What if we told you, as a small business owner, you already have access to a marketing super tool without realizing it? It’s your email list, and it’s about time you start profiting from it. However you’ve been accumulating emails over the weeks, months, or years that you’ve been in business, we’ll assume that you have a treasure trove of them. And that email list is one of your greatest marketing tools. In this article, we’ll dish out four tips on how your business can reap the benefits of email marketing. Introduce your business to new customers So you’ve managed to collect an email. You might not know this, but that’s a major step for the development of your business. When people browsing the internet voluntarily subscribe to your site, it means they’re interested enough in your business to receive casual updates from you. It also means that they’re, quite possibly, interested enough in your products to buy something down the line. So when you add a new email to your distribution list, it’s important to send an introduction right away. This initial contact will kick off a relationship between you and the prospective customer who landed on your website. An introduction email indicates that you’re a legit business with a well-developed brand. It gets people on the hook and your follow-up emails will keep them there. Follow up with new and current customers You’ll need to develop a regular cadence of communication with your subscribers. Following up with your leads is essential, but it’s also a balancing act. It’s important that you don’t spam your prospective customers. That’s why email marketing should be done on a schedule. Your task is to figure out the best ways and times to make contact with your subscribers: whether it’s a weekly round-up of deals, a monthly newsletter, or something different along those lines. Alternatively, it may serve your business to only contact subscribers during busy holiday periods or whenever your store is having a promotion. As you can imagine, every email marketing campaign is different. And “there’s no magic number,” according to the ecommerce experts at Entrepreneur Magazine. But a few things are crystal clear:
Another big part of following up properly is understanding lifecycle email marketing. This requires putting yourself in the shoes of your subscribers and website visitors. Understand lifecycle email marketing Lifecycle email marketing takes an individualized approach to communications with your subscribers. It attempts to understand the psychology of the individual shopper, and where he or she is at in the so-called customer journey. What exactly is meant by customer journey? Think about the last time you stumbled onto a random website. If it seemed interesting and legitimate, maybe you decided to stick around for a few minutes. You browsed the product catalog a bit, and perhaps even added an item to your cart. Then you got distracted or decided it wasn’t the right time to make a purchase. But the brand was enticing enough that you added your email to the newsletter sign-up that popped up before you exited the site. A couple of days later, you get a reminder email about the item you added to your cart. This is lifecycle email marketing. It’s an individual approach that picks up with shoppers exactly where they left off in their customer journey. It reminds them that they added items to their cart for a reason, and lures them back to your website to finish what they started. The truth is, it’s a rarity that someone browsing on the internet will make a purchase after arriving at your website for the first time. In ecommerce, relationship building through email marketing brings customers back again and again. And the more time they spend on your site, the more likely they are to eventually make a purchase. Lifecycle email marketing takes advantage of this reality. By understanding the customer journey, it entices shoppers to continue returning and ultimately leads to more conversions. Targeting your marketing emails: 4 types of email marketing Targeting your marketing emails means knowing who you’re speaking to. Email marketing that casts a wide net generally doesn’t convert as well as targeted communications directed to specific shopper profiles. To do this well, it helps to understand the 4 types of email marketing: 1. Acquisition emailing Acquisition emails are ones that you target at shoppers who have given you their contact information but haven’t converted to new sales yet. Because of this, they aren’t exactly cold emails. But since they’re directed toward recipients who are technically not your customers yet, acquisition emails should be crafted with language geared intentionally to convert them. Inform them about an item(s) they abandoned in their shopping cart. Or consider sending an informational email about a special promotion for first-time buyers. Find wherever your customers are in their customer journey and use acquisition emails to push them along that funnel. 2. Retention emailing Retention emails are meant to keep your existing customers, shoppers who have converted to a sale at least once, engaged with your business. Customers who have already made purchases at your store don’t need to be convinced of your brand’s legitimacy. They need reminders that your store is still there providing quality items that they’ve enjoyed, and that you’re excited to greet them as repeat customers again. 3. Promotional emails Sales and limited-time offers are perfect content for promotional emails. These are usually sent out around holiday weekends or before big shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 4. Newsletters A company newsletter is the only “wide net” type of targeted marketing because its content can be catered to individual subsets of your customer base. Use these to keep customers and prospective customers updated about what’s going on with your brand. Just a little monthly reminder that your store still exists is enough to keep some shoppers coming back. Partner with Kliken to up your ecommerce marketing game Email marketing is something that you can start today with no more resources than a simple email distribution list. However, if you want to flood your website with the internet’s best high-intent shoppers, consider partnering with Kliken and start a Google Ads campaign. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re trying to take your existing ecommerce business to the next level, Kliken makes the process of syncing your store with the Google Shopping & Ads platforms seamless. So you can start running Google Smart Shopping campaigns almost immediately — we'll deal with the onboarding headaches. As the world’s #1 Shopping and Ads marketing platform, Kliken has helped over 1,000,000 small businesses worldwide grow their sales on Google and get a return of up to 7x their original ad spend. Its proven marketing solutions can help you to unleash the potential of your ecommerce business. Learn more about how customers use Kliken to grow their businesses online here. Author: Michael ArnoldMichael is a freelancer from New York City. When he isn’t writing about how Kliken unleashes the marketing, you can find him reading, writing for pleasure, or traveling the globe.
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