The Importance of Email Marketing in the Ecommerce Industry
What is email marketing?
Email is one of the most traditional types of online interaction, but it's also one of the most impactful digital marketing methods available. Email marketing is a marketing approach in which businesses send promotional emails to a large number of users. It is commonly used to create sales through the distribution of promotional offers, the nurturing of leads, or the expansion of the reach of content marketing activities.
Ecommerce email marketing:
Email marketing is a significant approach in ecommerce. There are three types of ecommerce email marketing:
- Transactional emails: Transactional emails are emails delivered in response to a user's actions on an application or a website. They often include content or materials that are unique to that user and are delivered to users one at a time. Some examples are order confirmations, receipts, and order-shipped emails.
- Promotional emails: An email delivered to your email list that promotes your new or existing items or services is known as a promotional email. Promotional emails are used to spread the word about special discounts, limited-time offers, or unique content.
- Lifecycle emails: These are automated emails designed to connect users and strengthen your engagement with them. They are sent automatically in response to consumer activity (such as a purchase) or at certain times. Welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, thank you emails, feedback requests, and anniversary emails, such as happy birthday messages, are examples of these.
Benefits of Email Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce
The advantages of executing efficient email campaigns are impressive: email marketing enables an increase in brand awareness and credibility and the establishment of trustworthy connections with users. It is also an excellent approach to creating leads and increasing sales and website traffic.
- High ROI
In the ecommerce sector, it is claimed that results are everything. With this in mind, the return on investment is the primary reason why most businesses invest in email marketing. Email marketing has a higher average return on investment (ROI) than other marketing channels, and it is also a fairly cheap marketing option, especially given its efficacy.
| Source | ROI of Email Marketing |
|---|---|
| HubSpot (November 30, 2022) | Email ROI is impressive at $36 for every $1 spent. |
| Omnisend (October 18, 2022) | Email marketing remains on top when it comes to ROI. "On average, businesses earn $40 from email marketing for every dollar spent. |
| Litmus (January 9, 2022) | Email marketing continues to be unmatched when it comes to the return on investment it drives. A whopping $36 for every $1 spent. |
| The Direct Marketing Association (UK) (2019) - pdf (1.19mb) | The return on investment for email marketing is now slightly more than £42 for every pound spent. |
- Increase brand awareness
Email marketing is an effective strategy for improving your brand identity because it provides you with direct access to the inboxes of your potential clients. You'll have an advantage over your competitors if you start offering relevant content to them.
When you interact with your target audience on a regular basis, they will become more familiar with your brand and its values. Your recipients will get acquainted with your products, services, and company as a whole since you will often be in their inboxes. As you share useful material about your company or sector, you may establish a reputation as a valuable resource, which helps develop trust with potential customers.
- Easy to measure
When it comes to measuring results, email marketing is convenient. There are metrics such as click-through rate and conversion rate that may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your email text and design. Stats including bounce rate, spam complaint rate, and unsubscribe rate provide a clear picture of the quality of your list. Even stats like email sharing rate and list growth rate might reflect the trend of your company's popularity. The biggest advantage of being capable to track everything is the ability to determine where there is room for improvement.
- Ideal for personalised, targeted messages
The major objective of newsletters and email campaigns is to get in direct contact with the clients, keep them engaged, and deliver value through your content. Your clients will feel like they are part of your business.
- Generate website traffic
When you have appealing websites and the appropriate call-to-actions, email marketing may greatly enhance conversion rates by driving users to your website.
Tracking email website traffic provides digital marketers with information on how their email campaigns and lists are doing, which materials are most effective with customers, and how they can enhance their content to draw in more traffic and qualified visitors.
Email Marketing Strategy:
- Identify your audience.
A relevant email is one that is successful. Start with your buyer persona, comprehend their needs, and then, like everything else in marketing, adjust your email campaign to meet those needs.
- Define your objectives.
Keep in mind the main objectives of your email and digital marketing approach before you set up your email marketing service provider and construct your new campaign. Establish KPIs to evaluate the overall performance of your campaign. Thinking about topics like customer acquisition, open rates, and how email marketing will fit into your broader plan are all examples of this.
- Select the type of email campaign.
It might be challenging sometimes to choose between different email campaigns. You can drive users to spend more time and share your offers by using the appropriate types of email marketing campaigns. Email marketing may sometimes be even more efficient than social media.
- Set a schedule.
Determine how frequently you intend to approach your list and notify your audience in advance. Furthermore, once you've set a schedule, stick to it. This helps build trust and keeps you at the top of your audience's mind.
- Track your progress.
You will likely get a wave of satisfaction once you've planned or launched your email marketing campaign since the majority of your task is done. But don't forget that you should invest as much effort in analyzing your email campaigns as you do in creating them. Luckily, email marketing campaigns provide significant amounts of data that show the success of your campaign.
As a conclusion, email marketing has great potential for eCommerce businesses. These best strategies can help you attract new users, maintain existing ones, and increase revenue. There are many email marketing platforms available on the market that may help with this approach. We've already published a blog post comparing two of the best platforms (MailChimp vs. Klaviyo Compared); for more information), for further info check: Ecommerce Email Marketing: Mailchimp vs Klaviyo Compared.