Email Marketing for Success in Ecommerce
The main objective of ecommerce email marketing is to encourage website visitors to carry out your desired action i.e. make a purchase. In order to do
this, you need to offer an incentive and email marketing enables you to do this in several ways.
It may be incentive enough that you send well targeted, relevant and timely campaigns. If you send email campaigns to the right demographic, chances
are much higher that you will get a strong conversion rate than if you blast campaigns to a larger, less relevant email list.
However, all is not lost if you don't make a sale on the first visit. If you are able to create a relationship with the consumer that will encourage
them to return to the site, there is a good chance that you will make the sale at a later date.
Building a relationship with the consumer involves offering other channels of communication that are of interest to them. If you have a newsletter,
encourage them to sign up to it by offering a discount to subscribers. Not only will this encourage them to purchase from you, it also provides the
perfect data capture opportunity. By marketing to your own email database of warm leads in the future, you Increase the likelihood that they will
return to your site and even make multiple purchases. This is also applicable to your RSS feed and social media followers.
The use of consumers' email data should be implemented carefully however. The best email marketers do not simply send material encouraging a sale; they
send communication that appears to be a two way dialogue, for example, advice relating to their products.
Another means of implying a dialogue is to gather a small amount of personal information about an individual in addition to their email address. This
will serve to build better relations as emails addressed to individuals are proven to have a better rate of conversion. If relevant, an email offering
a discount for a person's upcoming birthday could also improve their relationship with you. Being creative with your methods of interaction will keep
consumers interested and will therefore encourage sales.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that email marketing is not a one way channel. Consumers expect more from brands than this and if your emails aren't
targeted, you are wasting time and money. Many consumers now want and expect a relationship and in order to do this, you need to offer a level of
interaction that indicates you care about your customers. Start with addressing email recipients by name and experiment with building your dialogue.
Emily Goodyear is PR & Marketing Executive for
Email Marketing Specialists
WRM-Media. She also writes the company blog at
http://wrmmedia.wordpress.com/
looking at the latest industry trends. Follow her on twitter
@Emily_Goodyear
or
@wrmmedia
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