Email Marketing Is Critical to Ecommerce Revenue Growth

Ecommerce websites that have an established email marketing program typically attribute 45-55% of their revenue to email marketing. This is a benchmark that ecommerce managers should be aiming for. Other revenue sources can include pay-per-click and social media marketing.

Five Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy’s Contribution to Revenue

If you’re starting from scratch always start simple with the understanding that your email marketing programs will become more sophisticated over time. Your email marketing needs will increase over time only because you will be generating more revenue over time. As it develops you’re going to need new techniques to keep subscribers interested and buying. Take a look at these five techniques you can implement that will increase your email marketing program’s revenue contribution.

Improve Subscriber Acquisition

There are a number of ways you can acquire new subscribers using just your website. One of the easiest includes asking buyers to confirm their subscription to your marketing emails at checkout. Another includes using interstitial popups. These have become so sophisticated that you can make your offer to subscribe 10 seconds after they’ve entered your site or when they try to exit. While you may hate popup offers, they do work. The key is making the offer highly relevant. For example, if your visitor came to your site from an organic Google search, AdWords display ads, or Facebook Ads you can customize the message to match the visitor’s intent. This will incrementally increase your conversion rates.

Cross Promote on Social Media Channels

Don’t assume that those that like your Facebook page or follow your brand on Twitter are doing so because they don’t want to be subscribed to your email marketing program. You need to understand that social media networks are “rented land” and play by rules you have no control of. Email is this the best and least expensive way to maintain a relationship with your customers and subscribers. Create cross-channel campaigns that encourage fans on Facebook and Twitter to sign up for your email marketing program. Present offers that are exclusively available to email subscribers. You can also reverse this approach to encourage email subscribers to follow your brand on social.

Make Product Recommendations

Remember that email is the biggest contributor to revenue for most ecommerce brands. You should be every aware of the buying trends your customers have. By running an analysis of their buying trends you should be able to identify who should receive an email with a recommended product to purchase next. Identify your top selling items and identify those customers that have purchased just one item. Then look at those customers that purchased that items and a second. Is there a correlation? Maybe they bought a t-shirt but no shorts? Or shoes and not socks? Segments these single purchase shoppers and email them additional product recommendations using social proof. You should share a key data point like “3 out of 5 customers who purchased this also purchase this item too.”

Offer a Daily Deal

Daily Deals can be tricky and aren’t for every ecommerce store. A deal could go viral when it ends up on a deal aggregator site and send you a ton of traffic that ends up crashing your website. If your website architecture is able to handle that volume of requests, it can be a very helpful way to move large quantities of discontinued merchandise and free of capital for your to buy new products. People love daily deals. They love to be the first to hear about them and make it part of their routine to check for the latest offers. Email is a friendly reminder to these important shoppers. Send your email at the same time each day and encourage your subscribers to invite their friends.

Segment Your Subscribers and Target with Relevant Offers

Maybe you have an ecommerce store that sells products to a couple different personas you need to segment them and sent them relevant offers for the products they prefer. Your email marketing service provider should be able to help you create segments and send email to each. If you have an apparel ecommerce store chances are that those that have historically purchased women’s clothing will not purchase men’s unless it’s seasonal. Or if you have a lifestyle brand that speaks to several different personas, it may be best to not send an email themed with a less interesting lifestyle theme. For example, would you send an email about baseball cleats to those who have previously purchased track spikes?

Will This Strategy Work?

I have personally implemented each of the tactics for ecommerce email marketing and found them to be extremely effective for attracting new subscribers and growing revenue. These are not difficult to implements and will help you get closer to your revenue contribution goals of email marketing. It helps having the right email marketing service provider with a toolset that integrates well with your ecommerce platform.

Tags: Ecommerce • Email Marketing