certain products, especially if you have an online store with a lot of products.
Promote a new product or service through email
You can use email marketing if you want to promote a new product, a new service or changes of the service that you are offering in a much easier and appealing way. If you bring a new product in the store, you can also send an email. This way you will be informing customers about the new arrivals. You can promote your product before launching or adding it to your online store.
Learn from your clients what you need to do
The communication between your company and its customers should never stop. Present your new products or the best deals with the help of an email campaign. Send emails to your customers. Find out what they think about the products, about your company, about the services you offer, and so on.
Increase traffic on your website
You can get your clients interested in your products or services due to the emails. They will want to read more about the products on the website.
Generate leads
Not everyone will buy the products that you promote through a newsletter. So that shouldn’t stop you. You should give information about your company or present the new deals. This doesn’t cost you much, so why wouldn’t you promote your online store? You don’t have anything to lose, only to gain. You will spread the word about your company and the customer will hear more about your company. In future they might buy your products or use your services.
How can you avoid unsubscribing and still increase the opening rate?
Send meaningful emails
Segment your audiences. Send customized emails with offers based on the needs of each segment. Don’t send the same email to everyone because not all of them are equally interested in the same things. When you send a newsletter to someone that is not interested in your offer, the person in question is tempted to unsubscribe from your newsletter or not to open your email.
Use segmented groups of subscribers
Segmented subscribers and customize your offers. It requires a little research, but you will definitely have much better results.
Use images
Use images, but don’t overdo it. You don’t want to send a newsletter full of images. Use high-quality images, whether it’s a product image, pictures that represent certain categories in your online store, new services or a landing page with offers from your online store.
As I mentioned earlier, don’t use too many pictures. The email will not load fast enough when you are overdoing it with lots and lots of images.
Message
Don’t forget about the content. Although images will most often grab the attention, words are important too. Don’t insist on a wall of text because nobody subscribed to a novel-newsletter. Make your readers curios in order for them to come to your website. If you want to introduce a new product write some phrases that will stir curiosity and send the reader to the product page. If you are a blogger for example, send a paragraph and let the reader discover more on your blog.
Choose the right moment
When you are sending a newsletter or a notification timing is essential. The moment must be chosen correctly. Your customer must have a spare time in order to look over the mail or read the notification. If you send messages at a wrong time, the chances for them to be open later are low, and in the case of notifications they will get swipe and will have no effect. This factor will influence the unsubscribe rate at newsletter or notifications. If your subscribers will receive notifications at inappropriate hours, they will get annoyed. When this happens, your subscribers will unsubscribe.
Choose reasonable hours on which to send your newsletter or notification. After a while, do a research on the data and see at what time emails have more openings or clicks.
And we have arrived at the testing
Identify the best time when to send emails and notifications, test different formats, test to see what works and how you can improve your results.
When you start testing you should have preferably at least 1,000 subscribers. The more subscribers the better it is. Why? Because a low amount of subscribers might not mean much – statistics based on 10 people are not really reliable as everyone is different. It is preferable to have a cleaner list as well. A clean list is a list made of the active subscribers who open, if not frequently, at least sometimes, the sent newsletter.
A/B testing
Use the A/B tests. Emil A/B tests work almost on the same principle as A / B tests made when we talk about a website redesign. Whether you choose to send a full different version or a version with just a few different objects – such as CTA – to some subscribers and other formats to another group of subscribers you will be able to gather enough data for the analysis.
If you want to check just some objects or segments of a newsletter layout, don’t get carried away. Check just an object. Choose an object such as a call-to-action button. If you modify too many things at the same time, you will not be able to be discover which of the changes made the most impact. If you want to make more changes, you can do it one by one, and for each change you will apply an A / B test. What variables can be tested separately? There are different variables, variables such as topic, images, call-to-action button, text and so on.
Check your results from the A/B testing
Depending on the results you will see which of the two versions gives you better results. You will send the best format to the entire list in the future.
The results from a A / B tests will show the email opening rate and number of clicks. Clicks that sent the reader to your website.
