The ins and outs of email marketing
Connecting your new business to your customers is imperative if you want to be successful. Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect and build a loyal customer base. Let’s go over what email marketing is and some email marketing ideas that you can implement with your online business.
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is one or more marketing emails that you send to a group or list of your customers. The goal of an email marketing campaign is one of the following:
- Convey general brand information, news, or updates
- Promote a particular product or service
- Or tell a brand story
Why email marketing?
Email marketing is the best customer communication channel. The overwhelming majority of e-commerce consumers check their email on a daily basis. That is more than any other communication channel that exists.
Control over your customer list. Email marketing gives you complete control over your customer and what you send them.
Conversions are better. Email marketing has an incredible ROI (return on investment). Whether you are investing time, money or both, email marketing is usually worth it!
Who do you send emails to?
You may be asking yourself who do I send these incredible email marketing campaigns to? eMerchantClub highly recommends you start building your email list with your personal contacts first. All of us have dozens if not hundreds of personal contact emails of friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc… The first thing you want to do with these emails is add them to a simple excel sheet for organization. Here is an example:
Import your contacts into your email marketing list. When you launch your store one of the first things your can do is let all of your email contacts know about your brand new eCommerce store. Here is a great email example for your email contact list:
Some other great ideas for email content:
- Discount on all first order email
- Product highlight email (featured product)
- Company overview email detailing what you sell and what your brand is all about
- Birthday email (if you know birthdays – send special email with discount to friends and loved ones)
- Promotions centered around holidays and events (4th of July)
- Customer emails vs Non customer emails
What makes a great email?
Now that you know who to send to and have a general idea on what to send, let’s discuss what makes for great email content.
Easily consumable content: Don’t write a manifesto. Deliver the important information about your brand, product, or promotion without writing a novel. Most people do not have the attention span to read more than a paragraph or two.
Clear call to action: Make your email actionable. In other words, ensure that you are giving your contacts a clear directive. For example, a call to action could be to click the link to visit your website. Another call to action could be to call a specific phone number.
Don’t sell too hard: Concentrate on the quality of your product, your company values, and connecting with consumers. Your email list will get tired of you trying to promote to them the same 10% off discount on a daily basis. Attempt to create a relationship with them with quality value adding content.
Be relevant: Relevancy is extremely important when sending emails. Especially if you are sending product specific emails. For example, don’t send a customer a lawn chair email promotion in the middle of winter.
Deliver instant gratification: If a customer wants to buy make sure they have the ability to experience instant gratification. Nothing is more frustrating that clicking on a product link just to find out that it is out of stock!
How to send your first marketing email?
To send an email to your contacts login to your website manager. The following process will enable you to send emails with your info@yourstorename domain. This sender will look very professional.
After your are logged in this is what you should see:
Next, navigate to the Support column and click on MAILBOX
After your click Mailbox you will be prompted to login to your Webmail Portal. Enter your credentials and click login to continue. Next you will see this email portal:
From your webemail portal you will decide who you want to send marketing emails to and compose your email message. To begin, start by clicking on COMPOSE NEW. This will now enable the window for you to create a new message.
First, enter the emails of the individuals that you would like to email about your brand new e-commerce web store. This is the ‘To:’ section at the top. Next, enter an attention grabbing subject line (but don’t be spammy) A great example is: “Big news, my e-commerce store launched!”
You final step is to compose the content for your email. This is where you can really get creative. This content will change depending on what you are promoting to your customer list. Here are a few examples:
- General promotion – Promote a product or service
- Sale or discount – Let customers know that you are offering a sitewide or product specific discount. Add a deadline for urgency.
- Informative/Branding – You can always just send emails about your business, what you are working on, news, or product details/recommendations
When you are finished writing your email content click on send in the top left corner. The contacts that you entered will now receive the email that you created.
Sending recommendations & tips
We highly recommend sending at least one email per week to keep your contacts engaged. As you continue promoting your website you will build a large list of subscribers. Subscribers are people who visited your website and entered their email. They are essentially saying I would like to receive marketing emails, promotions, and information from your company.
If you want to send to your subscriber list simply login to your website navigate to the SALES column and click on SHOPPERS. Pick a date range and click send. Your potential shoppers (subscribers) will now be shown. To add these contacts to your list copy and paste their email into your ‘To:’ field on your email composer in webmail.
