Should I really email my customers? Isn’t it just spam? Is it worth the time?
Too many eCommerce stores don’t take full advantage of email marketing; butif you’re only sending the occasional email newsletter, you’re missing a major opportunity for your store and an opportunity to improve your customers’experiences.
Based on my work at Klaviyo helping Ecommerce stores increase revenueswith email, here are five tips that I’ve seen consistently lead to great emails that customers like getting.
1. Go Beyond the Newsletter
For most eCommerce stores, sending well-timed emails to customers oncea year that drive purchases beats sending an email every week. The bestthing about this strategy is that rather than having to continually build flashy newnewsletters, you can focus on getting emails right once and then you can reuse the same emails over time.
Some examples:
- Emailing customers who abandon shopping carts
- Sending thank you emails to customers who purchase for the first time
- Offering discounts to customers who haven’t shopped recently
- Reaching out to VIP customers to recognize them
I’ve seen each of these emails drive thousands of dollars per month in revenue for many Ecommerce stores, and most just take a couple of hours to put together. Newsletters can definitely be great too – but don’t feel like they are the only way to go.
2. Keep it Simple
For many Ecommerce stores, one of the key barriers to sending emails is the time or cost it takes to make them look good. Here’s the thing – for many emails, open and click through rates will actually be higher with simple and short plain-text emails.
Here’s an email that one of our customer recently sent that worked well:
Hi Sarah –
Thanks for shopping at TheEcommerceStore a month ago. As a way of saying thanks, I wanted to reach out and offer you 50% shipping on your next order
(using code THANKYOU).
We really appreciate having you as a customer!
Best,
Mike
I got over 100 emails per day on average last year, and the chance of my getting through a long email from anyone other than a close friend is incredibly low. By keeping messages simple and short, you make it easier for me (since it just takes a second or two to read and get to the main point) and you make it much more likely I’ll read your email next time.
3. Be Personal
Over the summer of 2012, most Americans were bombarded with email from presidential candidates. What made these emails unique was that rather than being the typical glossy campaign communications, many were much more informal. From Barack Obama inviting me to dinner (not really, but that was his subject line) to Mitt Romney’s son talking about this dad, this campaign’s emails often read more like something I’d expect from a friend than from someone I’ve never met.
Importantly, these emails worked (in Obama’s case, it’s estimated that emails brought in over $500 million in donations). The lesson: don’t hesitate to write emails like they are coming from a person – not a faceless company. Unlike stores throughout time, Ecommerce stores rarely get to meet their customers face to face, so email is the best way to build a real relationship with your customers.
4. Monitor Results
At the end of the day, you send emails to increase sales, make your customers happy, and improve your business – so it’s essential that you measure the results of each email to see if it’s working.
Some things to look at:
- Open Rates: The number of people who open an email is directly related to the subject line and who the sender is. We tend to see that emails from real people have higher open rates – but this is only repeatable if the message really is personal.
- Click Through Rates: Once a customer has opened your email, your goal is to get them to visit your store. Click through rates are a great way to see how compelling your in email content is and whether it entices readers to come back.
- Purchases: At the end of the day, your goal is to get customers to buy from your store. While the number of purchases are related to click through rates, we do see that some emails are particularly good at getting people back to the store who then go on to buy.
5. Get Started
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started” – Mark Twain
Mark Twain got this right – the biggest problem we see eCommerce stores face is not sending the first email. If you pick one of the emails above and start really simple, you’ve overcome the biggest obstacle out there.
I’d love to hear more tips from readers in the comments below. What has worked well for your store? What hasn’t?
This is a guest post by Ed Hallen. He’s the co-founder of Klaviyo – an intelligent email marketing platform for eCommerce. From abandoned carts to post-purchase follow- up emails, Klaviyo hooks right into your shopping cart to make your email marketing easy, automated and effective.