How much do you have to wait in order to see the results? The time period varies depending on several factors. Factors that are related with your marketing strategy, the number of subscribers, the frequency with which you sent newsletter and so on. Most of the times, it’s preferably to choose time periods such as a week or a month. If you want to see the impact that is has it right away you can test for a much smaller time period, such as 24 hours or less.
Segmentation and customization
Subscribers list segmentation
If you want to please your subscribers it is very important to provide them interesting information. No one wants to receive emails with unnecessary and dull information.
If you send the same message to everyone from your subscribers list, especially if it is composed of a fairly high number of subscribers, there are big chances that your subscribers will have different gender and age, but also have different interests.
These metrics are extremely important especially if we refer to a newsletter that presents offers of an online store. For example, if we have an online store that is selling clothes. It is preferable to segment the list by gender. In this way, the women that subscribed at the newsletter will receive an offer with clothes for women and men will receive the offer that is addressed to men. Each subscriber will receive interesting and relevant information. You will have multiple email openings as well.
Email customization
Email customization plays an extremely important role, especially when each search result is based on the preferences.
It has to be emphasized that the personalization of an email is not done only by using the subscriber’s name in the subject or in the text, but we mean everything. We are talking about creating specific content for the different groups from your subscribers list. Even if it seems to be a lot of work, it’s not like that. However, short and segmented emails are preferred. A generic non-personalized email threw to the entire subscriber list of your online store will not perform as well.
From where do you get the needed information based on which you can divide the subscriber list into multiple groups? The answer it’s simple. Directly from your subscribers. They can agree on the fact that you are using their personal data. This way they will give you everything you need to do your list segmentation.
Based on what factors can you make your subscribers segmentation?
New subscribers
You got a new subscriber? Perfect. You can send them a tank you email and inform the new subscriber what are the perks of being subscribed to your newsletter. The benefits you give, depending on what you can afford, from the fact that subscribers will see the best deals on your store or are the first informed about what products are added to your online store. You can even give a discount for the first placed order.
Interests
Segmentation is done as we explained above, on the example with the clothes store. Segment subscribers in groups based on the interests. Groups are also based on the products that you sell on your online shop. If we retake the example with the clothes store, you can have more groups than men’s group and women’s group. For example, if you sell children’s clothes, you can also have groups like clothes for boys and clothes for girls. Besides the initial gender characteristic, the age characteristic also occurs.
Preferences
As I mentioned earlier in the article, email can be a really good way to establish a good communication with your clients. It’s also a way where they can tell you what they prefer. Who knows more about what your customers want, if not them? Ask your subscribers if they want to receive emails or notifications when you bring new products on the online shop. Ask them if they want to stay informed about the most recent sales. If we retake the example above, you can ask if they want to be informed when the children’s clothes are on sale. Or even more segmented, if they want to be informed when the clothes for girls or clothes for boys are on sale.
Inactivity
Keep in mind that there are still people that don’t check their emails and who have used an email address just to place an order, or even people who forget their email address or don’t know their correct email address. (If you’ve worked or you are still working in online commerce, you’ve meet this problem).
If the email addresses are correct and have had activity, but for a longer period of time users stopped to open your emails you can send them a message in order to fix the issue and attract them back to your company.
Do you have inactive subscribers?
If the subscribers no longer want to receive emails from you because they are no longer interested, then you can ask them if they don’t want to unsubscribe. Why should you do that? To have a clean and relevant list of subscribers. Don’t forget to ask why they are no longer interested in your offer. You can find relevant answers, such as finding another online store that offers better prices or products on which they are more interested in. This feedback helps you to find more about your competitors.
Abandoned carts
The topic of abandoned carts is being discussed quite often. With the help of email marketing you have yet another chance to get rid of this problem. If your client has an account on your online store and does not finish placing an order, you can send a mail with what’s in the basket and direct it through a call to action to complete the order. If 24 hours passed and the order wasn’t placed yet order you can send an email with a small discount. If you can afford it. A 5% voucher might be just what it takes to seal the deal.
