Email Marketing Automation Strategy for E-commerce store
Email: is the highest performing marketing channel for return on investment. That’s the reason 89% of marketers perceive it as a leading medium for generating leads. So, if you want to get the customer’s attention, all you need to do is optimize your email marketing strategy.
This is where email marketing automation can come in handy. After all, marketing automation increases qualified leads by 451%. Moreover, 51% of companies are already using marketing automation. Hence, if you wish to have a competitive edge over your competitors, incorporating automation for your E-commerce business is imperative.
What is email marketing automation?
Before we go ahead and explain the role of email marketing automation for your E-commerce business, let’s find out what email automation is all about?
Email automation gives you the ability to send targeted messages at scheduled times based on specific user action. It helps in building personalized relationships with past, present, and future customers. Simply put, it is the most effective way of engaging with your subscribers. It lets you use analytics to find the right strategies for your E-commerce business, thereby helping you keep your brand on the top of your customer’s mind.
Benefits of email marketing automation
Email marketing automation can assist you in creating the perfect message for each of your subscribers. In short, it ensures that you send the right message at the right time to the right person. Further, you can even leverage the data from each of your email campaigns and find out what works best for your customer base. Let’s take a look at its various benefits.
- Helps in creating drip campaigns
You can automate your outreach through email automation tools. It will keep your business on the top of the prospective customer’s mind. These are such customers who are interested in your product but are not ready to buy it yet.
- Facilitates a personalized approach
Email automation makes use of demographic, social, and transactional data to assist you in creating a personalized email for your customer base. It can give you a clear insight into your customer’s behavioral pattern along with their purchasing habits.
- Maintains brand consistency
Since automation takes care of scheduling and segmenting an email to each of your specific audience, you can concentrate more on creating the perfect email copy while maintaining your brand consistency throughout your customer base.
Email automation strategy to make your E-commerce store top-notch
Here’s a look at the various email automation strategies that can help you increase your sales and expand your customer base while enhancing customer retention and being more profitable.
1. Provide a personalized shopping experience
Personalized emails have the ability to drive 600% higher transaction rates. So, if you want to stay ahead in the competition, you must make personalization your key marketing strategy. As mentioned already, email automation keeps a check on the behavioral data and purchasing history of the customers, thereby helping you provide a customized approach to your customer base. Simply put, marketing automation allows you to tag your customers according to their buying behaviour. Such data can help you serve your customer in a better way the next time.
According to Accenture, 75% of consumers prefer buying from a retailer that recognizes them by name, gives recommendations on the basis of past purchases and keeps a record of their purchase history. Therefore, it becomes imperative to make good use of email automation. You can even make use of machine learning to show relevant product recommendations to the customers who visit your website. It will take your personalization strategy to the next level. We love how Uncommon Goods have made good use of personalization in its recommendation email template.
Take a look.
2. Work on proper segmentation
Understanding the buyer’s journey and offering them products and services that’s relevant to their needs can help your business grow. That’s why it is important for E-commerce marketers to segment their audience base for better marketing and engagement. After all, marketers who leverage segmented campaigns for their business witness a 760% increase in their revenue.
Email automation allows marketers to create highly segmented email lists. It lets marketers use subscriber activities and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data such as new customer onboarding, purchase history, last purchase, sales funnel stage, lead stage, and so on. In addition, marketers can also leverage highly targeted automation workflows to maximize the sales and engagement.
Take some inspiration from the welcome email template design of Glossier. See how it is onboarding the new customer by giving them a detailed idea about the brand.
3. Convert abandoned shopping carts
With 69.23% of shoppers abandoning their carts, it has become imperative for marketers to identify the reasons behind it and fix the issue. Here’s a look at the various cart abandonment reasons.
Once you have the data regarding the cause of cart abandonment, you can determine the weak points of your business and take corrective measures for it. Further, you can also offer special compensatory offers to entice your customers to complete the purchase. See how MACK WELDON makes good use of fear of missing out (FOMO) for its cart abandonment email template by telling the customer how the product might sell out soon. They even go a step ahead and try to build the customer’s trust in their brand by giving them the option of sending a different size of the product or refunding them.
Email automation can help your E-commerce business to send personalized abandoned cart email to boost your revenue. In fact, you can create a whole sequence for sending out such emails. Do you know sending three abandoned cart emails results in 69% more orders than a single email?
Take a look at how ASICS sends out two emails in their cart abandonment series to ensure better cart recovery.
So, go ahead and make use of marketing automation to simplify the whole cart abandonment email process. With marketing automation software, all you need to do is fill the criteria and content assets. The email will be sent automatically in accordance with the customer’s action.
4. Facilitate smooth communication between teams
It is critical to ensure that all the teams within a business communicate and collaborate with each other seamlessly. Remember, you can extract the benefits of customer data only when it is distributed amidst the team in the right way and at the right time.
Marketing automation allows all the departments in your business to be in sync with each other. It will give them a better insight into leads and customers. To put it in other words, marketing automation syncs the communication within the team in real-time. This, in turn, gives accessibility of your consumer data to all the teams in your business, thereby making it easy for teams to stay connected and deliver better results.
5. Pay special attention to loyal customers
You should treat your loyal customers differently from others. After all, such customers have a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) and can work wonders in driving revenues and generating user engagement. Hence, it is important to convert your loyal customers into your brand advocates and evangelists. You can do so by giving them special tokens, discounts , exclusive membership and so on. Here’s how Fabkids does it by giving its VIP member $10 free to spend during a special sale.
Such customers can be identified through. marketing automation by automatically tagging and segmenting them. You can also send automated emails to such customers regarding product launches, updates, deals, and more.
Wrap up
With machines being less likely to commit mistakes, the efficiency of automated email campaigns is certainly high. Do you know 36% of marketers use marketing automation to reduce repetitive tasks? You can do the same and spend your time on higher-value work while planning your E-commerce business strategically.
All in all, email marketing automation has great power and it is high time E-commerce stores start leveraging its power. Take some cues from the above-mentioned strategies and see how it does the trick for your business. You can even take the help of MailChimp experts and Marketo Certified experts and use their pre-built email templates and automation software respectively. Now, go ahead and reap the benefits of email automation.
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.