Ways to improve welcome emails:
- Provide value upfront. You don’t want to inundate customers with promotional messages during your only window of opportunity to create a strong first impression.
- Send your welcome email within minutes. Let’s say you incentivize joining your newsletter with a promo code for 10% off the customer’s next purchase. If someone is ready to purchase now and they don’t receive that promo code, you risk losing out on the sale for good.
- Set transparent expectations. Let subscribers change preferences easily, inform them what and how frequently you’ll be emailing new content, and remind them of how they ended up on your list in the first place.
Transactional emails are not just expected, they’re anticipated—customers seek them out to answer the basic questions they have: when they can expect to receive the order, what address you’re shipping to, and where they can ask questions. Only once the fundamentals are in place should you experiment with extras.
Ways to improve order confirmation emails
- Upsell related products by suggesting accessories, offer the option to buy the same product for a friend as a gift, or add the option for a subscription purchase.
- Offer a discount code or free shipping for a future purchase within a limited time frame. This is called a bounce-back offer and its one way the loss in revenue you’ll incur by giving a discount makes sense, because it’s often better to have the customer come back at a cheaper price than not at all.
- Ask the customer to join your community. If you’re selling a purely functional product, this may not work. But businesses that seek to have shared values with their customers should use their receipts as another avenue to get customers plugged into their community.
Ways to improve shipping confirmation emails
- Make it easy for your customers to track their order. Include the expected delivery date and tracking number linked to the shipping company so people can click once to see exactly where their order is in the delivery process.
- Suggest the customer refer a friend by forwarding a link to the product they purchased. Incentivize word-of-mouth marketing by implementing a referral program with rewards.
- Include product suggestions that match a customer’s purchase. Make sure you’re asking shoppers to purchase something they’ll actually be interested in.
Ways to improve customer feedback emails
- Focus on customer satisfaction, not sales, so you can get your customers’ thoughts on their purchase. Track these metrics over time and look for actionable insights you can implement to improve your business over time.
- Consider placing the review/survey form on your website so the customer can see related offers and products after submitting their feedback.
- Include the review on the product page as user-generated content to boost future buyers’ confidence.
Ways to improve cart abandonment emails
- Put the main message in text format so customers will see it right away without having to enable images. Include a link back to their shopping cart so they can easily complete the transaction.
- Remind the customer about item(s) in their cart that are awaiting purchase so they can get excited about them again. Highlight specific features and show off high-quality product photos.
- Consider communicating a specific incentive to return to their cart, such as free shipping or discounts. If an item is running out of stock, let customers know as a courtesy while also instilling a sense of urgency.
- Use a clear, compelling call-to-action. Keep it concise and limit yourself to a single call. Multiple CTAs can distract from the action you really want the customer to take: completing their purchase.
Be weary of enticing purely by offers and discounts – people will only wait until offers are available to purchase from you and this will hurt your bottom line.
Ways to improve second order emails:
- Start with your two or three top-selling products. Are there any complementary products associated with your top-selling products?
- Try increasing their effectiveness with discount ladders.In this scenario, all you did was highlight a complementary product. You could also try offering a discount on that complementary product. You could also try offering a discount ladder: 5%, then 10% if they don’t bite, then 15% if they don’t bite, etc.
- Test campaigns based on your own data.No one can tell you what your top-selling products are or which products would be complementary to them or when to send the one-two punch campaign. These campaigns will look different for everyone.
Ways to improve win-back emails:
- Test early so you don’t leave money on the table. Split test these emails to find out what the minimum amount you can offer without losing conversions is. Can you get away with 5% instead of 10%? 10% instead of 15%?
- After 90 days of inactivity, the outlook is not good.If someone goes three months without purchasing, the odds of them returning to purchase are not great. Though, this is definitely dependent upon your store and industry. Some stores simply have a long sales cycle. Just be aware that you will probably start experiencing diminishing returns at 90 days.
How Blue Horizons can help
Just get in touch if you want some help with your email marketing. We can get you up and running on Campaign Monitor so you can manage your email marketing yourself, manage everything for you or provide something in-between; whatever suits your needs.