Customer’s order history
If you have subscribers who just looked at your website and didn’t order, you can send them an email with the products they have seen. If one of the products is on sale, let them know until what date that product is at the promotional price. This email has the role to alert and speed up the process of taking a decision and placing the order. – giving the sense of urgency.
Depending on order history
Use the history of your clients’ orders to give them relevant offers. See more about methods like upsells and cross-sells here. We will retake the example of the clothes store: we have a client who is a man and has ordered a jacket for the winter. Why not send him an email with products such as hats or gloves? It is a straight forward example.
Reward your customers
Do you have customers who have bought several times from you? Set a number of orders on which clients can be rewarded. You can reward them with a discount on the next order. If they have already ordered 5 times from your online store, they most likely will keep ordering from you. Encourage and reward their action and give them a 5% or 10% discount on the 6th order. With this little strategy you can even increase the average value of their order while showing your customers that you cherish them and you know how to reward their fidelity. Your customers will most likely buy more – being already loyal to your online store – and seeing that they will benefit from discounts.
Reviews
A customer has ordered one or more products from your online store? Send them an email and ask them what they think about the product or the products they just bought. These customers will help you get more orders and they will also validate your image in front of new customers. A new visitor on your website will also read the product reviews written by your past customers. Those reviews can convince him to order from you and become a client. This will happen if you have accurate and real reviews.
Birthday
Do you have a record of your customer’s date of birth? Send them a happy birthday message and give him or her a 5% voucher to use for the next order. This email will definitely make your customer happy.
Segmented according to holidays
When the holidays are near, more than anything else, you’re getting ready for promotional campaigns. Especially when we talk about seasonal products. Send a newsletter informing your customers about the start date of your campaign and you could even showcase a teaser (some of the products that will be on sale). Again, you can segment according to the previous orders, interests, and so on. We will talk more about how can you get ready for a holiday campaign in the next article.
You can segment your subscribers list and personalize the emails according to many more features, but it also depends on your company, on your brand and on the products or services the you offer.
It requires a little research and study, but your effort will be rewarded.
Let’s talk about B2B and email marketing
Emails and segmentation exist even when we are talking about B2B. The same process takes place even if your business works only with companies. Segmentation can be done by taking in consideration factors such as new clients, order numbers, order value, upsells or cross-sells, and so on.
Platforms such as Magento or WordPress / WooCommerce even allow the presence of email subscriptions to notifications such as: ‘notify me when it comes back to stock’ or ‘I want to be notified when the price drops’. Especially if you are a supplier (and even if you are only B2B and you sell products to other companies) these functions can help you. Of course, B2C can also help you with these functions, but you need to be careful when you are restocking the inventory. You have to correctly calculate how many pieces you put in stock – individual customers often order fewer pieces of the same product.
What services or tools can you use for email marketing?
We must mention our favorite email marketing services: MailChimp, GetResponse and AWeber. The advantages of using these services are plenty. These services are easy to use, you will have less load on the server, but you also have a better chance to get your email in Inbox rather than in Spam even if you know close to nothing regarding networking, the inner-workings of the internet or technical stuff.
The good part is that it’s relatively easy to create lists, synchronize a service with your online store and actually create basic campaigns and more. But for specific details, ideas about e-mail design or service comparisons we will discuss in a future article.
Conclusion
Email marketing still works in 2019 and gives better results when it’s done properly. Especially when we talk about B2B. Yes, there are things that need to be studied and analysed. The good part it is that in the most cases it does not cost you money if you are doing it by yourself. There are plenty things that need to be studied. Yet, through this analysis you can see the interests and your clients behavior. These interests can change over time and your online store must be relevant and keep up with its customers and offer the most enjoyable experience.
We think that you agree with us when we say that you can generate far more sales when you get to know your customers better. By segmenting and studying your customer interests, you can, besides creating better email lists, find out what your clients prefer. All what you have to do after you discover this is to please them and generate sales.