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Email can seem rather quaint and old-fashioned these days, but it's still one of the most powerful marketing channels available to ecommerce retailers.
Why?
The most important thing here is that you have direct access to your customers and fans' inboxes.
Most other channels are typically owned by someone else. You should be doing search marketing and social media marketing, but in both of those cases, you're always going to be at the mercy of the companies that own those channels.
We've talked to retailers before who were doing well on search or social, only to get severely hampered by some algorithm change over at Google or Facebook.
Email, however, is eternal. Once your customer gives you their email, you have their permission to keep emailing them until they unsubscribe.
In this post, I'll break down what a powerful email marketing strategy can do for you (and your potential customer) as well as list five powerful guides that walk you through the entire process of setting it up.
By the end, you will know everything you need to about email marketing, from which email marketing platform to use to email marketing best practices.
I suggest you bookmark this post for later because there are a lot of goodies here for you :)
How do I email marketing?
Setting up an email marketing campaign requires a lot of effort upfront but then can usually be automated after that. With the right email marketing service provider, you can create an email automation plan that not only does all of the sending for you but also filters the emails according to your segmented email list. For example, everyone on your mailing list can receive the welcome email series and your weekly email newsletter, but then only those with upcoming birthdays will receive a personalized email wishing them a happy birthday.
Key Takeaway: Find email marketing software that supports your exact needs and let it do the automation for you.
What does an email marketer do?
An email marketer creates an email marketing strategy that sends targeted emails to new and potential customers on a mailing list. Targeted emails are mostly broken down by where the customer is at on the customer journey. Certain customer behaviors, like abandoning the cart at checkout or shopping through a particular category, can prompt a trigger email based on what the email marketer has set up. That way, each email subscriber receives emails that are only relevant to them.
This not only increases brand awareness but also makes the entire email campaign super valuable to those on the email list. When done well, an email marketer can boost sales and increase customer retention.
Key Takeaway: An email marketer follows email marketing best practices to move customers further along the customer journey.
What are the best email marketing services?
The best email marketing platform mostly comes down to your goals for your email marketing strategy. If you're a small business owner and you manage the ins and outs of your business, then a robust email marketing platform like ActiveCampaign might be too overwhelming and expensive for you. Something more user-friendly, like Mailchimp, would work better. That being said, the best email marketing services on the market as of this writing are:
How To Set Up Email Marketing Automation For Your Online Shop
With the right email marketing software, sending emails to your mailing list will be an absolute breeze. Even so, it takes a little bit of effort to set up a welcome email series, design targeted emails, and segment your customer list
So just to make sure that you don't miss a single thing, we've rounded up the top guides to ecommerce email marketing.
1. DigitalMarketer's Ultimate Guide To Ecommerce Email Marketing
This is an epic, 15,000+ word post by John McIntyre, the CEO of ReEngager.
It's broken into 4 parts:
- Part 1 – The Tools of an Ecommerce Email Marketing Strategy
- Part 2 – Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaign Roadmap – Stage 1
- Part 3 – Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaign Roadmap – Stage 2
- Part 4 – How Ecommerce Companies Like Amazon, Bonobos and Envelopes.com Drive Millions With Email Marketing
2. How To Write Great Emails Asking For Referrals
How To Write Great Emails Asking For Referrals
This is one of our most popular posts of all time. There are 6 parts:
- Focus on the subject line
- Keep the email simple
- Make your call-to-action impossible to ignore
- Emphasize the motivation for purchase
- Highlight the benefit to Friend AND Advocate
- Include any additional conditions for the referral
3. SleekNote's Email Marketing ROI Tool
It's quite well-established that email marketing has great ROI – but how much ROI are you getting, specifically?
It's always a good idea to be clear about the numbers of your business. Sleeknote has a really nice email marketing ROI calculator that you can use to get a good sense of it.
There's no download or email opt-in necessary – just pop in your numbers and get a nice chart that you can share with your team. It really makes it clear which part of the funnel you ought to work on optimizing next.
4. 6 Examples of Beautiful Referral Email Designs
6 Examples Of Beautiful Referral Email Designs
We used to hear from retailers that they didn't know what they could do with their referral program's emails – how could they make the emails look good?
So we've put together a list of some of the coolest referral emails we've seen our clients use.
5. Vero's The Ultimate Guide To Successful Email Marketing
The Ultimate Guide To Successful Email Marketing
Vero has one of the more comprehensive and easy-to-read email marketing guides we've seen.
It's broken up into 7 parts:
1 Your Basic Setup
2 Getting Subscribers
3 Your First Campaign Strategy
4 Creating Killer Content
5 Tracking Your Results
6 Optimizing Email Campaigns
7 Bonus Tips & Tricks
Highly recommended!
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We'll be continuing to update this post with more ecommerce email marketing resources, so stay tuned!
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Visa is ReferralCandy's former Blog Editor [2013–2018]. He also co-founded Statement.sg, a fashion ecommerce label selling witty t-shirts. He's mildly Internet-famous for his elaborate Twitter threads. He hopes to enjoy a glass of scotch onboard a commercial space flight someday.
